History > 2011 > USA > Gun violence (III)

A Fallen Officer Is Remembered

December 19, 2011
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

BABYLON, N.Y. — On a day to mourn, thousands of police officers in their crisp dress uniform converged on this tree-rimmed, Long Island bedroom town on Monday morning to see what no one likes to see, a police officer buried who fell while doing his job.

In the town where he lived at the church where he prayed, Officer Peter J. Figoski, 47, of New York City’s Police Department was remembered as a hero and a man. Before saddened officers who knew him and those who did not, from as far away as Michigan, the funeral service was being held at St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, a stately brick structure beside the high school, which was closed for the day.

Officers and civilians alike squeezed into the pews. Thousands more stood outside, listening to voices that poured over them from portable speakers. “You feel like you’ve lost a brother,” said Officer Joseph Barbanera of the Suffolk County Police Department. “Even though you don’t know the person, you feel that you do.”

Officer Figoski had been a New York City police officer for 22 years. In a darkened basement in Brooklyn a week ago, authorities said, a fleeing thief shot him in the face, an officer tangling with the wrong end of an illegal gun.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly were among the mourners, as stories were shared about a man molded and shaped into a father and an officer of the law. Officer Figoski worked in the crime-riddled 75th precinct in East New York, Brooklyn. He had four daughters, two in college and two in high school, who had lived with him in West Babylon since his divorce.

Though eligible for retirement, he stayed on the job to see that there would be adequate funds for their education.

Officer Figoski’s dedication to his daughters was punctuated by Mr. Kelly and Mr. Bloomberg during their remarks. Mr. Kelly recalled that the day before he was killed, Officer Figoski had had the chance to work an overtime assignment in Manhattan. “To his supervisor’s surprise, he turned it down,” Mr. Kelly said. “When he was later told how much money he could have made, he beamed and said, ‘I got a chance to spend a beautiful day with my girls.’ ”

    A Fallen Officer Is Remembered, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/nyregion/mourners-remember-a-fallen-officer.html

Calif Teen to Be Sentenced for Killing Gay Student

December 19, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

VENTURA, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California teenager faces 21 years in state prison when he's sentenced for killing a gay student during a computer lab class three years ago.

Brandon McInerney is scheduled to receive his sentence in a Ventura courtroom Monday, after the 17-year-old agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder as well as one count each of voluntary manslaughter and use of a firearm.

McInerney had just turned 14 when he shot and killed 15-year-old Larry King at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard.

A mistrial was declared in September when jurors couldn't reach a unanimous decision on the degree of guilty. Several jurors said after McInerney's trial that shouldn't have been tried as an adult.

    Calif Teen to Be Sentenced for Killing Gay Student, NYT, 19.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/12/19/us/AP-US-Gay-Student-Killed.html

In Dark Brooklyn Doorway,

Officer Confronts Gunman, and Dies

December 12, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

The 911 caller reported a robbery in progress early Monday, and the first officers who arrived at the Brooklyn basement apartment found a tenant bloodied from a beating. They had no idea that the robbers were still there, hiding in a dark room behind them.

The robbers, in turn, did not know that backup was on the way, and so when they moved to slip out of the apartment unnoticed, they were met by two more police officers. Everyone was surprised, and in the frame of a darkened door, one robber raised a pistol and fired, striking an officer in the face, the police said.

The officer, Peter J. Figoski, 47, of West Babylon, N.Y., died five hours later at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. His four daughters had been rushed to his side; two had been hurried aboard police helicopters at colleges in upstate New York.

The police identified the gunman as Lamont Pride, 27, a felon who served a prison term in North Carolina and was wanted by the authorities there for a shooting in August. He was arrested on a drug charge in Brooklyn in November but released.

Officer Figoski served 22 years with the New York Police Department. He was sworn in amid the crack-cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s and witnessed plummeting crime rates. His death at the barrel of a semi-automatic Ruger pistol, the same kind of gun used in the 1993 shootings on the Long Island Rail Road and the sort of firearm that continues to vex the city, served as a reminder of those days, and of the way an officer’s routine shift can end in an instant.

The shooting, the first fatal one in more than four years, revived the familiar mechanics that follow an on-duty death. Some grieving officers — many who did not know Officer Figoski — rushed to the hospital, while others pulled black bunting out from storage at the station house where he had spent his entire career.

Officer Figoski’s partner, Officer Glenn Estrada, had been struggling outside the basement apartment with a second robber when he heard the shot and saw the gunman run, the police said; Officer Estrada chased the gunman on a zigzag sprint of four blocks and arrested him.

The second suspect was still at large several hours later; the police released video footage of him calmly strolling on a nearby sidewalk minutes after the shooting.

The events leading to the shooting began at 2:15 a.m., when the two robbers pounded on the basement door of 25 Pine Street, a two-story home, claiming they were police officers. The owner, who lives upstairs, called 911. Neighbors told the police that both intruders were armed. The area, in Cypress Hills, is known as a relatively quiet pocket of a busy precinct that includes East New York; officers once called the precinct “the killing fields.”

The men entered the apartment, which was narrow and messy. The building’s oil tank, marked with graffiti, was in the hallway, under a bare light bulb. They confronted the tenant, a 25-year-old bodega worker who lived in a cramped bedroom, and demanded money, the police said the tenant had told them. Mr. Pride, wearing a ski mask, forced the tenant to the floor, he told detectives, then pistol-whipped him and took his watch as well as $770 in cash. The police said they were investigating whether the money might have come from drug-dealing.

The robbers moved deeper into the apartment, looking for a way out and finding none, the police said. One of them is believed to have stashed his revolver — an unloaded black Smith and Wesson that was jammed — in a dirty microwave oven in the kitchen, where officers found it later.

The robbers turned and headed back the way they had come, presumably stepping over the bleeding tenant. He later told the police that he knew the officers were close by when he heard the crackle of their radios. The robbers may have heard them too, and ducked into a dark room with tools and debris close to the front door. A neighbor walked in to care for the wounded tenant.

Two officers entered and saw the neighbor standing over the tenant, and they hurried to them, not knowing whether the neighbor was an attacker. They probably did not even notice the door to the room where the robbers were hiding, the police said.

Backup officers arrived: Officers Figoski and Estrada, who had been partners for several years. Both had been given commendations: Officer Figoski was awarded a medal for recovering a gun during an arrest in a livery cab robbery; Officer Estrada received a congratulatory letter after a driver in a traffic stop offered him $100 to walk away and he arrested the driver on bribery charges.

One of the robbers emerged from the room and ran outside, where Officer Estrada confronted him. They fought in front of the building while Officer Figoski came upon Mr. Pride trying to make his escape. Mr. Pride fired, the police said, and a single round struck Officer Figoski below his left eye; it exited from the back of his head. Officer Figoski left behind a bloody palm print on the wall, perhaps seeking to steady himself as he fell. A small pin with the number 75, for his precinct, fell from his uniform to the ground.

Mr. Pride ran and Officer Estrada chased him, south on Pine and around three corners, before he was apprehended. His gun, which contained 10 bullets but had jammed, was found under a nearby car, near a black ski mask, the police said.

According to a transcript of Mr. Pride’s court hearing after his arrest on a drug charge in November, Justice Evelyn Laporte of Brooklyn Criminal Court was told that there was an active warrant for his arrest in connection with a shooting in North Carolina, but she released him without bail. According to David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state court system, the warrant appeared to say that North Carolina would not seek his extradition if he were arrested outside that state.

A law enforcement spokeswoman in Greensboro, N.C., disputed that.

“It is our understanding, based on conversations with the district attorney’s office, that we had a warrant with full extradition that was in place at the end of September,” said Susan Danielsen, a spokeswoman for the Greensboro Police Department, adding that a New York police detective had notified the Greensboro police of Mr. Pride’s arrest.

“We had intended to travel to New York to pick him up and bring him back to North Carolina,” Ms. Danielsen said.

The last New York City police officer killed in the line of duty was Alain Schaberger, 42, who died on March 13 when he was pushed over a railing during a domestic violence episode in Brooklyn. The last officer fatally shot in the line of duty was Russel Timoshenko, 23, during a traffic stop in Brooklyn on July 9, 2007.

After Officer Figoski’s shooting, the State Police rushed to his two older daughters, at colleges in Plattsburgh and Oneonta. They were flown in helicopters to Albany. There, they boarded a police airplane to Kennedy International Airport, where officers met them and sped them to the hospital.

Officer Figoski’s younger daughters are in high school. He and their mother are divorced.

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg praised Officer Figoski’s career, with more than 200 arrests, about half for felonies.

Mr. Bloomberg called the shooting a “horrible, depraved criminal attack.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer, Andy Newman, Noah Rosenberg, Mosi Secret and Nate Schweber. Toby Lyles contributed research.

    In Dark Brooklyn Doorway, Officer Confronts Gunman, and Dies, NYT, 12.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/nyregion/at-scene-of-brooklyn-robbery-a-police-dept-veteran-is-fatally-shot.html

Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’

December 8, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

How do you praise the sanctity of traditional heterosexual marriage when the best-known nuptials of the year, between a Kardashian and a basketball player, lasted all of 72 days? Or, for that matter, when a possible Republican nominee for president, Newt Gingrich, cares so much about marriage that he’s tried it three times?

You don’t. The above mockeries of marriage are just the latest reasons one of the most potent wedge issues of American politics — the banner of gays, guns and God — will have little impact next year.

This trio is usually trotted out in big swaths of the West, in rural or swing districts and in Southern states at the cusp of the Bible Belt. The proverbial three G’s was the explanation in Thomas Frank’s entertaining book “What’s the Matter With Kansas” for why poor, powerless whites would vote for a party that promises nothing but tax cuts for the rich.

It’s misleading to think people will vote against their economic interests simply because a candidate doesn’t mouth the same pieties as them as they do. But the cultural cudgel works to a point. I’ve certainly seen the three G’s launched late in a campaign, to great effect. Jim Inhofe won a Senate seat in Oklahoma in 1994 using the three G’s as an overt slogan.

At the same time, I’ve watched smart politicians, like Montana’s two-term Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, blunt the attack by showing off their guns and waving away the God and gay questions as none-of-your-business intrusions.

But this year I think we’ve reached a tipping point on these heartless perennials. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, political sophisticates were stunned by a national exit poll in which 22 percent of voters picked “moral issues” from a list of things that mattered most — more than any other concern. This was heralded as the high-water triumph for evangelicals.

Later analysis showed that the phrase “moral issues” was being used rather broadly by voters, from concern about character to worry over poverty. It was a catch-all. Still, the ranking of moral issues as the top reason to pick a president came as a surprise.

Now look at this week’s New York Times/CBS News Poll of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa, about as conservative a cohort of voters as anywhere in the country. Iowa, for Republicans, is where gays, guns and God will grow in political fields long after corn is no longer planted for ethanol subsidies.

Topping the list of voter concerns was the economy and jobs — picked by 40 percent of respondents, followed by the budget deficit at 23 percent. Social issues came in a distant third, with 9 percent. And the candidate who polled highest as the one who “most represents the values you try to live by,” Michele Bachmann, has nothing to show for that rating in the overall race, where she is in fifth place.

But the decline of the three G’s hasn’t stopped a few of the dead-enders in the Republican field from raising the flag. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, last seen trying to find a verb to follow “oops,” is out this week with a very specific culture-war ad in Iowa, vowing to end “Obama’s war on religion,” whatever that is.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” says Perry, in a folksy drawl. “But you don’t need to be in a pew every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” The surprise here is that he actually completed several sentences, though it may have required a number of takes.

Perry and Rick Santorum, another badly wounded culture warrior, blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week for saying that the United States would assist human rights groups fighting for tolerance in countries where people have been imprisoned, and even killed, for their sexual orientation.

“This administration’s war on traditional values must stop,” said Perry, siding, apparently, with mullahs living in caves.

This is Perry’s last gasp; in desperation, he shows how this particular balloon has run out of hot air. Poll after poll has found that Americans now overwhelmingly favor letting gays serve openly in the military — a sentiment backed even by a sizable majority of Republicans.

The gay marriage issue is moving in the same direction. Earlier this year, Gallup reported that, for the first time in its tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans believe same-sex marriage should be legal. In 1996, only 27 percent felt that way.

Which brings us to guns. President Obama has done nothing to curb gun use. If anything, he’s expanded gun rights. There are probably a dozen Democrats in Congress from the West who know more about guns than Mitt Romney or Professor Newt Gingrich. That dog, as they say, will not hunt — not this year.

The irony is that two of the G’s could actually hurt Republicans in 2012. Conservative orthodoxy is badly out of step with emerging majority support for full citizenship rights of gays. And with religion, some Republicans have already made an issue of Romney’s Mormonism, and Gingrich’s switch to Roman Catholicism. In Gingrich’s case, questions have been raised about how a multiple-married man could win the favor of high-ranking Catholic clerics who usually look askance at people who ditch their wives.

Do we dare expect these two fine men to be the ones, at long last, to bring an end to the gays, guns and God wedge issue, even if it’s by accident?

    Goodbye to ‘Gays, Guns & God’, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/goodbye-to-gays-guns-god/

2 Dead of Gunshots as Violence Revisits Virginia Tech

December 8, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE, TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and J. DAVID GOODMAN

BLACKSBURG, Va. — Nearly five years after a massacre at Virginia Tech that was the deadliest ever on a school campus, two men, including a campus police officer, died of gunshot wounds there on Thursday afternoon.

The police officer, Deriek W. Crouse, 39, of Christiansburg, Va., was shot at close range by a man who had walked up to him as he was making a traffic stop in a campus parking lot, the police said.

Officials did not identify the gunman, but in a conference call with reporters on Thursday night, Gov. Bob McDonnell and state police officers said the evidence was strong that he was the second dead man, whose body was found in a parking lot about a quarter-mile away from the traffic stop.

“We have recovered clothing items that would lead us to believe that he would be one and the same,” said Maj. Rick Jenkins, deputy director of the Virginia State Police’s bureau of investigation. But he added, “We are not in a situation to say that definitively at this point.”

The killing of Officer Crouse, an Army veteran with five children, happened around noon and was captured on video by a camera that had been mounted on his car dashboard.

Officials said they believed the gunman had acted alone in killing Officer Crouse.

Capt. George Austin of the state police said the police are still investigating whether the gunman knew Officer Crouse or the person in the car who was stopped. The police said they had been conducting tests of DNA and ballistics at a facility in nearby Roanoke and interviewing witnesses to establish the identity of the gunman.

The shooting dredged up traumatic memories of April 16, 2007, when a student, Seung-Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people before killing himself on the campus, five hours south of Washington in the western mountains of Virginia.

With that experience still vivid, an emergency notification went out on Thursday within minutes, leading to a universitywide lockdown of students and staff in campus buildings, and hundreds of police officers, some wearing body armor and carrying machine guns, hurrying to respond.

“Our hearts are broken again,” said Charles W. Steger, the president of the university.

Governor McDonnell, whose daughter is a graduate student at Virginia Tech and was in lockdown in a campus basement all day, said, “It was honestly very tragic news to receive this afternoon.”

Several Virginia Tech officials rushed back to campus after spending much of the day in Washington where, by coincidence, the university was appealing a $55,000 fine levied by the Department of Education for waiting too long to notify students after the 2007 attack.

Ed Falco, the director of creative writing at Virginia Tech, was among 12 professors locked in his office at Shanks Hall.

Mr. Falco, who was off campus during the 2007 shooting, said he had been at home on Thursday when he received the alert on the campus message system. He said that because previous alerts had been prompted by backfiring trucks and other false alarms, he decided to go to the campus for an appointment.

“I figured this would be the same thing, and came to campus anyway,” he said from inside his office. “I’m fine, but along with everyone else, this brings back very bad memories and bad associations. That this is actually happening is unbelievable.”

Mr. Falco said that there had been a state trooper parked outside the building throughout the afternoon and that the police had been inside to make sure everyone was fine.

“SWAT team called to us from a door, people were running. It was chaos,” said Hannah Nowack, a freshman. “We were herded into an entry to a room with hands on our heads, they searched us all, it was really scary. Then I realized I was in a safe place.”

