Tag Archive: shootings


Student charged in Utah school bomb plot (AP)

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January 28, 2012

ROY, Utah – The two teens had a detailed plot, blueprints of the school and security systems, but no explosives. They had hours of flight simulator training on a home computer and a plan to flee the country, but no plane.

Still, the police chief in this small Utah town said, the plot was real.

“It wasn’t like they were hanging out playing video games,” Roy Police Chief Gregory Whinham said Friday. “They put a lot of effort into it.”

Dallin Morgan, 18, and a 16-year-old friend were arrested Wednesday at Roy High School, about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, after a fellow student reported that she received ominous text messages from one of the suspects.

“If I tell you one day not to go to school, make damn sure you and your brother are not there,” one message read, according to court records. “We ain’t gonna crash it, we’re just gonna kill and fly our way to a country that won’t send us back to the U.S.,” read another message.

While police don’t have a motive, one text message noted they sought “revenge on the world.”

The suspects say they were inspired by the deadly 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., and the younger suspect even visited the school last month to interview the principal about the shootings and security measures.

However, one suspect told authorities it was offensive to be compared to the Columbine shooters because “those killers only completed 1 percent of their plan,” according to a probable cause statement.

The teens had so studied their own school’s security system that they knew how to avoid being seen on the facility’s surveillance cameras, authorities said.

Whinham said the “very smart kids” had spent at least hundreds of dollars on flight simulator programs, books and manuals, studying them in anticipation of carrying out their plan to bomb an assembly at the 1,500-student high school.

While authorities said the suspects believed they could pull it off, experts said, it would have been a long shot.

Royal Eccles, manager at the Ogden-Hinckley Airport, about a mile from the school, said it would have been nearly impossible for the students to steal a plane or get the knowledge to fly one using flight simulator programs.

“It’s highly improbable,” Eccles said. “That’s how naive these kids are.”

Whinham said authorities searched two homes and two cars and found no explosives, but added that police continue to search other locations. The chief said it appeared that “a key component of their plan was not developed.”

“I wouldn’t want to say that they don’t have it or that they weren’t ready for it,” he said. “I’m just saying that we haven’t found anything that says they were ready for it yet.”

Whinham said it appeared the suspects, who have no criminal history, also had prepared alternate attack plans, but he declined to elaborate. He also declined to say whether any firearms were found during their searches.

“Most houses have firearms in them,” he said. “This is the state of Utah.”

While authorities have said they have not found any explosives, they charged Morgan on Friday with possession of a weapon of mass destruction.

The basis for the charge wasn’t immediately clear, though one of the elements of that offense is conspiracy to use a weapon, not necessarily possessing one. Prosecutors say they are considering additional charges.

Morgan has been released on bond, pending a court hearing Wednesday. The 16-year-old, whom The Associated Press isn’t naming because he’s a minor, remained held pending further court hearings.

Whinham said he knew both suspects personally, given the small size of the suburban Utah town of roughly 36,000 people. He said he had met with both of the suspects’ parents and they were “devastated.”

The 16-year-old suspect’s father declined comment Friday, and no one answered the door at Morgan’s home.

The plot “was months in planning,” said Whinham, who also noted Morgan told investigators the 16-year-old had previously made a pipe bomb using gun powder and rocket fuel.

In Colorado, Columbine Principal Frank DeAngelis confirmed Friday he met with the 16-year-old suspect on Dec. 12 after the teenager told him he was doing a story for his school newspaper on the shootings.

DeAngelis said he frequently gets requests from students doing research on the shootings, and the request from this one wasn’t unusual.

“He asked the same questions I get from many callers and visitors asking about the shooting,” DeAngelis said. He said the student wanted details about the shooting, the aftermath and the steps taken since then to protect the school.

Police said the student told them Roy school officials would not allow him to write the story.

DeAngelis said he was shocked when he got a call from Utah police on Wednesday asking if he had met with the youth. He said the interview raised no red flags but that he would do things differently with future requests.

“This was definitely a wake-up call. This is the first time this has happened,” DeAngelis said.

Police credit the suspects’ schoolmate with helping foil their plan, though Whinham said the school didn’t have any assemblies set, and the suspects revealed no specific dates to pull off the attack.

Sophomore Bailey Gerhardt told The Salt Lake Tribune she received alarming text messages from one of the suspects and alerted school administrators.

“I get the feeling you know what I’m planning,” read one of the messages, according to court records. “Explosives, airport, airplane.”

___

Associated Press writer Steven K. Paulson in Denver contributed to this report.

Student charged in Utah school bomb plot
(AP)

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Colo school shooting verdict: not guilty, insanity (AP)

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October 5, 2011

GOLDEN, Colo. – A man charged with attempted first-degree murder in the shooting and wounding of two eighth-graders at a Colorado middle school was found not guilty by reason of insanity Wednesday.

Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood, who was armed with a rifle, was tackled and held by two teachers shortly after the February 2010 attack at Deer Creek Middle School that recalled memories of the 1999 mass shooting at nearby Columbine High School.

Eastwood was charged with a total of 15 crimes. Jurors found him not guilty by reason of insanity on all but one charge: possession of a weapon on school grounds, which carries a sentence of up to 1 1/2 years in prison. Sentencing will be Nov. 15.

After the verdict, Deborah Weber, mother of one of the wounded students, said she was disappointed because she felt prosecutors proved that Eastwood was sane at the time of the shootings

“I don’t think that people should confuse mental illness with insanity, which is of the legal kind,” Weber said. “I don’t think that legal insanity should absolve someone of doing time.”

Defense attorney Katherine Spengler said she would appeal that conviction.

Eastwood, who has been at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo since the summer of 2010, continues to struggle to understand why he did what he did, Spengler said.

“Mr. Eastwood is an extremely ill man … and he is incredibly remorseful about what he did, and we’re glad that the children are recovering,” Spengler said.

She said he continues to get treatment at the state hospital.

District Attorney Scott Storey said Eastwood will remain at the state hospital for an indeterminate time until he is deemed legally sane and released. His case will be reviewed every six months. Storey added that the average stay in the state hospital, for homicide cases is 7 1/2 years and in Eastwood’s case could be less.

“It was a case that had to be tried,” Storey said afterward. “You can’t have somebody come onto our school grounds and shooting at students … He’s profoundly mentally ill. I respect the jury’s verdict, but I don’t agree with it …. I have no regrets for taking this case to trial.

“There are certain cases that just outrage me to the core. This is one of them.”

During the trial, defense lawyers showed jurors portions of Eastwood’s rambling journal that referred to mutants or transformers that were taking over his body.

“They want me to have nothing. Instead, they have me suffering, alive but in pain,” Eastwood noted in one entry.

Eastwood had written in his notebook before last year’s shooting that the voices were becoming more threatening. The notebook included doodles of a man under attack.

Prosecutors told the jury that Eastwood knew the difference between right and wrong when he shot the two children as they were leaving their school.

“He yelled that they were going to die,” Alexis King said. “He knew it was wrong and his behavior can’t be excused.”

Prosecutors said Eastwood approached a group of students and asked, “Do you like going to this school?” before shooting student Reagan Weber in the arm.

He then aimed at Matt Thieu, who was running away, prosecutors said. Thieu suffered a chest wound the size of a saucer plate.

Teachers David Benke and Norm Hanne were hailed as heroes for tackling the shooter and holding him until deputies arrived.

At issue during the trial was whether Eastwood knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of the shootings.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Jensen said testimony indicated that Eastwood knew it was wrong to take his father’s gun. After the shooting, Jensen said that during two hours of videotaped questioning with investigators, Eastwood repeatedly said he knew what he did was wrong, that he had hatred and anger.

“We had a videotape where we covered extensively the defendant’s state and whether he knew the difference between right and wrong,” Jensen said.

But Jensen said that state law prohibited an expert who studied the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, Dr. Steven Pitt, from personally examining Eastwood on behalf of prosecutors.

Three doctors who examined Eastwood testified that he was legally insane.

But when it came to Pitt’s testimony, he said there were several indications that Eastwood was sane but that he couldn’t render a final opinion about whether Eastwood could distinguish right from wrong because Pitt hadn’t personally interviewed Eastwood.

“The first question the jury sent out was, “Why didn’t Dr. Pitt interview the defendant,” Jensen said, adding that the judge could not legally explain why. “So this left a bit of a void … Obviously this had a big impact.”

Colo school shooting verdict: not guilty, insanity
(AP)

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Virginia Tech fined $55K for response to shootings (AP)

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March 29, 2011

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia Tech will have to pay the maximum $55,000 fine for violating federal law by waiting too long to notify students during the 2007 shooting rampage but will not lose any federal student aid, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.

Department officials wrote in a letter to the school that the sanction should have been greater for the school’s slow response to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, when student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 students and faculty, then himself.

The $55,000 fine was the most the department could levy for Tech’s two violations of the federal Clery Act, which requires timely reporting of crimes on campus.

“While Virginia Tech’s violations warrant a fine far in excess of what is currently permissible under the statute, the Department’s fine authority is limited,” wrote Mary Gust, director of a department panel that dictated what punishment the school would receive for the violation.