The shooting occurred about 12:15 p.m., during what was described as a routine traffic stop in a parking lot near McComas Hall, a gym and sports building.

Afterward, witnesses reported seeing the suspect running toward a different parking lot, called the Cage. That is where the police said they found the second body. They said the man had been alive at first sighting and that responding officers had not shot him. A gun was found near the body, and Major Jenkins said they believed it was the same gun seen in the video that was carried by the gunman. The police did not say whether the man had been a student.

Classes were not in session on Thursday because students were preparing for final exams, but there were still thousands of students, staff and faculty members on campus at the time, officials said.

Hayley Bance, a freshman from Richmond, Va., said she was sitting with some friends in a dining area at the Squires Student Center when the building suddenly became a flurry of police activity.

“It was unreal. It just didn’t feel like it was happening on this campus,” Ms. Bance said. “Then we were told to move away from the windows and were taken upstairs. We saw these two police officers with huge guns. Then it started to feel real.”

Erika Meitner, an assistant professor of English at the university, said her 4-year-old son had been among 45 children on lockdown at a campus day care center, not far from where the shooting occurred. After nervously waiting for several hours, Ms. Meitner said her husband had gone to campus to pick up her son when the center began to release children.

She said that even though the shooting had occurred not far from Wallace Hall, where the day care is located, the children had been unaware that anything was amiss because the gunfire had occurred during their nap time.

“It’s closer than you want your child to be to this,” she said.

 

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Blacksburg, and Timothy Williams and J. David Goodman from New York. Reporting was contributed by Zach Crizer, Michelle Sutherland, Lindsey Brookbank and Liana Bayne from Blacksburg,
and Lori Moore from New York.

    2 Dead of Gunshots as Violence Revisits Virginia Tech, NYT, 8.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/violence-revisits-virginia-tech-after-two-are-killed-in-shooting.html

Two Men Shot Dead, One on a Bus in Queens

December 2, 2011
6:04 pm
New York Times
City Room
By AL BAKER and SARAH MASLIN NIR

Updated 12:03 a.m. | A gunman killed two people — one on a crowded city bus — in Queens on Friday afternoon, the authorities said.

The police said that when they arrested a suspect, he told them he “had a beef to settle.” One of the victims was his girlfriend’s son. He apparently did not know the other one.

A third person was shot on the bus, but survived.

The violence began at about 3:40 p.m. in an apartment in the Baisley Park housing complex at 116th Avenue and Guy R. Brewer Boulevard in South Jamaica, the police said, where an 18-year-old, described as the son of the suspect’s girlfriend, was shot in the neck and then fell or jumped out of a second-floor window.

About 20 minutes later, shots rang out on a Q-111 bus heading west on Archer Avenue, about two miles north of the apartment, in Jamaica.

A 36-year-old man was killed, and another man, 29, was wounded. He was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where he was in stable condition on Friday night.

A passenger, Albert Taylor, 49, said he got off the bus at Parsons Boulevard and Archer Avenue, and moments later heard three or four shots. People at the busy intersection began running in a panic, he said.

“It was like the O.K. Corral out here,” he said. “As far as the chaos is concerned, it was bananas.”

The police said that they arrested the suspect about a block and a half away from where the bus shooting occurred and that he had a 9-millimeter Ruger pistol on him. Nine-millimeter casings were found near the scene of the earlier shooting, the police said.

The suspect’s name was not immediately released. The police said the man had been jailed for robbery in 2003. The authorities said he dropped identification near the scene of the first shooting.

Several hours after the shooting, the bus remained parked near the Jamaica Center subway station, opposite York College.

 

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    Two Men Shot Dead, One on a Bus in Queens, NYT, 2.1.22011,
    http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/man-fatally-shot-on-city-bus-in-queens/

Craigslist Used in Deadly Ploy to Lure Victims in Ohio

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

AKRON, Ohio — They were men thrown hard against the rocks of bad fortune — out of work, their marriages broken, their youth, with its possibilities, behind them.

To their eyes, the advertisement on Craigslist, offering $300 a week, a free trailer and unlimited fishing to “watch over a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows,” may have seemed like a sign that their luck was finally turning.

Instead, in a scheme so macabre that residents here are already speculating on when it will be turned into a movie script, three of the four men, one from Virginia, one from the Akron area and one still unidentified, were lured to their deaths, their bodies buried in shallow graves. The fourth man, from South Carolina, who was hired and driven to the property in rural southern Ohio, was shot in the arm but escaped and alerted the authorities. The “farm” was in fact land owned by a coal company.

More bodies may still be found, as the bogus advertisement, which was picked up by online job aggregators, drew more than 100 responses from Ohio and other states.

In Ohio, hit hard by the recession, the abundance of eager applicants pulled in by the advertisement has surprised no one, stirring talk about the lengths that people will go these days to find employment. “People here are desperate for work,” said a clerk at a motel in Akron, whose employer did not want him to give his name.

The police have suggested robbery as a motive, but other theories have also circulated, including identity theft and, perhaps more chilling, simply a desire to kill. The perpetrators appeared to be looking for loners who would not be missed.

Law enforcement officials have arrested two suspects, Richard J. Beasley, 52, of Akron and Brogan Rafferty, 16, a high school student from nearby Stow. Mr. Beasley, who has a long criminal record, has not been charged in connection with the killings yet but is being held on other charges, including 15 counts of promoting prostitution and also selling the painkiller OxyContin. On Thursday, sources said that the federal government had filed kidnapping and wire fraud charges in connection with the Craigslist case. (The F.B.I. would confirm only that it had issued a hold to keep Mr. Beasley incarcerated.)

Mr. Beasley appeared in court on the drug charge on Thursday, and on Friday he is to be arraigned on the prostitution charges.

Mr. Rafferty has been charged with the attempted murder of Scott Davis, 48, of South Carolina, the aggravated murder of David Pauley, 51, of Norfolk, Va., and two counts of complicity in those crimes. Prosecutors want the teenager, a tall youth who towered over the police officers escorting him from the courthouse in Caldwell this week, to be tried as an adult, something that is virtually routine in Ohio for crimes this serious. Judge John W. Nau of Noble County Common Pleas Court has issued a gag order in the case; he will take up the issue on Dec. 15.

Neither suspect has been charged in the murders of the other victims, Timothy Kern, 47, of Massillon, Ohio, whose body was found last week buried near a mall in Akron, and the unidentified man, whose body was found on the rural property in Noble County, where officials also found Mr. Pauley’s body on Nov. 14.

In a phone interview, Carol Beasley, Mr. Beasley’s mother, insisted that her son was innocent, and said that he had spent hundreds of hours in charitable work, like taking food to the poor, and had taken Mr. Rafferty — “a nice young man” — under his wing. “We never saw anything in Richard that was violent,” said Ms. Beasley, a retired secretary at Buchtel High School in Akron. “I hope the courts will see the truth.”

Yvette Rafferty, Mr. Rafferty’s mother, has said that if he was involved, he must have been in thrall to Mr. Beasley, a family friend. Ms. Rafferty, a striking woman, tall and rail thin, paced in front of the courthouse in Caldwell on Tuesday, waiting for a chance to talk to her son.

“All I know is he would not hurt anyone in the world unless he was threatened,” she said.

One applicant who was rejected, Ron Sanson, 58, a former construction worker, said he was interviewed by Mr. Beasley, who was dining on Chinese food, in the food court of a mall.

Mr. Sanson, who is divorced, said he had been in and out of work since fracturing his leg in 2006. He said potential employers balked at his age, even for jobs shoveling snow. “You’re not going to be out there shoveling snow in the middle of the night,” he was told.

He said he had good antennae for trouble, but picked up nothing strange about Mr. Beasley, who, he said, looked like a farmer, with “a scraggly beard” and a red, white and blue baseball cap.

“He seemed all right with me,” Mr. Sanson said.

He did not get the job; the fact that he had gone to college and been in the Navy may have put Mr. Beasley off, he speculated.

Less fortunate were Mr. Pauley, who had driven from Virginia with all his belongings, and Mr. Kern, who was struggling to support his three children.

Erin Sendejas, who worked with Mr. Kern for five years at a Domino’s Pizza, said that he quit his job as a delivery man several months ago because his car was breaking down and he could not make enough money after paying for repairs.

“He was just trying to find any job,” she said. “When he was here, all he talked about was his kids. He just felt that they were priorities in his life.”

Mr. Kern had been missing since Nov. 13, and his body might never have been found were it not for Mr. Davis, the man from South Carolina who escaped.

Before the gag order was issued, Sheriff Stephen S. Hannum of Noble County had said that his office had responded to a call on Nov. 6 and found “a white middle-aged man” with a gunshot wound to the arm and a story about answering an advertisement on Craigslist.

Mr. Davis told the sheriff that he had met two people for breakfast in Marietta, Ohio, and after leaving his car in Caldwell, was driven to the nearby “farm.”

While walking through the wooded area, Mr. Davis reported, he “heard what he thought was a gun being cocked. He turned to see a gun pointed at his head. He deflected the gun and ran,” hiding in the woods and finally seeking help at a house two miles away.

A search of the property revealed a hand-dug grave, the sheriff said. On Nov. 11, a woman in Boston called the sheriff’s office to say that her twin brother, David Pauley, was missing and that he had answered the same advertisement on Craigslist.

Ms. Beasley said she had met with her son at the Summit County Jail, where he is being held on the prostitution and drug charges. “We prayed for Brogan and this whole situation,” she said.

Jon Platek, the Akron campus pastor at The Chapel, where the Beasleys attended church and often brought Brogan Rafferty, said that Mr. Beasley had attended only very sporadically in recent years. He said that Mr. Beasley used to come with his family, even as a child, and church members remembered him wearing cowboy boots and a big belt buckle, unusual attire in Akron in the 1960s and 1970s.

The crimes have deeply affected the congregation, Pastor Platek said. “It’s one thing to do something out of passion, but it’s another to do something at this level,” he said. “I sit with a lot of deeply troubled people that don’t do this.”

    Craigslist Used in Deadly Ploy to Lure Victims in Ohio, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/three-lured-to-death-in-ohio-by-craigslist-job-ad.html

Gun Nuts in a Rut

December 1, 2011
9:00 pm
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN

PHOENIX — When it became clear in the early fall of 2008 that Barack Obama, son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, would be the 44th President of the United States, many citizens rushed to their gun shops, stocked up on ammo and camo, and tried to fortify their nests with all manner of lethal weapons.

Though he had said nothing about gun control in the campaign, Obama, to a certain kind of person, appeared to be a grave threat to the Second Amendment. He was urban — Chicago, not the kind of place where a man could shoot a coyote with a laser-sighted Ruger while on his daily jog, as Gov. Rick Perry claims to have done. He was professorial, with scholastic braising at that home of confiscatory consensus, Harvard. And he’d made that statement about rural people clinging to guns and religion.

Into the early months of the Obama presidency gun sales went though the roof. A nation of at least 200 million firearms reached for ever more, in a hurry and a frenzy.

And then, nothing. No legislation. No speeches about the ubiquity of guns in the most violent of Western democracies. Obama actually increased gun rights, signing a bill with a rider that allows people to pack loaded and concealed heat in national parks. Even after the slaughter in Tucson in January of 2011, when six people were killed and 13 wounded, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in a madman’s spree, Obama did nothing to keep guns out of the hands of those at the margins of sanity.

At last, though, some evidence seemed to emerge of his real intent: the story of a federal agency, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, allowing high-powered guns purchased in this state to flow to Mexican drug cartels — a woefully misguided effort to catch bigger fish.

To the gun wackos, it was all a grand scheme, hatched at the very top, to move the masses against weapons. That is, guns like AK-47 rifles, sold with some restrictions by dealers here. If the government could prove, through an operation called Fast and Furious, that loose American gun laws were responsible in part for the firepower of Mexican drug gangsters, well, then surely they would move next to restrict the arming of private citizens in the U.S. of A. That was the logic, and the battle cry.

Fast and Furious was plotted at the top, proclaimed Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, “so they can stick more gun legislation on honest American gun owners.”

The gun lobby, whose ownership of Congress rivals only that of Wall Street, started a television campaign to oust Attorney General Eric Holder, who said he never authorized the operation.

Congressional Republicans, eager to do the N.R.A.’s bidding, launched investigations. Subpoenas were issued. Fox News fanned the flames, without, of course, breaking any news. “Fast and Furious Just Might Be President Obama’s Watergate,” was one headline at Forbes.com.

Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, in the words of Gomer Pyle, simpleton and role model no doubt for this Congress. What the documents and testimony showed was that Fast and Furious originated with field agents here in Phoenix — not in the White House — and the tactic was first used under President George W. Bush. His attorney general, Michael Mukasey, was told in a 2007 briefing paper of gun border operations that were precursors to Fast and Furious, and of the need to expand them.

Oh. So Bush wanted to take everyone’s guns. Case closed, yes?

The plain and simple truth is that Democrats learned from the last gun law episode, when President Clinton led Congress to ban certain kinds of assault weapons in 1994, not to touch this issue. And ever since then, after many Western and rural Democrats were voted out, they have been silent. Your typical Democrat from the West, now, is as likely to show off his gun collection as any preening Republican.

In American politics, some issues fade away naturally, while others recirculate. We are a violent nation. More people die from firearms (often their own guns, in suicides, domestic fights and accidents) in America than in almost any other civilized country. About 1 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since 1968.

But at the same time, violent crime is down considerably in most parts of the country — as in, levels not seen since Beaver Cleaver’s time. You can argue that the crime decline is because of all the guns in our midst (protection). Or you can argue that we still kill our own at a much higher rate than most countries because of those same guns.

But there’s no serious case that President Obama is trying to take people’s guns. Guess what grade the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence gave Obama after one year in office? He got an “F” for his gun stance, or lack of same. This after the N.R.A. predicted that he would be the most anti-gun president in history.

Of course, sensible laws might have kept people like Jared Lee Loughner, the clearly deranged accused shooter in the Tucson massacre, from owning — and legally concealing — his Glock 19 semiautomatic, with its multiple-clip magazine. But Obama would not use his executive power to make even that case.

Left with nothing to fear but imaginary fear itself, the gun nuts are in a terrible rut. They need scary opposition in order to flourish. They need someone to hate. They need conspiracies. And, as always, they need donations.

So, in their world, Obama’s silence, his reticence, his passivity is proof of a grand scheme.

“It’s all part of a massive conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intention to destroy the Second Amendment,” LaPierre told a major conservative gathering this fall.

Get it: he’s a stealth threat! By design.

It’s much harder to accept the nuance of truth, because that would imperil the power of the gun lobby. And it’s difficult for many to accept the idea that the drift of civilizations in general is toward less violence.

“Believe it or not — and I know most people do not — violence has declined over long periods of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” wrote Steven Pinker in his provocative new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.”

Would you think the gun lobby could call a truce? Not a chance.

    Gun Nuts in a Rut, NYT, 1.12.2011,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/gun-nuts-in-a-rut/

How Freedom Group Became the Big Shot

November 26, 2011
The New York Times
By NATASHA SINGER

SCARBOROUGH, Me.

LINED up in a gun rack beneath mounted deer heads is a Bushmaster Carbon 15, a matte-black semiautomatic rifle that looks as if it belongs to a SWAT team. On another rack rests a Teflon-coated Prairie Panther from DPMS Firearms, a supplier to the United States Border Patrol and security agencies in Iraq. On a third is a Remington 750 Woodsmaster, a popular hunting rifle.

The variety of rifles and shotguns on sale here at Cabela’s, the national sporting goods chain, is a testament to America’s enduring gun culture. But, to a surprising degree, it is also a testament to something else: Wall Street deal-making.

In recent years, many top-selling brands — including the 195-year-old Remington Arms, as well as Bushmaster Firearms and DPMS, leading makers of military-style semiautomatics — have quietly passed into the hands of a single private company. It is called the Freedom Group — and it is the most powerful and mysterious force in the American commercial gun industry today.

Never heard of it?