The university avoided the potentially devastating punishment of losing some or all of its $98 million in federal student aid. While that’s possible for a Clery Act violation, the department has never taken that step and a department official said Tuesday it was never considered for Tech.

University officials have always maintained their innocence and said they would appeal the fine, even though it’s a relatively small sum for a school of more than 30,000 full-time students and an annual budget of $1.1 billion. The amount would cover tuition and fees for one Virginia undergraduate student for four years, or two years for an out-of-state undergrad.

“We believe that Virginia Tech administrators acted appropriately in their response to the tragic events of April 16, 2007, based on the best information then available to them at the time,” spokesman Larry Hincker said in a statement.

The Clery Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal student financial aid to report crimes and security policies and provide warning of campus threats. It is named after Jeanne Ann Clery, a 19-year-old university freshman who was raped and murdered in her dormitory in 1986. Her parents later learned that dozens of violent crimes had been committed on the campus in the three years before her death.

The Education department issued its final report in December, finding that Virginia Tech failed to issue a timely warning to the Blacksburg campus after Cho shot and killed two students in a dormitory early that morning in 2007. The university sent out an e-mail to the campus more than two hours later, about the time Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.

That e-mail was too vague, the department said, because it referred only to a “shooting incident” but did not mention anyone had died. By the time a second, more explicit warning was sent, Cho was near the end of his shooting spree.

“Had an appropriate timely warning been sent earlier to the campus community, more individuals could have acted on the information and made decisions about their own safety,” the department said in its letter.

A state commission that investigated the shootings also found that the university erred by failing to notify the campus sooner. The state reached an $11 million settlement with many of the victims’ families. Two families have sued and are seeking $10 million in damages from university officials. That case is set for trial this fall.

Virginia Tech argues that, relying on campus police, it first thought the shootings were domestic and that a suspect had been identified so there was no threat to campus. The university argued that the Department of Education didn’t define “timely” until 2009, when it added regulations because of the Tech shootings.

Hincker, the university spokesman, outlined six other serious incidents at other college campuses before and after the Tech shootings in which notifications were not given for hours, or in some instances the next day, and the schools were not punished.

“The only reason we want to appeal this is that it gives us the process to explain how a notice given on one campus can be OK if it’s this long, and a notice given on another campus is not OK if it’s this short a time period,” he said. “As best we can tell, it’s whatever DOE decides after the fact.”

The education department rebuffed that argument, saying officials should have treated it as a threat because the shooter was on the loose.

Through its appeal, Hincker said the university hopes to find out how the department came to its conclusion. School officials were never interviewed, he said, and the department refused to share materials or respond to Freedom of Information requests sent by the school.

If the school loses the appeal, it could fight the fine in court. The money goes back to the Department of Education.

Several victims’ family members maligned Tech for saying it would appeal.

“This is in black and white,” said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings. “They’re going to spend more money appealing it than just paying the fine, because they do not want to admit they did anything wrong.”

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was shot but survived, said she was not surprised by the maximum fine.

“I feel like it’s par for the course, if you will, for what they are allowed to do,” she said. “I think it is a woefully, woefully, woefully sad amount of money for the staggering loss of life.”

Andrew Goddard, whose son Colin also was injured, said even a smaller fine would have accomplished a purpose.

“The bottom line is just having a monetary amount points out what they did was wrong,” he said. “There’s really no way you can replace 32 people, or even seek to equate that with money. I’m not too worried about the amount. Even if they charged them a dollar, it would have done the same thing.”

Only about 40 schools have come under review for Clery violations in the 20 years that the law has been in place. The largest fine to be levied was $350,000 against Eastern Michigan University for failing to report the rape and murder of a student in a dormitory in 2006.

S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, a nonprofit organization that monitors the Clery Act, said it’s “a shame” the department had only really began fining schools for noncompliance in 2005.

“If the Department of Education had sent a stronger message about having to follow the law and that something faster would be expected sooner, the shootings at Virginia Tech may have never happened,” Carter said.

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Associated Press Writer Larry O’Dell contributed to this report.

Virginia Tech fined $55K for response to shootings (AP)

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Ala. university recovering a year after shootings (AP)

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February 10, 2011

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – It’s been a year since a Harvard-educated professor opened fire during a faculty meeting in a conference room at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three colleagues and wounding three others. Ever since, those staff meetings have been held elsewhere.

Professor Debra Moriarity, who narrowly escaped dying that day, works in an office nearby and said it’s too much to go back in there.

“That conference room has been closed up since after the incident,” she said. “They went in, cleaned it and repainted it, but we don’t use it.”