You’re not alone. Even within gun circles, the Freedom Group is something of an enigma. Its rise has been so swift that it has become the subject of wild speculation and grassy-knoll conspiracy theories. In the realm of consumer rifles and shotguns — long guns, in the trade — it is unrivaled in its size and reach. By its own count, the Freedom Group sold 1.2 million long guns and 2.6 billion rounds of ammunition in the 12 months ended March 2010, the most recent year for which figures are publicly available.

Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management, the private investment company that first came to widespread attention when it acquired Chrysler in 2007. (Chrysler later had to be rescued by taxpayers). With far less fanfare, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, has been buying big names in guns and ammo.

From its headquarters on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, Cerberus has assembled a remarkable arsenal. It began with Bushmaster, which until recently was based here in Maine. Unlike military counterparts like automatic M-16’s, rifles like those from Bushmaster don’t spray bullets with one trigger pull. But, with gas-powered mechanisms, semiautomatics can fire rapid follow-up shots as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. They are often called “black guns” because of their color. The police tied a Bushmaster XM15 rifle to shootings in the Washington sniper case in 2002.

After Bushmaster, the Freedom Group moved in on Remington, which traces its history to the days of flintlocks and today is supplying M24 sniper rifles to the government of Afghanistan and making handguns for the first time in decades. The group has also acquired Marlin Firearms, which turned out a special model for Annie Oakley, as well as Dakota Arms, a maker of high-end big-game rifles. It has bought DPMS Firearms, another maker of semiautomatic, military-style rifles, as well as manufacturers of ammunition and tactical clothing.

“We believe our scale and product breadth are unmatched within the industry,” the Freedom Group said in a filing last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Here at Cabela’s, Mark Eliason, the vice president for sales and marketing at Windham Weaponry, a new competitor of Bushmaster that was established by Bushmaster’s founder, surveys the racks. He estimates that roughly 20 percent of the long guns for sale here are made by Freedom Group companies. In the aisles, he examines shelf upon shelf of ammunition. About a third of it comes from the Freedom Group, he says.

“That’s a very large presence,” Mr. Eliason says.

So large, in fact, that rumors about the Freedom Group — what it is, and who is behind it — have been circulating in the blogosphere. Some gun enthusiasts have claimed that the power behind the company is actually George Soros, the hedge-fund billionaire and liberal activist. Mr. Soros, these people have warned, is buying American gun companies so he can dismantle the industry, Second Amendment be damned.

The chatter grew so loud that the National Rifle Association issued a statement in October denying the rumors.

“N.R.A. has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some time,” the N.R.A. assured its members. “The owners and investors involved are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.”

Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is: Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus.

 

CERBERUS is part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private equity. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or sell at a profit to someone else.

Before the financial crisis of 2008, scores of well-known American companies, from Chrysler down, passed into the hands of private-equity firms. For the financiers, the rewards were often enormous. But some companies that they acquired later ran into trouble, in part because they were burdened with debt from the takeovers.

Mr. Feinberg, a Princeton graduate who began his Wall Street career at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk bond powerhouse of Michael R. Milken fame, got into private equity in 1992. That year, he and William L. Richter founded Cerberus, which takes its name from the three-headed dog in Greek mythology that guards the gates of Hades.

Today, Mr. Feinberg presides over a private empire that rivals some of the mightiest public companies in the land. Cerberus manages more than $20 billion in capital. Together, the companies it owns generate annual revenue of about $40 billion — more than either Amazon or Coca-Cola last year.

Why Cerberus went after gun companies isn’t clear. Many private investment firms shy away from such industries to avoid scaring off big investors like pension funds.

Yet, in many ways, the move is classic Cerberus. Mr. Feinberg has a history of investing in companies that other people may not want, but that Cerberus believes it can turn around. When Cerberus embarked on its acquisition spree in guns, it essentially had the field to itself.

“There’s much less competition for buying these companies,” says Steven N. Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a private equity expert. “They must have decided there is an opportunity to make money by investing in the firearms industry and trying to build a big company.”

Whatever the reason, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, is now a major player.

It may come as a surprise to many people, given the prominence of guns in American culture, the national conversation and politics, but the commercial firearms market in the United States is actually relatively small. Sales of guns and ammunition total about $4 billion annually, according to estimates from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.

True, the N.R.A. estimates that about 70 million to 80 million Americans collectively own 300 million firearms. But how many of those people buy new guns regularly? For companies like the Freedom Group, the challenge is to expand the market. These days, more women are involved in target shooting, according to participation reports from the National Sporting Goods Association. But, analysts say, many young men who in the past might have taken up game hunting are now more interested in other pursuits like online gaming.

So, to keep growing, the Freedom Group has expanded its sales staff in the United States and increased its business internationally. It has sold weapons to the governments of Afghanistan, Thailand, Mexico and Malaysia, among others, and obtained new business from the United States Army, including a contract worth up to $28.2 million, to upgrade the M24 sniper weapon system.

Cerberus brings some connections to the table. The longtime chairman of its global investments group is Dan Quayle, the former vice president. The Freedom Group, meantime, has added two retired generals to its board. One is George A. Joulwan, who retired from the Army after serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. The other is Michael W. Hagee, formerly commandant of the Marine Corps.

Jessica Kallam, a spokeswoman at the Freedom Group, said executives there declined to comment for this article. Timothy Price, a managing director of Cerberus, also declined to comment.

THE old Bushmaster factory in Windham, Me., doesn’t look like much. With a facade of brick and gray aluminum siding, it squats in an unassuming office park on the Roosevelt Trail.

But Cerberus representatives who arrived here in 2005 clearly saw potential. Inside, several dozen gunsmiths, working by hand, were fitting together 6,000 to 7,000 weapons a month. At the time, Bushmaster was thriving, though it had been stung by bad publicity stemming from the Beltway sniper shootings. (In a 2004 settlement with victims of the shootings and their families, Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, the store where the gun was acquired, agreed to pay $2 million, and Bushmaster agreed to pay $568,000, but they did not admit liability.)

Richard Dyke, then the principal owner and chairman of Bushmaster, welcomed the visitors from New York. A blunt-spoken Korean War veteran and Republican fund-raiser, he had made a fortune himself by buying companies in trouble, including one that made poker chips. In 1976, he bought a bankrupt gun maker in Bangor, Me., for $241,000, moved it to Windham and later changed its name to Bushmaster.

The company that Mr. Dyke bought had patents on semiautomatic weapons designed for the military and police. But he was drawn to the nascent market in military-style firearms for civilians. He saw as his customers precision target shooters, including current and former military personnel, police officers and, well, military wannabes, he says.

A Bushmaster Carbon 15 .223 semiautomatic is about three feet long. But, weighing in at just under six pounds, it is surprisingly easy to maneuver, even for a novice. It doesn’t have to be recocked after it’s fired: you just squeeze the trigger over and over.

“At 25 meters, if you are a decent shot,” Mr. Dyke says, “you can put it into a bull’s-eye that is the size of a quarter.”

The Bushmaster brand began to grow in the 1980s after the company started supplying its semiautomatics to police departments. It won a much larger consumer following in the 1990s, after it landed several small military contracts.

Bushmaster was among the first to sell ordinary people on weapons that look and feel like the ones carried by soldiers. Today many gun makers have embraced military-style weapons, a major but controversial source of growth for the commercial gun market, says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, a research group that backs gun control.

“It’s clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry,” Mr. Diaz says.

Mr. Dyke says he’s not sure why Bushmaster caught the eye of Cerberus. Whatever the case, when Cerberus came calling, Mr. Dyke, then past 70, was ready to sell. At the time, Bushmaster had $85 million in annual sales and about several million dollars in debt, he says. In April 2006, he sold the company to Cerberus for about $76 million, he says, and Cerberus rented the Bushmaster plant here for five years.

The next year, Cerberus formed the Freedom Group.

Now Bushmaster is gone from Maine. Earlier this year, Mr. Dyke says, the Freedom Group notified him it was closing Bushmaster’s operation in the state and moving it to a bigger plant owned by Remington, a typical consolidation play for a private investment firm looking to cut costs and increase efficiency. Remington, for its part, announced earlier this year that it was expanding its manufacturing capacity and hiring new employees to make Bushmasters.

Several months ago, Mr. Dyke started a new company, Windham Weaponry, at the old Bushmaster site and has rehired most of his former employees. But he’s not planning to go head-to-head with the Freedom Group.

“It’s the big gorilla in the room,” he says, adding: “We don’t have to do $100 million. We’d have hopes of doing $20 million.”

 

REMINGTON has been producing guns since 1816, when, according to lore, a young man named Eliphalet Remington made a flintlock rifle in his father’s forge in Ilion Gulch, in upstate New York. By the 1870s, the brand was so popular that the company diversified into typewriters.

In 2007, the Freedom Group swooped in and bought Remington for $370 million, including $252 million in assumed debt. In one stroke, the Freedom Group gained one of the most famous names in American firearms, the largest domestic maker of shotguns and rifles and a major manufacturer of ammunition.

“That caused a lot of stir in the industry,” says Dean J. Lockwood, a weapons systems analyst at Forecast International, a market research firm.

Next, the Freedom Group in rapid succession went after other firearms companies: DPMS; Marlin Firearms, a classic maker that came with two niche shotgun brands, Harrington & Richardson and L. C. Smith; and Dakota Arms. The Freedom Group also bought S&K industries, which supplies wood and laminate for gun stocks, as well as the Advanced Armament Corporation, which makes silencers. It acquired Barnes Bullets, which makes copper-jacketed bullets popular with precision shooters and police departments.

The more the company diversifies its portfolio, analysts say, the more it has to offer to firearms distributors and leading retailers like Wal-Mart and Cabela’s.

“You can see Freedom Group constantly expanding its manufacturing base,” Mr. Lockwood says. “You don’t want to be a one-trick pony. They are trying to get as far into the market as they can.” What is left? The Freedom Group does not own the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation or Sturm, Ruger, both publicly traded. Nor does it own the Colt’s Manufacturing, which is privately owned.

Cerberus also does not own Winchester Repeating Arms or Browning, both part of the Herstal Group of Belgium.

Still, the Freedom Group has ingested so many well-known brands so quickly that some gun owners are uneasy about what it might do next. Two years ago, a Cerberus managing director, George Kollitides, ran for the board of the N.R.A. Despite an endorsement from Remington, and the fact that he was a director of the Freedom Group and Remington, he lost. His campaign didn’t sit well with some gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper.

Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s director for public affairs, declined to speculate about why Mr. Kollitides lost. “It’s a great question to ask our four million members,” he said.

THE challenges for gun makers in America go far beyond those faced by many other companies. As in many industries, sales tend to rise and fall with the economy. But firearms makers must also grapple with the vicissitudes of politics and public opinion.

Many Americans are solidly behind the right to own guns. In a Gallup poll conducted in October, only 43 percent of respondents said they supported stricter gun laws — an all-time low since the company first asked the question in 1990. And 47 percent reported that there was a gun in their home or on their property, the highest level of self-reported gun ownership since 1993, according to the poll, which canvassed about 1,000 adults in early October.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a “right to carry” bill that would require states to recognize one another’s permits to carry concealed weapons. If the bill passes the Senate, people in states with weaker concealed-weapon regulations would be able to carry concealed handguns into states like California, which requires extensive background checks.

The development would be good news for handgun makers like Colt and Smith & Wesson, but wouldn’t be much help to the Freedom Group, which focuses on long guns.

That, however, may be changing. Not long ago, Remington introduced the Remington 1911 R1, its first pistol in decades. Industry analysts speculate that the Freedom Group might next go shopping for a handgun maker to expand its presence in that segment of the market.

“At the right price,” says Jim Barrett, an analyst at CL King who covers firearms companies, “it would be logical for them to be interested in one of the premier handgun manufacturers.”

But, in an industry with few independent players left, the big question is this: What is Freedom Group’s long-term strategy? Because the company is private, outsiders can only speculate.

The Freedom Group had planned to go public, but backed away earlier this year when the financial markets turned turbulent. As of the end of September, the company had nearly half a billion dollars in debt, according to a third-quarter earnings report available on the Freedom Group’s Web site. That includes about $225 million in debt that the company raised last year to pay itself a special dividend used to buy back preferred stock from Cerberus, according to a company prospectus filed with the S.E.C.

Some analysts say tactical rifles have peaked, that the market has topped out, and that small, concealable handguns are the way forward for the near future. And yet, after a tough 2010, gun sales at the Freedom Group were up 5.6 percent during the first nine months of this year, although the company reported a net loss of $6.3 million for the same time period, according to the company’s most recent earnings report.

Meantime, the Freedom Group, despite its place atop the industry, appears to be operating without an official chief executive of its own. Its most recent C.E.O., Theodore H. Torbeck, resigned in September 2010 and no replacement has been named. For the moment, a temporary office of the chief executive, led by Robert L. Nardelli, the Cerberus executive who oversaw Chrysler, is helping to lead the company

“It’s a sensible strategy to roll up things,” says Gautam Khanna, an aerospace and military industry analyst at Cowen & Company. The issue is whether the Freedom Group, and Cerberus, can persuade more Americans to buy more guns.

“That,” Mr. Khanna says, “is an open question.”

    How Freedom Group Became the Big Shot, NYT, 26.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/business/how-freedom-group-became-the-gun-industrys-giant.html

White House Shooting Suspect’s Path to Extremism

November 20, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

IDAHO FALLS — A referee lifted Oscar Ortega’s hand high into the clear Rocky Mountain night last summer. Mr. Ortega had not yet been accused of trying to kill the president. He had not yet told the world he was Jesus Christ. Not until the next morning would all the blows to his body make him urinate blood.

That July night at the rodeo grounds in Pocatello, with 2,000 people watching beneath the dry Western sky, the lazy kid who used to smoke too much dope was lucid and devastating in his debut as a mixed martial arts fighter. For the first time anyone could remember, he was an undisputed winner.

It was his first bout, and it would be his last.

“When his hand was raised in that ring,” said Eric King, who helped train Mr. Ortega at the Y.M.C.A. here, “I think that was one of the brightest moments of his life.”

The fight ended in the second round, with Mr. Ortega astride his prone opponent in what is called a full mount, pummeling him in the face. Technical knockout, the referee ruled. Mr. Ortega carried his infant son, Israel, in triumph.

Now he may spend the rest of his life in prison. The government says that on Nov. 11, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, 21, rode past the Ellipse in Washington in a black Honda Accord he bought with money he earned waiting tables at his family’s small chain of Mexican restaurants here. Investigators say he slowed down as he passed the White House and fired a semiautomatic rifle from the passenger window. Bullets struck the White House near the residential quarters. The president and Michelle Obama were out of town.

The federal charges accuse Mr. Ortega of attempting to assassinate President Obama. They say acquaintances claim that Mr. Ortega was trying to kill Mr. Obama because he considered him “the Antichrist.”

That a religious extremist from a small town in Idaho would try to kill a black Democratic president might seem like cinematic stock. The state has long been stereotyped as violently antigovernment and racist. Remember the white supremacists of Hayden Lake? Remember Ruby Ridge? But many people here in Idaho Falls say the cliché is empty this time.

Mr. Ortega is a Mexican-American whose family knows the sound of ethnic slurs and worries mostly about its restaurant business, not politics. People here say that the only thing that could have motivated Mr. Ortega was mental illness — but that they did not realize the severity of it until it was too late.

“I kind of thought we should sit down and talk with him,” said Mr. Ortega’s sister, Yesenia Hernandez, “but then he was already gone.”

The family reported Mr. Ortega missing on Oct. 31, eight days after he left on what he said was a vacation to Utah; instead, it was a trip to the East Coast. His family never heard from him, and still has not.

Family members and others said that while Mr. Ortega was behaving increasingly strangely — he read a 45-minute speech at his 21st birthday party in October that veered from supporting marijuana legalization to detailing the threat of secret societies to expressing frustration with American foreign policy in oil-producing countries — he never seemed violent.

They said that he could not have truly wanted to kill the president, but that he may have wanted a larger audience. He read his speech to anyone who would listen. In September, Mr. Ortega made a video in which he asked Oprah Winfrey to let him appear on television with her.

“You see, Oprah, there is still so much more that God needs me to express to the world,” he says. “It’s not just a coincidence that I look like Jesus. I am the modern-day Jesus Christ that you all have been waiting for.”

Mr. Ortega’s behavior and the age at which it appears to have begun to suggest that he has “a textbook case” of schizophrenia, said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who researches the disease and is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va.

Dr. Torrey recalled working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric treatment center, in the 1970s and 1980s.

“These folks often end up in Washington as what we used to call ‘White House cases,’ ” he said. “A White House case classically is someone who comes to the guard at the White House and says they have a special message for the president, or they try to go over the wall. We’ve seen dozens. They almost always have paranoid schizophrenia, and they almost always respond to medication.” Among the patients being treated there is John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Mr. Ortega, he acknowledged, is accused of going much further than pestering a guard or climbing a wall.

“I can guarantee you that in his mind, it all makes perfect sense,” Dr. Torrey said. “If he’s Christ, Obama’s the Antichrist.”

Mr. Ortega had a lengthy arrest record in and near Idaho Falls, but the charges were mostly misdemeanors, like under-age drinking, and rarely involved violence.

“He really did fly under the radar,” said Joelyn Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Idaho Falls Police Department.

Now the entire town knows who he is.

“He seemed like a nice guy, but when he started talking, it was like, wow,” said Ramon Bailey, a student at Idaho State University who made the video of Mr. Ortega in September, after they met at the gym. Mr. Bailey was among several people traveling to Washington this week to testify before a grand jury.

Jake Chapman is also scheduled to make the trip to Washington. The AK-47 that Mr. Ortega is accused of using to fire on the White House was registered to Mr. Chapman, who said in an interview that he is known to friends as “the gun guy.” He said that he sold the gun to Mr. Ortega in March for $550 and that he believed it was the first gun Mr. Ortega owned.

Mr. Chapman, 21, said he had not heard Mr. Ortega talk of taking violent action. But more than a year ago, he recalled, Mr. Ortega and others watched an antigovernment film on the Internet called “The Obama Deception,” which was written, directed and produced by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host who has espoused a number of conspiracy theories involving the federal government.

Ms. Hernandez, who is two years older than her brother, said their family’s house was popular when they were children because they had a trampoline and lots of video games. She described her brother as friendly but said he began getting into trouble in his teens and dropped out of high school in 10th grade.

After several of what she and their mother, Maria Hernandez, said were aimless years, Mr. Ortega seemed to be maturing last year. He returned from a long visit with relatives in Mexico shortly before the birth of his son last year. He and his girlfriend, the boy’s mother, separated several months ago. In a brief interview, the girlfriend requested anonymity, saying only, “I love him, and I know who he truly is.”

In addition to his son, whom friends and family say he doted on, Mr. Ortega was devoted to mixed martial arts. He started training about a year ago and learned quickly, developing strong stand-up fighting skills and often volunteering to help others.

After years of eating junk food and caring little about his health, he started paying close attention to his diet, drinking protein shakes and eating more fruit and meat. Like other mixed martial arts fighters, when it came time to fight, he quickly dropped weight, getting to 154 from about 165 in a few days, in order to qualify for a lighter division, his trainers said.

He had let his hair and beard grow long in the last year. He told some people that it was part of his fighting identity, meant to intimidate. More recently, he said it was because he was Jesus.

“You ever heard of Andrei Arlovski, the fighter?” asked Mr. King, the trainer. “Oscar looked like him. But he also looked like Jesus.”

    White House Shooting Suspect’s Path to Extremism, NYT, 20.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/us/oscar-ortega-white-house-shooting-suspect-struggled-with-mental-illness.html

In Gunshots, a Trail of Threats Is Reported

November 17, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities on Thursday charged a 21-year-old Idaho man with attempting to assassinate President Obama — saying he had told one friend that the president was “the Antichrist” and that he “needed to kill him,” according to a complaint filed in federal court.

The man, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, who is accused of spraying bullets from an assault rifle at the residential floors of the White House last week, was also “convinced the federal government is conspiring against him” and had become “increasingly more agitated” before he disappeared from Idaho last month, the complaint said.

The complaint was filed in conjunction with a brief appearance by Mr. Ortega-Hernandez in a federal courthouse in Pittsburgh on Thursday afternoon. He had been arrested on Wednesday at a hotel near the town of Indiana, Pa., and officials intend to bring him back to the District of Columbia to face the assassination charge, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez was shackled and dressed in a white prison-issue jumpsuit. He spoke only briefly during the hearing, muttering “yes ma’am” when asked by a magistrate judge if he understood his legal rights.

Law enforcement officials had been hunting for Mr. Ortega-Hernandez since Friday night, after discovering evidence linked to his identity in a black Honda Accord with an Idaho license plate. The car was found abandoned on the lawn of the United States Institute of Peace, about seven blocks west of the White House and near a bridge over the Potomac River.

Minutes earlier, at least two witnesses had seen the car pause on Constitution Avenue in front of the Ellipse — a grassy field between the White House and the Washington Monument — as gunshots were fired out of its passenger window, after which the vehicle sped away, according to the complaint.

A search of the car found a Romanian-made semiautomatic rifle with a “large scope” mounted on its top, nine spent cartridges, and large amounts of ammunition of the same size as a bullet later found at the White House. Two of Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s acquaintances in Idaho said he owned such a weapon, the complaint said.

On Wednesday, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the area around the White House and located “several confirmed bullet impact points on the south side of the building on or above the second story,” where the first family’s residential quarters are located.

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, were out of town at the time of the shooting, just after 9 p.m.; it is not clear if the authorities have evidence showing whether Mr. Ortega-Hernandez believed that the president was at home. The Secret Service has declined to say whether the Obamas’ daughters, Sasha and Malia, were in the residence.

The president, who is in Bali, Indonesia, declined to answer a reporter’s shouted question about the shooting during an appearance on Friday morning. He walked out of a room without responding. Aides traveling with the president have referred all questions to the Secret Service.

It was not clear why it took so long to discover the bullets. But Daniel Bongino, a former Secret Service agent with the presidential protection division, said in an interview that the search for bullet damage on the building and grounds would have been like looking for “a needle in a haystack” and was most likely conducted slowly and methodically to avoid missing or damaging any evidence.

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s family had reported him missing in Idaho Falls last month, after he drove away in the Honda Accord, the complaint said. The Secret Service has said it did not have Mr. Ortega-Hernandez on record as having made any threats against the president. But after the shooting, several acquaintances said he had been fixated on Mr. Obama.

Besides the one friend who told investigators that Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had said he believed the president was the “Antichrist” and that he needed to kill him, another friend said he stated “President Obama was the problem with the government,” was “the devil,” and that he “needed to be taken care of.” The second friend also said he appeared to be “preparing for something.”

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez has had legal problems in Idaho, Texas, and Utah, including charges related to drug offenses, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, officials have said. He is said to be heavily tattooed, with the word “Israel” on his neck and pictures of rosary beads and hands clasped in prayer on his chest.

Investigators searching the car found, in addition to the rifle and ammunition, brass knuckles, a baseball bat, a sales receipt from a purchase at a Wal-Mart in northern Virginia about four hours before the shooting, and a black hooded jacket with “LA” written in the style of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ team logo.

The complaint said Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had been photographed at least twice earlier that day wearing the jacket — on a surveillance tape at the Wal-Mart, and when the police in nearby Arlington County, Va., had stopped him a few hours earlier because someone reported that he was acting suspiciously. He was on foot and unarmed, and the police let him go.

Mr. Bongino, who left the Secret Service in May and is now running for a United States Senate seat in Maryland, said the agency was very likely now conducting an “exhaustive review” of its security procedures on the outer edge of the White House complex.

He predicted that the review would focus more on the agency’s response — how it was that the gunman had been able to get away rather than being apprehended quickly — than on how someone had managed to shoot at the White House in the first place.

“The Secret Service’s job is not to prevent every bad thing from happening,” he said. “You can’t prevent bad people from doing bad things. What you can do is stop bad outcomes. And that’s what they did — the structure did what it was supposed to do, and stopped that round.”

Officials have said that reinforcements on the building and its windows stopped the bullets from penetrating the interior. Still, one of the bullets apparently struck a window overlooking the Truman balcony, where the Obamas sometimes go outside to relax.

Mr. Bongino noted, however, that Mr. Obama was not home and no one was on the balcony, so there would have been a lower level of security.

 

Leah Welch contributed reporting from Pittsburgh,

and Jackie Calmes from Bali, Indonesia.

    In Gunshots, a Trail of Threats Is Reported, NT, 17.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/us/attempted-assassination-charge-in-shooting-at-white-house.html

Something to Shoot For

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By GAIL COLLINS

You may have noticed that Congress is unpopular.

Really, really unpopular, actually. Only 9 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress has been doing its job, according the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. And you do sort of wonder about that 9 percent. Do you think they misheard and thought they were being asked: “Do you approve of Christmas?”

This week, the House of Representatives took time out of its busy schedule of going home for vacation to remind us, once again, why it has the strong support of about as many people who believe Rick Perry should be the next president of the United States. It approved a bill requiring states with strict gun regulations to honor concealed weapon carry permits issued in states where the gun rules are slightly more lax than the restrictions on who can dispense ice cream cones from a truck.

“This bill is about freedom,” said Representative Chris Gibson, a Republican from upstate New York. In this Congress, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t. Cutting Social Security is about freedom. Killing funds for Planned Parenthood is about freedom. Once again, we are reminded that, as Janis Joplin used to sing, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Here’s an example of the way the House plan would work. California has very strict limits on who can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, involving extensive background checks by local law enforcement. Utah, on the other hand, is really mellow about the whole thing. You don’t even have to live there to get a Utah permit. Just ask the 215,000 non-Utah folks who’ve gotten one. And, in Florida, “it is so easy that a staffer in one of our offices was able to complete the form in less than 30 minutes,” said Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat.

Under this bill, California’s strict rules on gun permits are now expanded to include anybody who drives into the state waving a Florida or Utah permission slip.

The bill passed 272 to 154. It’s a law-enforcement nightmare for states that take gun regulation seriously. There’s no national database cops can check if they stop someone who’s carrying a gun with an out-of-state permit. Some state records aren’t available at all.

“A common-sense solution to adapt to today’s needs,” said Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican, cheerfully.

The opponents really did try everything, including the time-honored tactic of proposing that the bill be taken away and amended to say “except for child molesters.”

They also pointed out, in tones of deep irony, that Republicans are supposed to be big fans of states’ rights. But really, a vast majority of members of Congress have always believed that the states have a right to do anything that the member in question happens to like. “It’s tougher when it’s those things you may disagree with that are left to the states,” said Representative Dan Lungren, a Republican of California, who should know since he was one of approximately two gun-rights lawmakers who opposed the bill because of principles of strict constitutional construction.

Anyway, the National Rifle Association will be giving everybody a grade before they run for re-election. Screw around with this bill. and you could be looking at a B-minus.

There is a distinct cultural rift in this country between the people who feel safest when there are as few guns on the street as possible and the ones who believe that they aren’t secure unless they have a loaded gun around to protect themselves against evildoers. “As millions of American families can attest, there is no greater threat to our families than — the ability to protect,” said Representative Renee Ellmers, a Republican of North Carolina, flung into incoherence by the drama of the moment. What she pretty clearly meant to say was there was no greater threat than a crazed, knife-wielding zombie breaking through the doors of an unarmed household and trying to carry off the baby.

“We must protect our families,” she concluded.

Actually, the evidence suggests very strongly that a gun in the house will most likely be used to take out a relative. And guns in the house are not the subject of this bill anyway, since we’re talking about weapons being carted across state lines. So maybe the danger here is a crazed knife-wielding zombie breaking into the station wagon while the family is stopped for gas on the way to Disneyland.

Anyway, God wants everybody to be armed. “Mr. Speaker, rights do not come from the government. We are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights,” said Representative Marlin Stutzman, an Indiana Republican.

Among these rights are life, liberty and a pistol in the glove compartment.

    Something to Shoot For, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/opinion/collins-something-to-shoot-for.html

After Bullet Hits White House, a Manhunt and Arrest

November 16, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement officials on Wednesday arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man suspected of firing a semiautomatic rifle at the White House on Friday night, and the Secret Service reported finding that at least one bullet had struck the presidential residence.

The suspect, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, was arrested at a hotel near Indiana, Pa., about 12:35 p.m. by the Pennsylvania State Police, acting on information from Secret Service agents in Pittsburgh, the Secret Service said.

“Ortega-Hernandez is currently in the custody of the Pennsylvania State Police,” the statement said.

The man, previously referred to in a warrant as Oscar Ramiro Ortega, has a background of legal problems and is said to have a history of aberrant behavior. During an encounter earlier on Friday with the police in Arlington County, Va., he said he was from Idaho Falls. The police there said his family had reported him missing last month.

Gunfire was heard in the vicinity of the White House and the National Mall shortly after 9 on Friday night, and the Secret Service said its officers had seen a car speed away west on Constitution Avenue. A few minutes later, the car was found about seven blocks away, abandoned, with an assault-style semiautomatic rifle inside.

Investigators were examining evidence found in the car and talking with Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s relatives, who told them that he appeared to have a fixation on the White House or President Obama, one official said. Another official said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had traced the origin of the weapon, but the official declined to disclose the circumstances of its purchase.

The United States Park Police had obtained an arrest warrant charging Mr. Ortega-Hernandez with a felony count of carrying a deadly weapon. The agency had also released photographs showing that Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had distinctive tattoos, including the word “Israel” on the left side of his neck. He was also said to have three dots tattooed on his right hand, the name “Ortega” on his back, rosary beads and hands clasped in prayer on his right chest and folded hands on his left chest.

The police in Arlington County took those photographs on Friday when they stopped Mr. Ortega-Hernandez after someone reported that a man outside was circling the area in a suspicious manner. Mr. Ortega-Hernandez was on foot and unarmed, said Lieutenant Joe Kantor, a county police spokesman, and since “there was no crime,” there was no reason to arrest him.

Late on Friday, the police searched the Occupy DC protest camp, on McPherson Square just blocks from the White House, after reports that the suspect might have spent time there. Protesters there said on Wednesday that the police had been through their encampment several times since then, showing around a photograph of Mr. Ortega-Hernandez.

Sgt. David Schlosser of the Park Police said any motive would not be clear “until we can talk to this guy.”

He said Mr. Ortega-Hernandez had criminal records in Idaho, Texas and Utah for charges including drugs, underage drinking, domestic violence, resisting arrest and assault on a police officer. Public records indicated much the same thing.

The Secret Service did not have Mr. Ortega-Hernandez on record as someone who had made any threats to the president, an agency official said.

Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, were away on Friday; the president was in San Diego on his way to an Asia-Pacific economic forum in Hawaii, and on Wednesday was in Australia.

It was not clear for several days that someone had deliberately fired at the White House. But the Secret Service has now found at least two bullets. The agency would not say where the White House had been struck, but workers on Wednesday were examining a window overlooking the Truman Balcony, an area outside the second-floor residential quarters where the first family sometimes relaxes or hosts guests.

A second round was found outside, and officials were searching the South Lawn for any other rounds. The area around the White House was generally more crowded than usual with police cars on Wednesday.

The shooting came from roughly 750 yards south of the White House, just outside the outer security perimeter. The security perimeter extends to the south edge of the Ellipse, a grassy area where the National Christmas Tree is displayed. It is across Constitution Avenue from the more distant Washington Monument.

The street area, usually open to the public, is one of the most guarded parts of the city — or of the country, for that matter — with the United States Park Police patrolling on the National Mall and the District of Columbia police on the streets. In addition, the Secret Service, with a uniformed force of 1,400 officers, has agents on guard at fixed positions on the White House grounds and on patrol nearby in cars and on bicycles. Streets are routinely shut down for motorcades. The Secret Service said its security worked effectively on Friday evening, though it planned to “scrutinize how we can make it better,” an official said.

The Secret Service said it had been tipped off to Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s whereabouts by a hotel employee who recognized a photograph of him and called the Pittsburgh field office. The field office alerted the Pennsylvania State Police, which dispatched troopers to the hotel.

Investigators established Mr. Ortega-Hernandez’s route by talking to people who knew him, an official at the Secret Service said, and circulated photos of him to several hotels in the area. The investigation involved all of the Secret Service’s 122 field offices in the United States, the official said.