She and the rest of the survivors of professor Amy Bishop’s Feb. 12 rampage are recovering, pulling each other through with the help of dozens of doctors, counselors, substitute teachers, relatives and friends.

“We talked to each other a lot, especially in those first few weeks,” said Moriarity, interim chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, where the shooting occurred. “We’re at an OK place now, probably better than a lot of people expected us to be.”

Moriarity has awful memories from that day: She tried to stop the shooter and wound up with a gun pointed directly at her. The weapon clicked but didn’t fire.

For some students it’s creepy just being inside the Shelby Center, a modern science building filled with classrooms and laboratories.

“It’s just weird knowing what happened there,” said senior Jonna Greer.

Bishop remains in jail without bond just a few miles from campus. Her lawyer, Roy Miller, doesn’t deny that she opened fire or that a major factor in her attack was being denied tenure. Instead, he is laying the groundwork for an insanity defense.

After she was charged with capital murder in the UAH killings, Bishop came under renewed scrutiny as Massachusetts authorities reopened an investigation into the fatal shooting of her brother Seth at the home they shared with their parents in 1986.

Originally determined to be an accident, the shooting was reclassified as a homicide and Bishop was charged with murder in that slaying, too.

Bishop faces four lawsuits over the Alabama shooting. Authorities say she attempted suicide at least once in custody but has mostly settled into the jailhouse routine.

Meanwhile, Bishop’s office — with many of her belongings still inside — sits locked and dark at the Shelby Center. Officials still haven’t decided what to do with the contents a year later.

A memorial service is planned on Saturday for the three professors who were killed: The previous department chair, Gopi Padila; Maria Ragland Davis; and Adriel Johnson.

Of the three people who were hurt, assistant professor Luis Cruz-Vera suffered the least severe injuries and returned to work the soonest. His wife is a teacher and helped take over a seminar class that Davis had taught, Moriarity said.

Staff aide Stephanie Monticciolo, who was shot in the head, is still recovering and retired. Professor Joseph Leahy, who also was shot in the head, has undergone months of operations and rehabilitation and already has been back at the department on a part-time basis.

“Joe is looking forward to teaching in the fall,” Moriarity said.

The biological sciences department needed help getting through the last academic year after being devastated by the loss of four teachers: the slain victims and Bishop. More than a dozen visiting professors and retired teachers helped fill the void on a rotating basis. Schools including Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois, where other shootings have occurred, offered administrators advice on how to move forward.

The department is currently trying to hire three people for tenure-track jobs to fill the positions permanently, Moriarity said. There was some concern that people might shy away from UAH because of the shootings, but more than 155 resumes came in.

Public universities seem perpetually strapped for cash, and Moriarity said the loss of valuable research performed by Bishop and the shooting victims has reduced outside research grants coming into UAH. That’s expected to improve as new teachers are hired. Enrollment in some biology courses dipped slightly after the shootings, according to Moriarity but the school currently has about 430 biology majors, about the same as before.

Greer, the student government association president, said the campus came together in a healthy way after the violence and is better in some ways than before.

“There’s more school pride and sense of community,” said Greer, a senior majoring in Spanish. “I think it will last.”

Still, there’s the conference room.

Moriarity and her colleagues now meet wherever they can, gathering in several different rooms as they are available. No decision has been made on what to do with the space where the bloodshed occurred.

“We are now talking to our facilities people to see what we are going to do with that space,” she said. “The general consensus was we don’t want to use it again as a conference room, or at least not in any way similar to the way it is set up now.”

___

Online:

University of Alabama in Huntsville: http://www.uah.edu

Ala. university recovering a year after shootings (AP)

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Bill would let Neb. teachers carry guns in schools (AP)

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January 19, 2011

LINCOLN, Neb. – A Nebraska lawmaker has introduced a bill to allow school administrators, teachers and security staff to carry concealed handguns in schools.

Sen. Mark Christensen of Imperial introduced the bill two weeks after a 17-year-old killed his vice principal and shot his principal before killing himself.

Christensen says he has always opposed a ban on handguns in schools, but he had no plans to introduce his bill until the shootings on Jan. 5.

He says many schools don’t even let security officers carry guns, leaving students and school employees “helpless in the face of a shooter.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures says 42 states and the District of Columbia have banned guns in schools, but it could not say whether any states allow them.

Bill would let Neb. teachers carry guns in schools (AP)

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Ala. university shooting victims’ kin sue official (AP)

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January 14, 2011

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Attorneys representing the families of those killed in a shooting rampage last year at an Alabama university say they are suing a school official.

The lawsuits seek to hold the University of Alabama-Huntsville’s provost responsible for failing to abide by regulations that the families say would have prevented the shootings.