The last known episode in which bullets struck the White House occurred in 1994, when one round fired from the area of the Ellipse penetrated a first-floor window and landed in the State Dining Room, and another was found in a Christmas tree near the South Portico. President Bill Clinton and his wife and daughter were sleeping upstairs. No one was hurt.

 

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from New York, and Brian Knowlton and Emmarie Huetteman from Washington.

    After Bullet Hits White House, a Manhunt and Arrest, NYT, 16.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/us/bullet-that-struck-the-white-house-is-found.html

Felons Finding It Easy to Get Gun Rights Reinstated

November 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

In February 2005, Erik Zettergren came home from a party after midnight with his girlfriend and another couple. They had all been drinking heavily, and soon the other man and Mr. Zettergren’s girlfriend passed out on his bed. When Mr. Zettergren went to check on them later, he found his girlfriend naked from the waist down and the other man, Jason Robinson, with his pants around his ankles.

Enraged, Mr. Zettergren ordered Mr. Robinson to leave. After a brief confrontation, Mr. Zettergren shot him in the temple at point-blank range with a Glock-17 semiautomatic handgun. He then forced Mr. Robinson’s hysterical fiancée, at gunpoint, to help him dispose of the body in a nearby river.

It was the first homicide in more than 30 years in the small town of Endicott, in eastern Washington. But for a judge’s ruling two months before, it would probably never have happened.

For years, Mr. Zettergren had been barred from possessing firearms because of two felony convictions. He had a history of mental health problems and friends said he was dangerous. Yet Mr. Zettergren’s gun rights were restored without even a hearing, under a state law that gave the judge no leeway to deny the application as long as certain basic requirements had been met. Mr. Zettergren, then 36, wasted no time retrieving several guns he had given to a friend for safekeeping.

“If he hadn’t had his rights restored, in this particular instance, it probably would have saved the life of the other person,” said Denis Tracy, the prosecutor in Whitman County, who handled the murder case.

Under federal law, people with felony convictions forfeit their right to bear arms. Yet every year, thousands of felons across the country have those rights reinstated, often with little or no review. In several states, they include people convicted of violent crimes, including first-degree murder and manslaughter, an examination by The New York Times has found.

While previously a small number of felons were able to reclaim their gun rights, the process became commonplace in many states in the late 1980s, after Congress started allowing state laws to dictate these reinstatements — part of an overhaul of federal gun laws orchestrated by the National Rifle Association. The restoration movement has gathered force in recent years, as gun rights advocates have sought to capitalize on the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

This gradual pulling back of what many Americans have unquestioningly assumed was a blanket prohibition has drawn relatively little public notice. Indeed, state law enforcement agencies have scant information, if any, on which felons are getting their gun rights back, let alone how many have gone on to commit new crimes.

While many states continue to make it very difficult for felons to get their gun rights back — and federal felons are out of luck without a presidential pardon — many other jurisdictions are far more lenient, The Times found. In some, restoration is automatic for nonviolent felons as soon as they complete their sentences. In others, the decision is left up to judges, but the standards are generally vague, the process often perfunctory. In some states, even violent felons face a relatively low bar, with no waiting period before they can apply.

The Times examined hundreds of restoration cases in several states, among them Minnesota, where William James Holisky II, who had a history of stalking and terrorizing women, got his gun rights back last year, just six months after completing a three-year prison sentence for firing a shotgun into the house of a woman who had broken up with him after a handful of dates. She and her son were inside at the time of the shooting.

“My whole family’s convinced that at some point he’ll blow a gasket and that he’ll come and shoot someone,” said Vicky Holisky-Crets, Mr. Holisky’s sister.

Also last year, a judge in Cleveland restored gun rights to Charles C. Hairston, who had been convicted of first-degree murder in North Carolina in 1971 for shooting a grocery store owner in the head with a shotgun. He also had another felony conviction, in 1995, for corruption of a minor.

Margaret C. Love, a pardon lawyer based in Washington, D.C., who has researched gun rights restoration laws, estimated that, depending on the type of crime, in more than half the states felons have a reasonable chance of getting back their gun rights.

That universe could well expand, as pro-gun groups shed a historical reluctance to advocate publicly for gun rights for felons. Lawyers litigating Second Amendment issues are also starting to challenge the more restrictive restoration laws. Pro-gun groups have pressed the issue in the last few years in states as diverse as Alaska, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee.

Ohio’s Legislature confronted the matter when it passed a law this year fixing a technicality that threatened to invalidate the state’s restorations.

Ken Hanson, legislative chairman of the Buckeye Firearms Coalition, argued that felons should be able to reclaim their gun rights just as they can other civil rights.

“If it’s a constitutional right, you treat it with equal dignity with other rights,” he said.

But Toby Hoover, executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, contended that the public was safer without guns in the hands of people who have committed serious crimes.

“It seems that Ohio legislators have plenty of problems to solve that should be a much higher priority than making sure criminals have guns,” Ms. Hoover said in written testimony.

That question — whether the restorations pose a risk to public safety — has received little study, in part because data can be hard to come by.

The Times analyzed data from Washington State, where Mr. Zettergren had his gun rights restored. The most serious felons are barred, but otherwise judges have no discretion to reject the petitions, as long as the applicant fulfills certain criteria. (In 2003, a state appeals court panel stated that a petitioner “had no burden to show that he is safe to own or possess guns.”)

Since 1995, more than 3,300 felons and people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors have regained their gun rights in the state — 430 in 2010 alone — according to the analysis of data provided by the state police and the court system. Of that number, more than 400 — about 13 percent — have subsequently committed new crimes, the analysis found. More than 200 committed felonies, including murder, assault in the first and second degree, child rape and drive-by shooting.

Even some felons who have regained their firearms rights say the process needs to be more rigorous.

“It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” said Beau Krueger, who has two assaults on his record and got his gun rights back last year in Minnesota after only a brief hearing, in which local prosecutors did not even participate. “We could have all kinds of crazy hoodlums out here with guns that shouldn’t have guns.”

 

Powerful Lobby Prevails

The federal firearms prohibition for felons dates to the late 1960s, when the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, along with rioting across the country, set off a clamor for stricter gun control laws. Congress enacted sweeping legislation that included a provision extending the firearms ban for convicted criminals beyond those who had committed “crimes of violence,” a standard adopted in the 1930s.

“All of our people who are deeply concerned about law and order should hail this day,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said upon signing the Gun Control Act in October 1968.

Even the N.R.A. backed the bill. But by the late 1970s, a more hard-line faction, committed to an expansive view of the Second Amendment, had taken control of the group. A crowning achievement was the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, which significantly loosened federal gun laws.

When it came to felons’ gun rights, the legislation essentially left the matter up to states. The federal gun restrictions would no longer apply if a state had restored a felon’s civil rights — to vote, sit on a jury and hold public office — and the individual faced no other firearms prohibitions.

The restoration issue drew relatively little notice in the Congressional battle over the bill. But officials of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms identified the provision in an internal memo as among their serious concerns. Some state law enforcement officials also sounded the alarm.

When Senator David F. Durenberger, a Minnesota Republican, realized after the law passed that thousands of felons, including those convicted of violent crimes, in his state would suddenly be getting their gun rights back, he sought the N.R.A.’s help in rolling back the provision. Doug Kelley, his chief of staff at the time, thought the group would “surely want to close this loophole.”

But the senator, Mr. Kelley recalled, “ran into a stone wall,” as the N.R.A. threatened to pull its support for him if he did not drop the matter, which he eventually did.

“The N.R.A. slammed the door on us,” Mr. Kelley said. “That absolutely baffled me.”

Until then, the avenues for restoration had been narrow and few: a direct appeal to the federal firearms agency, which conducted detailed background investigations; a state pardon expressly authorizing gun possession, or a presidential pardon. Felons convicted of crimes involving guns or other weapons, as well as those convicted of violating federal gun laws, were expressly barred from applying to the federal firearms agency.

By contrast, the restoration of civil rights, which is now central to regaining gun rights, is relatively routine, automatic in many states upon completion of a sentence. In some states, felons must also petition for a judicial order specifically restoring firearms rights. Other potential paths include a pardon from the governor or state clemency board or a “set aside”— essentially, an annulment — of the conviction.

Today, in at least 11 states, including Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and Rhode Island, restoration of firearms rights is automatic, without any review at all, for many nonviolent felons, usually once they finish their sentences, or after a certain amount of time crime-free. Even violent felons may petition to have their firearms rights restored in states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia. Some states, including Georgia and Nebraska, award scores of pardons every year that specifically confer gun privileges.

Felons face steep odds, though, in states like California, where the governor’s office gives out only a handful of pardons every year, if that.

“It’s a long, drawn-out process,” said Steve Lindley, chief of the State Department of Justice’s firearms bureau. “They were convicted of a felony crime. There are penalties for that.”

Studies on the impact of gun restrictions largely support barring felons from possessing firearms.

One study, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1999, found that denying handgun purchases to felons cut their risk of committing new gun or violent crimes by 20 to 30 percent. A year earlier, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that handgun purchasers with at least one prior misdemeanor — not even a felony — were more than seven times as likely as those with no criminal history to be charged with new offenses over a 15-year period.

Criminologists studying recidivism have found that felons usually have to stay out of trouble for about a decade before their risk of committing a crime equals that of people with no records. According to Alfred Blumstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, for violent offenders, that period is 11 to 15 years; for drug offenders, 10 to 14 years; and for those who have committed property crimes, 8 to 11 years. An important caveat: Professor Blumstein did not look at what happens when felons are given guns.

The history of the federal firearms agency’s own restoration program, though, offers reason for caution. The program came under attack in the early 1990s, when the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group, discovered that dozens of felons granted restorations over a five-year period had been arrested again, including some on charges of attempted murder and sexual assault. (The center also found that many of those granted gun rights were felons convicted of violent or drug-related crimes.) In the resulting uproar and over the objections of the N.R.A., Congress killed the program.

 

A Superficial Process

In 2001, three police officers in the Columbia Heights suburb of Minneapolis were shot and wounded by a convicted murderer whose firearms rights had been restored automatically in 1987, 10 years after he completed a six-and-a-half year prison sentence and then probation for killing his estranged wife and a family friend with a shotgun. (The State Legislature had imposed the 10-year waiting period for violent felons after it discovered what Senator Durenberger had feared: that felons’ gun rights would be restored immediately under the Firearm Owners Protection Act.)

What happened in the wake of the shooting is emblematic of how the issue has played out in many states, particularly where the gun lobby is powerful.

Two Democratic legislators sought to impose a lifetime firearms ban on violent felons, although they concluded that for their bills to have any chance of passing, they would also have to set up a process that held out a hope of eventual restoration. They were unable, however, to get their bills through the Legislature.

The issue was taken up the following year by Republican lawmakers, but it became wrapped up in legislation to relax concealed-weapons laws. Initially, a moderate Republican introduced a bill with a 5- to 10-year waiting period for regaining gun rights, but the waiting period was scrapped entirely in the law, written by gun-rights advocates, that was finally enacted in 2003. That law, which does not even mandate that prosecutors be notified of the hearings, requires judges to grant the requests merely if the petitioners show “good cause.”

“The decision was, we have good judges and we trust them,” said Joseph Olson, who helped write the statute as president of the advocacy group Concealed Carry Reform Now.

One man who has benefited from a Minnesota judge’s gun rights ruling is William Holisky.

Mr. Holisky, an accountant who has struggled with bipolar disorder and alcoholism, had gone out only a few times with Karen Roman, a nurse he had met online, before she broke up with him.

In August 2006, Ms. Roman was getting ready to work a night shift, putting on makeup in the bathroom of her home in Duluth, when she heard a truck pulling up and a loud boom. Moments later, she heard another boom and glass breaking. She hit the floor, calling out to her teenage son in the other room to do the same as she crawled to the phone to dial 911.

The police arrested Mr. Holisky later that night for drunken driving. Several months later, they charged him in the shooting as well. He pleaded guilty to second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon.

Around the same time, he also pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making terroristic threats against an elderly neighbor. The woman had reported to the police that someone — she suspected Mr. Holisky — had left her a threatening and obscene note. She had also reported a series of escalating incidents that included harassing telephone calls, his entering her apartment and someone’s smashing her bedroom window. Mr. Holisky also had a misdemeanor burglary conviction from 2003, for breaking into an ex-girlfriend’s house, as well as another misdemeanor conviction for violating an order of protection.

In Mr. Holisky’s gun rights hearing in October 2010 in Two Harbors, a small town on the north shore of Lake Superior, Russell Conrow, the prosecutor in Lake County, argued that Mr. Holisky had not yet proved that he could stay clean, given that he had just gotten out of prison. Mr. Conrow also pointed out that there were two active orders of protection against Mr. Holisky.

“There were people still scared of him,” Mr. Conrow said recently.

For his part, Mr. Holisky took documents from the plea agreement in his assault case, in which the prosecutor in neighboring St. Louis County agreed not to oppose the restoration of his firearms rights.

Mr. Holisky, who is 59, did not specify in his often-rambling petition exactly why he wanted a gun. He described his behavior in 2006 as an “aberration.”

The county judge, Kenneth Sandvik, was set to retire in a few months. He knew Mr. Holisky’s family from growing up in the community. Several weeks later, he ruled that Mr. Holisky had met the basic requirements of the law.

In an interview, Judge Sandvik said he had given considerable weight to the St. Louis County prosecutor’s agreement not to oppose the restoration of gun rights for Mr. Holisky. But Gary Bjorklund, an assistant St. Louis County attorney, said in an interview that he had been focused on extracting a guilty plea that would send Mr. Holisky to prison and had thought no judge would take a firearms request from Mr. Holisky seriously.

Judge Sandvik acknowledged that he had not looked into the details of Mr. Holisky’s assault case, arguing that his job had been only to review what the prosecutor had presented to him.

“We’re not investigators,” he said.

The ease with which Mr. Holisky regained his gun rights does not appear to be an anomaly. Using partial data from Minnesota’s Judicial Branch, The Times identified more than 70 cases since 2004 of people convicted of “crimes of violence” who have gotten their gun rights back. A closer look at a number of them found a superficial process. The cases included those of Mr. Krueger, who criticized the system as insufficiently rigorous after winning back his gun rights in a perfunctory hearing, and of another man whose petition was approved without even a hearing, even though his felony involved pulling a gun on a man.

The ruling in Mr. Holisky’s case prompted members of his family to write a series of frantic e-mails to Judge Sandvik and Mr. Conrow, warning of dire consequences.

It is not entirely clear whether Mr. Holisky, who did not respond to several requests for comment, is legally able to buy a gun at this point, because at least one of the outstanding orders of protection, which expires next year, appears to trip another federal prohibition. But Mr. Holisky has been writing letters to relatives in Texas, threatening legal action if they do not turn over his gun collection.

So far, they have refused.

 

A Killer’s Successful Petition

Just as in Minnesota, violent felons in Ohio are allowed to apply for restoration of firearms rights after completing their sentences. The statute is similarly vague, requiring only that a judge find that the petitioner has “led a law-abiding life since discharge or release, and appears likely to do so.”

Only a handful of county clerks in Ohio said they could track these cases, producing records on several dozen restorations. They included people who had been convicted of first-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, felonious assault and sexual battery.

The case of Charles Hairston in Cuyahoga County stands out.

Mr. Hairston was 17 in January 1971, when he shot a man to death in Winston-Salem, N.C. Mr. Hairston and a group of neighborhood toughs had been preparing to rob a local grocery store when the owner, Charles Minor, 55, closed up and headed for his car.

“I am fixing to get him,” Mr. Hairston told one of his friends, according to witness statements to the police, before he pulled the trigger on a 20-gauge shotgun.

Mr. Hairston spent 18 years in prison before being released on parole in 1989. He moved to Cleveland and started working in heating and cooling, a trade he had learned behind bars.

In 1995, he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge for allegedly grabbing and pushing his wife.

More seriously, later that year he was indicted on 60 counts of rape, felonious sexual penetration and gross sexual imposition; prosecutors charged that he had forced sex upon his stepdaughter, starting when she was 12. He was acquitted of the most serious charges and convicted only of corruption of a minor for one encounter at a motel for which prosecutors were able to provide corroborating evidence beyond the girl’s detailed testimony.

Mr. Hairston, who denies the charges and is still fighting the conviction, filed his first gun rights restoration application in 2006 in Cuyahoga County but was summarily denied.

When he filed a new petition two years later, a judge thought he was ineligible and denied him again, though she wrote in her decision that she did not believe Mr. Hairston was likely to break the law again. But an appeals court ruled that the judge had misread the statute, and sent the case back for another hearing late last year.

The county prosecutor’s office had vigorously opposed the restoration from the beginning. But Mr. Hairston, who took in several friends as character witnesses, told the judge he had grown up in prison.

“Nearly 40 years ago, you know, I was a dumb kid,” Mr. Hairston said at his first hearing. He added, “I am in a situation now where if, God forbid, if someone was to come into my home and attack me, my wife, there isn’t a lot I could say about it, there isn’t a lot I could do.”

In the end, the judge, Hollie L. Gallagher, granted his petition without comment.

Soon after the judge’s ruling, Mr. Hairston obtained a concealed weapons permit from a neighboring county and bought a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.

Returning to Crime

Erik Zettergren originally lost his gun rights in 1987 because of a felony conviction for dealing marijuana. A decade later, the police went to his house after being called by his ex-wife and discovered a cache of guns. He was convicted of another felony, unlawful possession of a firearm.

He relinquished his weapons to friends but eventually got them back, sometimes hiding them in an old car in his backyard, according to friends. Sometime after that, though, he became worried that the police might come after him again and turned over the guns — two long guns and a Glock pistol — to a friend, Tom Williams.

“I kept them under my bed,” Mr. Williams said.

In December 2004, Mr. Zettergren successfully petitioned in Kittitas County — a three-hour drive from his home — to have his gun rights restored. (Like Minnesota’s, Washington’s law allows petitioners to apply anywhere.) Court records show he did not even have a hearing. Instead, his lawyer, Paul T. Ferris, who specializes in these cases, took care of the matter.

Right away, Mr. Zettergren retrieved his guns from Mr. Williams and soon obtained a concealed pistol license. He made something of a sport of showing off his Glock to friends. “He was so proud of that thing,” said Larry Persons, a friend. “He was flashing it in front of everybody.”

Not long after, he would use it in the killing.

Washington’s gun rights restoration statute dates to a 1995 statewide initiative, the Hard Times for Armed Crimes Act, that toughened penalties for crimes involving firearms. The initiative was spearheaded, in part, by pro-gun activists, including leaders of the Second Amendment Foundation, an advocacy group, and the N.R.A.

Although it drew little notice at the time, the legislation also included an expansion of what had been very limited eligibility for restoration of firearms rights.

“There were a lot of people who we felt should be able to get their gun rights restored who could not,” said Alan M. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, who was active in the effort.

Under the legislation, “Class A” felons — who have committed the most serious crimes, like murder and manslaughter — are ineligible, as are sex offenders. Otherwise, judges are required to grant the petitions as long as, essentially, felons have not been convicted of any new crimes in the five years after completing their sentences. Judges have no discretion to deny the requests based upon character, mental health or any other factors. Mr. Gottlieb said they explicitly wrote the statute this way.

“We were having problems with judges that weren’t going to restore rights no matter what,” he said.

The statute’s mix of strictness and leniency makes Washington a useful testing ground.

The Times’s analysis found that among the more than 400 people who committed crimes after winning back their gun rights under the new law, more than 70 committed Class A or B felonies. Over all, more than 80 were convicted of some sort of assault and more than 100 of drug offenses.

There were cases like that of Mitchell W. Reed, disqualified from possessing firearms after a 1984 felony cocaine conviction. He also has seven misdemeanor convictions on his record from the 1980s, including for assault. In 2003, he successfully petitioned for his gun rights in Snohomish County Superior Court.

His wife, Debi Reed, went with him to the hearing and said in an interview that she had been shocked at how easily his rights were restored. He immediately bought a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.

The following year, she said, he beat her up for the first time. In 2008 he became more angry and violent, she said, in one instance putting a gun in her hand during an argument, pointing it at his head and saying he was going to frame her for murder. During another fight that year, he struck her with a gun, giving her a black eye, and held a loaded gun to her head.

Mr. Reed was ultimately arrested in 2009 and charged with harassing and threatening to kill his wife’s ex-husband. While those charges were pending, he was arrested on second-degree assault charges after he beat up and tried to strangle his wife. The charging documents also mentioned the 2008 gun episode. He eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and intimidating a witness, as well as fourth-degree assault and harassment.

Jason C. Keller, disqualified because of a 1997 burglary conviction, had his rights restored after a brief hearing in 2006. He waited a few years before buying a Hi-Point .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, according to his girlfriend at the time, Shawna Braylock. But she did not trust him with the gun because of his temper, making him keep it at his parents’ house.

In 2010, Mr. Keller left a Fourth of July party in the late evening, picked up his gun and drove to the house of a woman he knew. He fired several shots as she stood out front with her 9-year-old son; her 6-year-old daughter was sleeping inside. Mr. Keller pleaded guilty to drive-by shooting, a felony.

In Mr. Zettergren’s case, his friends said they were shocked that a judge had restored his gun rights, because they knew he was receiving disability payments, in part because of mental health problems.

“Most of the people around here that knew him, knew that he could be dangerous,” said Darrell Reinhardt, one of Mr. Zettergren’s friends.

Mr. Zettergren’s mental health issues, in fact, have been at the heart of his efforts to appeal his convictions for second-degree murder, second-degree assault and unlawful imprisonment. He had been in counseling since 2000, and several mental health experts had found he had post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression, saying he had a “very high degree of psychological disturbance” and suffered frequent “flashbacks and disturbing images,” according to a declaration from a forensic psychologist in one of Mr. Zettergren’s appeal briefs. The post-traumatic stress, according to the psychologist, resulted from scenes he had witnessed years before, including his mother’s death by electrocution and the shooting death of a friend.

None of this was reviewed by the judge who heard Mr. Zettergren’s gun rights petition.

Donna Bly, the mother of Jason Robinson, Mr. Zettergren’s shooting victim, considered suing the county for negligence over the decision but could not find a lawyer to take the case. She also tried bringing the issue up with a state legislator but got nowhere.

“This man did not deserve to have his gun rights back,” she said.

 

Toby Lyles and Lisa Schwartz contributed research. Tom Torok contributed reporting

    Felons Finding It Easy to Get Gun Rights Reinstated, NYT, 13.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/felons-finding-it-easy-to-regain-gun-rights.html

Gunman Wounds Nurse and Guard at Bronx Hospital

November 9, 2011
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

A man pulled out a gun and fired at least one shot in a waiting area at a hospital in the Bronx on Wednesday night, injuring a nurse and a security guard, the police said.

The shooting occurred in the waiting area for the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center’s emergency room, and detectives were investigating the possibility that the gunman might have been firing at someone he thought was a rival gang member, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department.

The police said they were questioning some people, but would not confirm on Wednesday night whether a suspect was in custody.

The suspect entered the waiting room, in the Mount Eden section of the Bronx, with a concealed weapon, the police said.

About 7 p.m., he fired at least one shot, the police said. Two men were hit: a nurse, 37, in the shoulder, and a security guard, 42, in the lower body, said Lt. John Grimpel, a spokesman for the Police Department. Both were in stable condition and expected to be released.

The injured workers were not the intended targets and were most likely hit by fragments of the same bullet, which had ricocheted, Mr. Browne said.

“I heard pop, pop, pop, pop,” said Cecilia Belle-Singleton, 30, who was being treated in a nearby room for a laceration on her hand when the shots rang out. Ms. Belle-Singleton said that while waiting to be treated, she met a young man with a cut under his left eye who said he had been hit with a chair. She said he might have been the intended target of the attack.

The police said a man with an eye injury from an earlier altercation was in the waiting room and saw rivals there, too. He called friends, who arrived at the hospital, and investigators believe one of them opened fire, the police said. The man with the eye injury was among several people being held afterward, the police said.

Errol C. Schneer, a spokesman for the hospital, said the shooting was a result of a dispute that had “carried over from earlier in the day” and was independent of the hospital.

“Security was able to contain it and minimize serious injuries,” said Mr. Schneer, who added that the hospital had turned over security camera video to the police.

The hospital, at Grand Concourse and 173rd Street, does not have metal detectors but has guards stationed at every entrance, Mr. Schneer said. The hospital handles more than 130,000 patient visits to the emergency room each year, he said.

He added, “We have never had any situations such as today where violence was involved.”

A man who said he was a doctor but spoke only on the condition of anonymity said that the neighborhood was violent and that the hospital provided cars to escort workers to the train station. “We kind of expect it in this area, because it’s so dangerous,” he said of the shooting. “Of course we didn’t expect it to be in the hospital, but I’m not surprised, because anything can happen here.”

The shooting rattled people throughout the medical center. “I will not be coming back,” said Nicole Nixon, 33, whose ill son was spending the night in a different part of the hospital.

“I am nervous about my son staying here tonight. This is so disturbing,” she said. “How dare he shoot someone in a hospital.”

 

Al Baker and Daniel Krieger contributed reporting.

    Gunman Wounds Nurse and Guard at Bronx Hospital, NYT, 9.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/nyregion/gunman-wounds-nurse-and-guard-at-bronx-hospital.html

Texas Gun Instructor’s Ad Leads to State Inquiry

November 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

MASON, Tex. — Crockett Keller, a weapons instructor who runs a general store in this small town in Central Texas, needed a few more students for a recent concealed-handgun course. He decided to put an ad on a local country music radio station, but his attempt to prohibit certain students from signing up has jeopardized his state-certified status and earned him praise, condemnation and even death threats from people around the world.

The 68-second ad, which has stopped running but has since been posted on YouTube, ends with an anti-Muslim, anti-liberal and anti-Obama-voter message.

“If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner-in-chief, please do not take this class,” Mr. Keller said in the ad. “You’ve already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision as required under the law. Also, if you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class. Once again, with no shame, I am Crockett Keller.”

Mr. Keller, 65, said that the ad was not a publicity stunt and that he stood by his remarks. In an interview outside his cabin behind the store on Thursday, he equated giving Muslims handgun training with providing flight instruction to the hijackers responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Why would I teach people who have sworn the annihilation of the United States and who can lie, cheat, steal and murder Americans in order to further Islam?” Mr. Keller said. “Why would I arm someone like that? Why would I enable them to carry a weapon legally? I don’t want to be a part of that. I’m sorry those flight instructors didn’t have the same hindsight to know that these guys were up to no good, and they shouldn’t be teaching them, and they should have refused.”

Mr. Keller, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and standing outside the truck parked behind his store, reached for the butt of the holstered gun he had been carrying in his hands as this reporter approached him. He said he had received death threats from callers and had been in contact with the Mason County Sheriff’s Department. “As you saw, I had my hand on my gun, and while I was doing that I was looking to see if you were armed,” he said.

Mr. Keller’s radio ad and his views have angered Muslims in Texas and some of his fellow weapons instructors, as well as many residents in Mason County, an area of cactus-covered hills and cattle ranches about 110 miles from Austin. According to the 2010 census, 93 percent of its 4,012 residents are white. In 2000, its foreign-born population numbered 177, the vast majority from Mexico.

The city administrator, John R. Palacio, made it a point to note that technically Mr. Keller lived outside the city limits. “I guess he has a right to his own opinion, but that’s about it,” Mr. Palacio said. “It’s his own opinion.”

Tina Hoffman, a real estate broker, described Mr. Keller as a local character who enjoyed stirring up controversy. “I thought it was kind of harsh,” she said. “But that’s just Crockett. You got to know Crockett. I don’t think that’s the flavor of our county. This is a very prayerful community.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which certifies instructors to teach and train those seeking to qualify for a concealed handgun license, is investigating Mr. Keller’s statements. “Certified instructors are required to comply with all applicable state and federal statutes,” the agency said in a statement. “Conduct by an instructor that denied service to individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion would place that instructor’s certification by the department at risk of suspension or revocation.”

Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, found Mr. Keller’s remarks both sad and comical. “It’s more of the same type of anti-Muslim rhetoric that we hear on a fairly regular basis,” said Mr. Carroll, a Muslim who has lived in Texas for three decades. “Outside of looking at television, I doubt if he’s ever seen a Muslim. Muslims are Americans. They pay their taxes. They raise their children. They’re the kind of people you want living next door to you.”

Mr. Keller said that the majority of phone calls he has received have been supportive, and that he does not believe he has done anything wrong. Though the thrust of his radio ad might suggest otherwise, he is a polite and courteous man. Born in Austin, he lives on his great-great-grandfather’s ranch on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 87, behind Keller’s Riverside Store. He is a member of the Texas Concealed Handgun Association, and he said that throughout his six years of teaching the course, he has never turned a potential student away.

“When you’re in Texas, No. 1, you don’t ask a guy how big his ranch is or how many cattle he runs,” Mr. Keller said. “You really don’t even ask him the name of his wife or his dog. Those are things that are really none of your business. You don’t ask him his religion nor do you ask him his politics. I don’t care what your religion, what your creed is. That makes no bearing. But when people consider themselves a particular religion that has proven itself to be anti-American, well, then, I’m anti-them.”

The class that the ad promoted was held at his store last Wednesday. It was not exactly packed. “We had six people,” he said.

    Texas Gun Instructor’s Ad Leads to State Inquiry, NYT, 4.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/us/texas-gun-instructors-ad-draws-inquiry.html

8 Killed in Salon Shooting in Southern California

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT and ADAM NAGOURNEY

SEAL BEACH, Calif. — A gunman burst into a beauty salon in this sunny Pacific Coast town on Wednesday, killing eight people and severely injuring one more in a rampage that sent patrons and workers diving to the floor and running out of the building for safety.

The attacker, reportedly loaded down with weapons, left the salon and jumped into a car in a parking lot after finishing his attack. A police officer arriving on the scene spotted the suspect and followed as he drove a half-mile before being stopped by the Seal Beach police and placed under arrest. Police officials said the suspect — who was not immediately identified — told officers that he had more guns inside his white pickup truck.

Sgt. Steve Bowles of the Seal Beach Police Department said there was no immediate word on the motivation of the killer. Sergeant Bowles said the police were confident that the gunman had acted alone, and suspected that he was known by people inside the hair salon.

A former salon employee, Lydia Sosa, who was at the scene, said the attacker had been involved in a bitter divorce from his former wife, who worked at the salon. “They were never happy for a long, long time,” Ms. Sosa said. “She said he was bitter. He was very bitter.”

The police would not comment on that account.

The sheer magnitude of the attack stunned this small and affluent community in Orange County, patrons said. The Police Department had to call in reinforcements from a half-dozen neighboring forces to help seal the area, control crowds, help traumatized family members and deal with a crush of news media.

“A crime of this magnitude is something that Seal Beach is not familiar with,” Sergeant Bowles said at a briefing.

The police responded to a report of shots fired at the Salon Meritage on the Pacific Coast Highway around 1:20 p.m., Sergeant Bowles said, finding a scene of carnage and panic. The salon was crowded, he said, with nearly every chair occupied. Eight people were shot inside the salon. One was found outside, crumpled and bleeding, he said, but it was not clear whether the victim had been shot inside and stumbled out.

Six were declared dead at the scene. Three more were taken to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where two died. The victims, both men and women, were not immediately identified.

People gathered at the periphery of the crime scene, crying and shaking. Tammy Hetzel, who opened her own salon two years ago, said that she knew Randy Fannin, the owner of Salon Meritage, and feared that he was one of the victims.

“Randy was awesome, awesome,” she said. “Just a wonderful Christian man.”

The scene at the hospital was intense. “They were bringing them in, and they were all bloodied up,” said Biagio Zaby, 67, of Seal Beach, a patient. “One got shot in the face. One got shot in the chest. They took one in for a CAT scan. They said ‘Code Blue,’ which is not a good deal.”

 

Ian Lovett reported from Seal Beach, and Adam Nagourney from Los Angeles.