Authorities say biology professor killed three colleagues and wounded three others in February 2010 during a staff meeting. Bishop has been charged with capital murder in the shootings.

The families of two of those killed, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel D. Johnson Sr., filed the lawsuits.

Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, also are defendants in the lawsuit.

Ala. university shooting victims’ kin sue official (AP)

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Funeral held Saturday for Nebraska school gunman (AP)

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January 8, 2011

OMAHA, Neb. – Friends of the 17-year-old who shot and killed an assistant principal and wounded the principal at a Nebraska high school before killing himself say that they are beginning to identify signs of unrest as they look back.

The friends say it’s now clear that Robert Butler Jr. was troubled because he was involved in fights, had behavior problems and seemed unhappy.

Still, those behaviors may not have predicted the Wednesday shooting that killed assistant principal Vicki Kaspar and injured principal Curtis Case at Millard South High School in west Omaha.

Butler’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday morning in Lincoln, where he grew up. He transferred to the Omaha school in the fall.

Butler’s relatives have said they were shocked and confused by the shootings.

Funeral held Saturday for Nebraska school gunman (AP)

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Feds: Va Tech violated law during 2007 shootings (AP)

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December 9, 2010

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia Tech could be fined as much as $55,000 because it broke the law by waiting too long to notify students during a 2007 shooting rampage, according to a federal report issued Thursday.

The U.S Department of Education had found in January that the school violated federal law with its response during the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but gave Tech a chance to respond to the finding in its preliminary report. In Thursday’s final report, federal officials rejected Tech’s arguments that it met standards in place at the time.

“While Virginia Tech failed to adequately warn students that day, we recognize that the university has put far-reaching changes in place since that time to help improve campus safety and better protect its students and community,” U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

School officials won’t face criminal charges for breaking the law, the department said.

The university disputed the findings, and spokesman Larry Hincker said the school likely will appeal if it is sanctioned.

The school could be fined up to $55,000 and could face the loss of federal student financial aid.

However, an expert on the law that requires notification of danger — known as the Clery Act — said loss of federal aid is unlikely.

S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security On Campus, said Clery Act reviews are relatively rare: The Tech review was the 35th in 20 years. No school has ever lost federal funding, and the largest fine was $350,000 against Eastern Michigan University for failing to report the killing of a student in a dormitory in 2006.

The department found that the university violated the Clery Act because it failed to issue a timely warning after a gunman killed two students in a dormitory early on April 16, 2007. The school sent out an e-mail about the shootings about two hours later, but by that time student gunman Seung-Hui Cho was chaining shut the doors to a classroom building where he killed 30 more students and faculty, then himself.

Tech argues that the department didn’t define “timely” until 2009, when it added regulations to require immediate notification upon confirmation of a dangerous situation or immediate threat to people on campus.

“Both the law and purposeful reasoned analysis require that the actions of that day be evaluated according to the information that was available to the university and its professionals at that time,” Hincker said. “Anything else loses sight of the unthinkable and unprecedented nature of what occurred.”

But the report says the department has consistently stated that the determination of whether a warning is timely is based on the nature of the crime and the continuing danger to the campus.

“The fact that an unknown shooter might be loose on campus made the situation an ongoing threat at that time, and it remained a threat until the shooter was apprehended,” the report said.

A state commission impaneled to investigate the shootings also found that the university erred by failing to notify the campus sooner. The state reached an $11 million settlement with many of the victims’ families. Two families have filed a $10 million civil lawsuit against university officials.

One victim’s mother said she was glad the university finally faced punishment for its actions, but she took more satisfaction from the inclusion in the report of actions officials took to protect themselves that morning. Victims’ families had long wanted those details included in a separate report by the state panel.

“They couldn’t fine enough money for what happened that day and how it altered our lives,” said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings. “It’s more about the truth of what happened. That’s what I sought for all these years.”

Grimes and other victims’ families fought for the state report to include documentation that some Tech staffers informed family members and others about the shootings long before the notice was sent to the rest of campus.

The university says that one official advised her son to go to class anyway, and that another only called to arrange for a baby sitter.

But the federal report notes that a continuing education center locked down, an official directed that the doors to his office be locked, the university’s veterinary college locked down and campus trash pickup was suspended after word traveled of the shootings. All of those actions took place before the e-mail was sent to campus.

“If the university had provided an appropriate timely warning after the first shootings (in the dormitory), the other members of the campus community may have had enough time to take similar actions to protect themselves,” the report states.

___

Associated Press Writer Steve Szkotak contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects date of Va Tech shootings to April 16, 2007 – not April 17.)

Feds: Va Tech violated law during 2007 shootings (AP)

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