    8 Killed in Salon Shooting in Southern California, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/8-killed-in-shooting-at-hair-salon-in-seal-beach-california.html

Packing Heat Everywhere

September 18, 2011
The New York Times

Some bad ideas refuse to die. Include in that category an extreme proposal percolating in the House to strip states of their authority to decide who may carry a concealed loaded firearm. This gift to the gun lobby, the subject of a hearing last week by a House Judiciary subcommittee, is nearly identical to a provision the Senate defeated by a narrow margin two years ago.

Every state but Illinois makes some allowance for concealed weapons. The eligibility rules vary widely and each state decides whether to honor another state’s permits. For example, 38 states prohibit people convicted of certain violent crimes like assault or sex crimes from carrying concealed guns. At least 36 states set a minimum age of 21; 35 states require gun safety training.

The proposed National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011 would shred those standards and the public safety judgments behind them, creating a locked-and-loaded race to the bottom in which states with strict requirements, like New York, would be forced to allow people with permits from states with lax screening to carry hidden loaded guns.

This trashing of state and local prerogatives is not only unwise but unnecessary. In its wrongheaded 2008 decision recognizing an individual’s Second Amendment right to keep guns in the home for self-defense, the Supreme Court still left room for reasonable gun limits, including restrictions on toting concealed weapons. Since then, several federal courts have upheld state concealed-carry permitting rules, including a decision this month by a federal district judge that upheld New York’s concealed-carry law.

Philadelphia’s police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, said at the House panel hearing that the measure would interfere with law enforcement and could put officers at greater risk in making traffic stops. He pointed to the bill’s failure to establish a national database or other enforcement mechanism to allow officers to verify the validity of an unfamiliar out-of-state concealed-carry permit shown by a person with a loaded gun.

Others contend that the bill’s nationalization of lenient concealed-carry rules would increase gun violence and hinder efforts to combat illegal gun trafficking.

On Capitol Hill, unfortunately, such concerns matter less than election-year politics and the demands of the National Rifle Association. The bill, introduced by Representatives Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican, and Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat, already has more than 240 co-sponsors, all but guaranteeing House passage.

Two years ago, Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, both Democrats, led the successful fight to defeat it in the Senate. They and others in the Senate have to stand up again for gun sanity. For his part, President Obama should be threatening to veto this outrageous measure.

    Packing Heat Everywhere, NYT, 18.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/packing-heat-everywhere.html

Pandering to the Gun Lobby

September 15, 2011
The New York Times

How low can the Florida Legislature go in pandering to the gun lobby?

Citizens might have thought the answer came earlier this year when doctors were banned from inquiring about guns in the household as a factor in their patients’ welfare. A federal judge has blocked that, finding that a doctor’s free speech hardly violates the Second Amendment. Now local officials must deal with another gun lobby outrage. They are scrambling to meet an Oct. 1 deadline by which they must scrap all local gun control laws.

In 1987, the Legislature passed a law that allowed the state to pre-empt the whole field of gun and ammunition controls, but it had very little effect on real life. “No Guns Allowed” signs and other notices were kept up in appropriate places as communities continued to enforce gun ordinances already on their books.

That is about to change under a new law, passed in June by the Republican-controlled Legislature. Local governments could face penalties of $100,000 for not dropping their gun control laws. Local officials could face a $5,000 fine and possible removal from office. And court costs are explicitly denied for local officials if they are sued by gun owners under the new law.

Cities like St. Petersburg are rushing to repeal sensible ordinances against firing guns in the city limits. Other communities are busy spiking bans on carrying guns into public parks. They must also repeal their authority to suspend gun and ammunition sales during public emergencies. “We’re not allowed to have bows and arrows or slingshots in a park, but we can have a gun,” a town council member in Oldsmar said to The St. Petersburg Times.

Even the Supreme Court, in its ruling that misread the Second Amendment as a personal right to bear arms, stressed that it was not casting doubt on a wide range of gun control laws passed to protect communities from gun violence. Florida’s voters will have to ask themselves: Did we send legislators to Tallahassee to protect the gun lobby or to represent all Floridians?

    Pandering to the Gun Lobby, NYT, 15.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/opinion/pandering-to-the-gun-lobby.html

Heralded Girls Basketball Star Is Shot to Death in Manhattan

September 11, 2011
The New York Times
By DMITRY KIPER and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

A star player in high school girls basketball was shot dead early Sunday in a building stairwell in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, the police said.

The victim, Tayshana Murphy, 18, was on the basketball team at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers in Manhattan, where she had just begun her senior year. She was ranked on an ESPN Web site as the nation’s 16th-best point guard in her class.

By Sunday afternoon, no arrests had been made in her killing, which occurred shortly after 4 a.m. in one of the towers that make up the Grant Houses, a public housing project where she lived. In the hours before her death, Ms. Murphy had been in a crowded building courtyard with friends and other people.

There was little sense that she knew she was in danger; her friends said she had been dancing less than an hour before the shooting, and some of them even shared cellphone recordings of their friend dancing, saying that they would never erase them.

A law enforcement official said the shooting appeared to be in retaliation for an assault earlier in the day, but the official said it was not clear if Ms. Murphy had played any role in that earlier assault.

Ms. Murphy’s mother, Tephanie Holston, said she believed that her daughter was killed as a result of a feud that several men from another housing project had with some of the other people who were in the courtyard.

Ms. Holston said that as she looked out her window from her 15th-floor apartment several times, she observed a group of men, who she believed lived in a different housing project, leave the courtyard, only to return. She watched from the window as some of the men returned one final time and at least one brandished a gun, she said.

Ms. Murphy fled into her building, her mother said. She took the stairs up a few floors, but stopped, said her mother, who said she was basing her account on what she learned from a friend who was with her daughter.

Soon, the gunman entered the hallway and pointed a gun at Ms. Murphy, her mother said. She told the gunman, “I wasn’t with them” — a reference to whoever was involved in the earlier dispute — before he fired, according to the account given to the mother.

Ms. Murphy, who had a basketball tattooed on her forearm, started playing the game when she was 5, her mother said. In pickup matches she was often the only girl on a court full of boys. Relatives and friends said that Ms. Murphy hoped to play professional basketball and earn enough money to move her family out of the projects.

“She wanted to be like Michael Jordan, top of the top,” said Vicki Demorh, 36, a family friend.

Ms. Murphy transferred to Murry Bergtraum last year.

“She was a playground legend,” said Ed Grezinsky, her coach at Murry Bergtraum. “She was an all-city caliber player.”

Ms. Murphy had spent last season on the bench as she recovered from knee surgery, accompanying her team to games as it won the Public Schools Athletic League AA championship games at Madison Square Garden, Mr. Grezinsky said.

“She couldn’t wait for this season to start,” Mr. Grezinsky said. “The glass was always half-filled with her.”

    Heralded Girls Basketball Star Is Shot to Death in Manhattan, NYT, 11.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/nyregion/tayshana-murphy-basketball-star-is-shot-to-death.html

Florida Forces Towns to Pull Local Laws Limiting Guns

September 10, 2011
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — The signs — “No Guns Allowed” — are being stripped from many Florida government buildings, libraries and airports. And local ordinances that bar people from shooting weapons in their yards, firing up into the air (think New Year’s Eve) or taking guns into parks are coming off the books.

The state has spoken, again, on the matter of guns, and this time it does not want to be ignored: since 1987, local governments in Florida have been banned from creating and enforcing their own gun ordinances. Few cities and counties paid attention, though, believing that places like Miami might need to be more restrictive than others, like rural Apalachicola, for example.

But this year the Legislature passed a new law that imposes fines on counties and municipalities that do not do away with and stop enforcing their own firearms and ammunition ordinances by Oct. 1. Mayors and council and commission members will risk a $5,000 fine and removal from office if they “knowingly and willfully violate” the law. Towns that enforce their ordinances risk a $100,000 fine.

To comply with the law, cities and counties are poring over their gun ordinances, repealing laws and removing gun-related signs. In Palm Beach County, that means removing ordinances that bar people from taking guns into county government buildings and local parks and from firing guns in some of its most urban areas. In Groveland, that means they can now fire their guns into the air to celebrate. And in Lake County, firearms will soon be allowed in libraries.

“Now you can have a shooting gallery in your backyard,” said Shelley Vana, a Palm Beach County commissioner. “We are really urban areas here. I come from a rural area in Pennsylvania. I understand that guns are appropriate in a lot of places with no problems. But in an urban area, it’s different.”

State lawmakers who supported the bill, which was backed by the National Rifle Association, said local governments were overreacting, particularly since the original law that pre-empted local gun ordinances was passed in 1987.

“The notion that a city ordinance stops violence is patently absurd,” said State Representative Matt Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican who sponsored the bill. “People lawfully carrying weapons with permits are rarely part of the problem.”

The law seeks to protect licensed gun owners who travel from county to county and may not be familiar with the patchwork of rules that dictate where they can carry and shoot a gun.

Florida gun laws are broader than local ordinances. They restrict guns, for example, at legislative and city council meetings but not inside the buildings themselves. They permit target shooting under “safe” conditions and in “safe” places, and they make it illegal to display a firearm in a rude or threatening manner, unless it is in self-defense. Floridians also cannot knowingly fire a gun in a public place, in an occupied building or on a paved street. But those who support stronger laws said words like “knowingly” and “safe” often make enforcement difficult.

Local gun ordinances first galvanized gun rights advocates in 2000 when South Miami passed an ordinance that required trigger locks for guns while stored. The National Rifle Association took the town to court, and the town lost. But counties and cities across Florida continued to vote on or enforce their own gun ordinances.

“The bill provides a remedy, if somebody chooses to be irrationally stubborn,” Mr. Gaetz said.

Some cities and counties, though, say they will lobby for a change so they can have more flexibility. Officials say that none of their ordinances violate the Second Amendment; they just give them added power to tamp down crime.

“It’s a disregard for public safety,” said Shirley Gibson, the mayor of Miami Gardens, where signs prohibiting guns in parks were taken down. “It’s not a good message to send.”

Kraig Conn, the legislative counsel for the Florida League of Cities, said fining individual mayors and council members for their legislative actions sets a “horrible precedent.” Lawmakers hold immunity that protects them from liability in civil lawsuits for duties they perform. “It pierces legislative immunity,” he said. “This is part of our common law system.”

It also runs counter to the Republican principle that local control is best.

In a state of 18 million people, with rural and urban areas adjacent to one another, “the State Legislature doesn’t know where it makes sense to restrict guns,” Mr. Conn said.

    Florida Forces Towns to Pull Local Laws Limiting Guns, 10.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/us/11guns.html

Killer of Denise Gay,

an Innocent Bystander, Is Still a Mystery

September 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and ROB HARRIS

It was barely four hours after the gunfire stopped on Park Place in Brooklyn when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appeared at a hospital to announce what officials believed had happened: one of two criminals involved in a gun battle killed an innocent woman as she sat on her stoop; one of those men exchanged shots with the police; one of the gunmen died at the scene, and the other died shortly afterward.

As it turns out, much of that information about the episode on Monday night, based on interviews with witnesses, was incorrect. There may not have been a gun battle between the two men. Only one man was dead; the other one said to have been involved was wounded, but alive.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, noted that the dead woman’s daughter had told the police that she believed that the bullet that killed her mother had come from the survivor’s gun.

It is now clear is that that man, Leroy Webster, did not fire the fatal shot. Ballistics tests show that the bullet that killed Denise Gay, 56, a retired home health aide, did not come from the gun the police said was Mr. Webster’s. The man who was killed may not have had a gun, raising the possibility that the shot that killed the woman was a police officer’s.

If the dead man did have a gun, the lethal shot might have come from it.

Police officials said that a bullet extracted from Ms. Gay’s head contained none of the distinct markings that come as a bullet passes through the grooves of conventionally rifled barrels like those on many handguns, including the one allegedly used by Mr. Webster.

The bullet that killed Ms. Gay had probably been fired from a gun with what is known as polygonal rifling, Mr. Browne said. Such barrels leave little telltale marking on a bullet, making it difficult for ballistics tests to link the bullet to a specific gun, firearms experts said.

One of the largest firearms manufacturers that uses polygonal rifling is Glock, which makes a gun used by many police officers in New York.

Two of the officers who fired at Mr. Webster used Glocks, including Avichaim Dicken, 29, whose left elbow was grazed by a bullet, Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Browne pointed out that witnesses also said that the man who was killed, Eusi Johnson, had a gun, although none was discovered on his corpse or nearby. “You just have witnesses who believe they see Johnson with a gun,” Mr. Browne said.

Lars Russell, a freelance writer who said he saw the shooting, said he thought it was quite likely that officers on Franklin Avenue fired the shot that killed Ms. Gay.

He said that while some officers stood across from Mr. Webster’s stoop, others stood at the end of the block, at Franklin Avenue. Between Ms. Gay’s stoop and Mr. Webster’s stoop is a tree that might have kept Ms. Gay out of view of the officers on Franklin, Mr. Russell said

The public advocate, Bill de Blasio, commended the officers involved for “tremendous bravery,” but said in a statement that “the number of shots fired alone merits careful investigation.”

Each of the eight officers fired 2 to 16 bullets. The only officer to empty his gun was Omar Medina, 35, who was wounded by bullet fragments, and was carrying a Smith & Wesson, Mr. Browne said. Officer Dicken fired his Glock 10 times, he said.

John Cerar, who was in charge of the department’s firearms and tactics training from 1985 to 1994, said the number of shots fired — 73 — and the number that missed their mark — all but 2 — was not unusual.

He said that the fact that two police officers were shot made “for more frayed nerves,” which he said decreased accuracy.

He added that the shooting also occurred at close range, and that the closer officers were to a threat, the more bullets they were likely to fire.

    Killer of Denise Gay, an Innocent Bystander, Is Still a Mystery, NYT, 8.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/nyregion/killer-of-denise-gay-an-innocent-bystander-is-still-a-mystery.html

Fatal Shot on a Stoop May Be Tied to the Police

September 7, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A bystander who was fatally shot on a Brooklyn stoop may have been killed by a police officer’s errant round, ballistics testing indicated on Wednesday.

The 9-millimeter handgun that investigators say one man used to kill another on a street in Crown Heights on Monday has been eliminated as the source of a bullet that fatally struck the bystander, Denise Gay, 56, a retired home health aide, the police said.

After the violence on Monday, some witnesses said they thought the man who was killed, Eusi Johnson, also had a gun, but none has been found.

Asked if a bullet fired by a police officer could have been the fatal shot, Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it could have been. “Was it one of the officers’ Glocks? Possibly,” he said. “Was it from the gun witnesses said Mr. Johnson had, but has not been recovered? Possibly.”

The ballistics tests determined that the bullet that killed Ms. Gay, from a 9-millimeter gun, had markings consistent with those made by seven manufacturers’ guns, including Glock.

It was doubtful whether the source of the shot that killed Ms. Gay would definitively be determined, even by comparing the slug to those from the Glocks fired by two officers, the police said, because of the generic markings the lead slug picked up as it passed through the gun’s barrel. Also, the round retrieved from Ms. Gay’s body was deformed.

The shooting on Monday erupted just after 9 p.m., when, the police said, Leroy Webster, 32, opened fire on Mr. Johnson, 29, in a dispute that escalated after an earlier confrontation the men had on Park Place, blocks away from the path of the West Indian Day Parade.

As Mr. Webster fired several shots, the police said, Mr. Johnson was struck in the neck and fell mortally wounded.

Several officers confronted Mr. Webster, who officials said ignored their orders and fired at them. Eight officers returned fire — in two distinct volleys — firing 73 bullets and striking Mr. Webster twice, in his chest and hip.

Two of those officers used Glocks to fire 15 rounds, the police said. One of those officers was also wounded, the police said.

A few witnesses, including Ms. Gay’s daughter, initially said they believed Mr. Webster had most likely fired the round that killed her, the police said. In addition, in interviews with investigators, some witnesses described muzzle flashes coming from a gun in Mr. Johnson’s hand. The police have not located a gun and could not confirm if he was carrying one.

Charges are pending against Mr. Webster, who is in critical but stable condition.

    Fatal Shot on a Stoop May Be Tied to the Police, NYT, 7.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/nyregion/officer-may-have-shot-bystander-during-gun-battle-police-say.html

5 Die, Including Gunman, in Nevada IHOP Attack

September 6, 2011
The New York Times
By IAN LOVETT

LOS ANGELES — A man armed with an AK-47 assault rifle opened fire Tuesday morning on a group of uniformed National Guard members as they ate breakfast at an IHOP restaurant in Carson City, Nev. He hit all five Guard members, killing three of them, and killed another woman and wounded five other people before taking his own life.

The gunman, identified by the police as Eduardo Sencion, 32, began his five-minute shooting rampage around 9 a.m. as people flocked to the restaurant for the breakfast rush.

The Carson City sheriff, Ken Furlong, said the authorities had not yet established a motive. However, he said it appeared that Mr. Sencion did seek out the National Guard members, at least once he was inside the restaurant. Five of the 11 people shot were in uniform, and one of the wounded civilians was caught in the line of fire between Mr. Sencion and the Guardsmen.

“It appears as though his gunfire was primarily focused on those military members,” Sheriff Furlong said. “We do not know whether or not the gunman was aware that there were National Guardsmen in the restaurant, but it appears as though he did. He had to travel through the entire restaurant to get to the back where the Guardsmen were having breakfast.”

Mr. Sencion’s family has indicated that he had a history of mental illness, according to the Carson City Sheriff’s Department. However, Mr. Secion did not have any prior criminal history, nor did he have any known affiliation with the military or with anyone inside the restaurant. But he shot every one of the Guard members inside.

The sheriff’s department said Mr. Sencion entered the IHOP and began firing just before 9 a.m., eventually moving his rampage outside to the restaurant’s parking lot, where he shot himself. Victims lay both inside and outside the restaurant in the wake of the shooting. Two Guardsmen and one civilian were pronounced dead at the scene, while six others were transported to nearby hospitals. A third member of the National Guard died after surgery.

Mr. Sencion, a Carson City resident, was also transported to a hospital, where he later died.

Mr. Sencion filed for bankruptcy in 2009, when he was living in nearby Stateline, a rough-around-the-edges casino town on the California border.

Ralph Swagler, the owner of a nearby barbecue restaurant, told The A.P. that he saw the gunman pull up outside the restaurant, where he first shot a man on a motorcycle and then headed inside.

“I wish I had shot at him, but he was going in the IHOP,” Mr. Swagler said. “But when he came at me — when somebody is pointing an automatic weapon at you, you can’t believe the firepower, the kind of rounds coming out of that weapon.”

The shootings shocked a city just emerging from a long holiday weekend, when many locals and tourists flocked to nearby Lake Tahoe. Carson City has less of the glitz — and grime — associated with Las Vegas or Reno, which is 25 miles to the north. It has steadily grown over the years, but it is still sleepier than Reno, which was hit hard by the recession’s impact on construction and casino spending.

It was a much different scene Tuesday. Paramedics and law enforcement and fire officials responded within minutes, blocking off the city’s main drag while they secured the area and sent victims to the hospital by ground ambulance and helicopter.

The State Capitol and Supreme Court buildings were briefly locked down as the authorities feared more violence. But Mr. Freer said the shooting appeared to be an isolated incident.

Fran Hunter, who works at a nearby pet store, watched the aftermath of the shooting from a casino parking lot across the street, where people had gathered to observe the commotion.

She said others who gathered in the parking lot said the gunman had sprayed bullets into other nearby businesses, breaking windows, before shooting a man on a motorcycle and entering the IHOP, though she did not see it herself.

“It wasn’t a pretty scene,” she said. “Everyone and their mother’s uncle was down there. I didn’t see any bodies, thankfully. But it is frightening.”

Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco.

    5 Die, Including Gunman, in Nevada IHOP Attack, NYT, 6.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/us/07shooting.html

Police: 5 Slain in W.Va. Before Suspect Kills Self

September 6, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — Authorities say a man who killed five people near Morgantown and ran down an elderly woman in neighboring Pennsylvania also shot and wounded a gas station attendant as he crossed back through West Virginia. He then took his own life in Kentucky.

The path of violence that Shayne Riggleman cut through three states before committing suicide during a police chase was "one of the most heinous crimes I've ever witnessed," State Police Capt. James Merrill said Tuesday.

At a news conference, Merrill would not comment on a motive or say how Riggleman, 22, was connected to any of the five shooting victims at the blood-spattered house a few miles west of Morgantown, where the spree began Monday afternoon.

Charles Richardson Jr., whose son was among the five shooting victims, told The Associated Press he didn't recognize Riggleman's name or know his connection to the family. Nor was he aware of his son having trouble with anyone.

Richardson said his son worked for FedEx and liked to tinker on vehicles and computers. The two were not close, he said, even though the elder Richardson lives in a mobile home within sight of his son's house.

"He went about his business and I went about mine," he said, "but I loved my son."

Police identified the dead as: 49-year-old Charles Richardson III; his wife, 50-year-old Karin Richardson; her children, 17-year-old Kevin Hudson and 22-year-old Katrina Hudson; and 30-year-old Robert Raber.

Katrina Hudson was six months pregnant.

Raber lived in the house, but Merrill would not otherwise elaborate on his relationship to the other victims.

Merrill said investigators believe all five victims in the ramshackle house were shot with a high-powered rifle. Autopsies were under way Tuesday.

Troopers had been asked to check on the family around 5:30 p.m. Monday and arrived about an hour later. They found two bodies in the kitchen and one in the living room once they reached the home at the end of a deeply rutted dirt drive.

Merrill said troopers secured the site, determined the shooter was no longer inside and found two more bodies in a bathroom after searching further.

Merrill said the call about the family's welfare came from a friend who grew concerned after Riggleman traveled to see her in Pennsylvania.

Authorities said Riggleman apparently shot the victims around 3:30 or 4:30 p.m. Monday then drove about 20 miles to Fairchance, Pa., and met with that friend. Authorities would not identify the woman but credited her with preventing more deaths.

"It's unfortunate it ended the way it did," Merrill said, "... but I do not believe that he would've stopped."

After leaving the woman around 5:30 p.m., police say, Riggleman crashed into another vehicle near Fairchance and then ran down the elderly female driver as she got out of her car to exchange information. Authorities did not identify that victim but said she was seriously injured.

Riggleman then fled south on Interstate 79, Merrill said. At an Exxon station near Amma, about 30 miles from the West Virginia state capital of Charleston, Riggleman "randomly shot and severely wounded" attendant Don Nichols, police said.

Nichols, who was in critical condition, is expected to survive.

Riggleman continued south into Lewis County, Ky., where a deputy tried to pull him over for reckless driving.

The deputy chased the driver until he pulled over about a half-mile down the road. The deputy found Riggleman with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Lewis County Sheriff Johnny Bivens said.

Merrill said Kentucky authorities found three weapons in a silver Jeep that Riggleman had taken from the Richardson home — a high-powered rifle, a second rifle and a .22-caliber handgun.

Authorities searched Riggleman's Morgantown apartment and were studying his Facebook page. Riggleman apparently lived alone, and police did not immediately know whether he was employed.

He does have a criminal history but Merrill declined to elaborate, saying only that "he was known by law enforcement."

On a public Facebook page for a Shayne Franklin Samuel Riggleman, a string of Wall Posts from the past week seem to hint at a troubled relationship.

"There is a direct corelation between the amount of love you have for someone and how crazy you go when you lose them," reads one.

"I mate for life, not like a penguin though," reads another. "I mate for life like a praying mantis."

And one, ominously, says only, "We're not promised tomorrow."

Riggleman's profile page, meanwhile, contained several quotes.

At the top of the list, unattributed, was this one: "I ain't goin' out without a fight. I'm with whatever. it WILL be YOUR LIFE before MY LIFE."

    Police: 5 Slain in W.Va. Before Suspect Kills Self, NYT, 6.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/06/us/AP-US-WVa-Slayings.html

3 Fatally Shot and 2 Officers Are Wounded

September 5, 2011
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR

Three people were fatally shot and two New York City police officers were wounded on Monday night in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. One of the victims was a bystander, a 56-year-old woman, sitting on a stoop near where the violence errupted.

The shootings followed a weekend rife with gun violence. More than 30 people were wounded by firearms in the city over the holiday weekend, the authorities said.

The shooting on Monday night occurred just after 9 p.m. on Park Place near Franklin Avenue. The police said Leroy Webster, 32, a man described by officialsas having an extensive criminal record, emerged from a building on Park Place with a Ruger 9 mm gun, which he fired at Eusi Johnson, 29, who was walking by with his cousin. Mr. Webster shot Mr. Johnson in the neck, killing him.

Mr. Webster also killed the bystander, Denise Gay, who died immediately, the police said, with her adult daughter next to her on a nearby stoop.

The police said Mr. Webster fired on officers who were in the area because of the West Indian Day Parade, which took place earlier in the day about four blocks away.

He was then killed by the police, they said.

Early Tuesday morning, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the injured officers were Omar Medina, 35, who had shrapnel in his arm and side, and Avichaim Dicken, 29, whose left elbow was grazed by a bullet.

Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly held a news conference at 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where Mr. Medina, of the 90th Precinct, was being treated. Mr. Dicken, of the 79th Precinct, was taken to New York Methodist Hospital. Both are in stable condition, Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Bloomberg described Ms. Gay’s killing as “a senseless murder and a painful reminder what happens when elected officials in Washington fail to take the problem of illegal guns seriously.”

A 23-year-old bystander in Crown Heights who gave his name only as Peter said that Mr. Webster and Mr. Johnson had a prior disagreement that night.

 

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    3 Fatally Shot and 2 Officers Are Wounded, NYT, 5.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/nyregion/brooklyn-shooting-kills-2-and-wounds-officer.html

Gun Inquiry Costs Officials Their Jobs

August 30, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Tuesday replaced two top Justice Department officials associated with an ill-fated investigation into a gun-trafficking network in Arizona that has been at the center of a political conflagration.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the resignation of the United States attorney in Phoenix, Dennis K. Burke, and the reassignment of the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Kenneth E. Melson.

The two officials became the highest-profile political casualties yet in the fallout from a disputed effort to take down a weapons-smuggling ring based in Arizona and linked to Mexican drug cartels.

Run by the bureau’s Phoenix division, the operation, called Operation Fast and Furious, ran from late 2009 to early 2011. Its strategy was to watch suspected “straw” gun buyers, rather than moving as quickly as possible to arrest them and seize the weapons, in the hope of identifying higher-level conspirators — as drug investigations are often conducted.

The operation was internally controversial because the firearms bureau traditionally puts a priority on getting guns off the street. It also lacked adequate controls — one straw purchaser bought more than 600 weapons, and agents lost track of hundreds. Many later turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, and two were recovered at a site in Arizona where a United States Border Patrol agent was killed.

After that killing, bureau agents opposed to the operation reached out to Congress, and two Republican lawmakers — Representative Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa — began an investigation. On Tuesday, they vowed to press on.

“Today’s announcement is an admission by the Obama administration that serious mistakes were made in Operation Fast and Furious,” Mr. Grassley said, “and is a step in the right direction that they are continuing to limit any further damage that people involved in this disastrous strategy can do. We’re looking for a full accounting from the Justice Department as to who knew what and when, so we can be sure that this ill-advised strategy never happens again.”

Democrats have been largely muted in response to the investigation. Mr. Holder also asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to examine the operation. And Democratic lawmakers have joined in criticizing its tactics, while objecting only to Republicans’ efforts to blame senior Obama administration officials for them.

Such accusations have been repeatedly contradicted by testimony from Justice Department and A.T.F. supervisors — including Mr. Melson and Mr. Burke — that there was no policy directive from Washington or the administration to adopt such an investigative strategy. The two men have also said that they had not known the details of the operation’s tactics, let alone briefed their own superiors about them.

Mr. Issa repeated his claims on Tuesday, saying that his committee “will continue its investigation to ensure that blame isn’t offloaded on just a few individuals for a matter that involved much higher levels of the Justice Department.”

Mr. Holder did not directly address the operation on Tuesday. But in his statement thanking Mr. Burke, he referred indirectly to the management distractions, commending “his decision to place the interests of the U.S. Attorney’s Office above all else.”

Mr. Holder also named B. Todd Jones, the United States attorney for Minnesota, as the new acting director for the firearms bureau, a beleaguered agency that has long been hobbled by gun-rights politics. Five years ago Congress required that the agency’s director be approved by the Senate, but no nominee has since been confirmed.

Mr. Jones, who also is the chairman of Mr. Holder’s advisory committee of prosecutors, will remain a United States attorney.

“I know it’s been a challenging time for this agency, and for many of you,” Mr. Jones wrote in an e-mail to the firearms bureau Tuesday. “As we move forward, we face a more important challenge than what’s been going on outside of A.T.F. these last several months — what’s going on inside A.T.F.”

Other officials associated with the star-crossed operation have also been swept away in recent weeks. Two A.T.F. Phoenix division supervisors, William Newell and William McMahon, received lateral transfers to positions in Washington. Emory Hurley, an assistant United States attorney in Phoenix who worked on the operation, was transferred to the office’s civil division from its criminal division.

Mr. Melson is taking a low-profile position as a “senior advise” for forensic science issues at the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department. By contrast, Mr. Burke — who was considered a rising Democratic star in a state run by Republicans — is returning to private life.

Mr. Burke did not return calls on Tuesday. But in newly released excerpts of his private testimony to Congressional investigators this month, he took responsibility for the operation even as he said he had not known about its tactics.

“I get to stand up when we have a great case to announce and take all the credit for it regardless of how much work I did on it,” he said. “So when our office makes mistakes, I need to take responsibility, and this is a case, as reflected by the work of this investigation, it should not have been done the way it was done, and I want to take responsibility for that, and I’m not falling on a sword or trying to cover for anyone else.”

 

Marc Lacey contributed reporting from Phoenix.

    Gun Inquiry Costs Officials Their Jobs, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/us/31guns.html

Medical Examiner Rules Flanagan's Death a Suicide

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BALTIMORE (AP) — Former Cy Young award winner Mike Flanagan died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, the Maryland medical examiner ruled Thursday. A police investigation revealed that the 59-year-old pitcher was upset about financial issues. He left no note.

Flanagan's body was found Wednesday afternoon about 250 feet behind his home. An investigation showed he was home alone when he took his life.

Flanagan won the Cy Young Award in 1979 and helped the Baltimore Orioles win the 1983 World Series. After his retirement, he worked for the Orioles as a coach and in the front office before settling into a job as color commentator on the team's broadcast network.

Flanagan was scheduled to work this weekend's series against the New York Yankees.

"He was looking forward to broadcasting the Yankees series coming up. He was doing something he loved," said Jim Duquette, who teamed with Flanagan from 2005-07 to attempt to rebuild the Orioles.

According to police, Alex Flanagan last spoke to her husband about 1 a.m. Wednesday. She told police he sounded upset, and he promised he would talk to her later.

When Alex Flanagan did not hear from her husband, she called a neighbor to check on him. The neighbor went to the home and called 911 after failing to find him.

Police discovered a body on the property but could not immediately determine the identity because the wounds were so severe.

There was a moment of silence at Yankee Stadium on Thursday before New York faced the Oakland Athletics. Flanagan's picture was posted on the video board.

Flanagan was a crafty left-hander who went 167-143 with a 3.90 ERA over 18 seasons with Baltimore and Toronto.

He was 141-116 with Baltimore and is a member of the team's Hall of Fame. Flanagan was also the final Oriole to pitch at Memorial Stadium, Baltimore's home from 1954-1991.

During that appearance out of the bullpen, Flanagan struck out Detroit's Dave Bergman and Travis Fryman, much to the delight of the 50,700 fans that filled the old ballpark one last time.

"He was a wonderful individual and a true Oriole who led by example, played the game with class and brought a lot of happiness to Orioles' fans over his career. He will be missed tremendously by so many people," said Mike Gibbons, executive director of Sports Legends Museum & the Babe Ruth Birthplace.

The Flanagan family issued this statement Thursday: "We thank you for your support and kind words at this difficult time. Thank you for respecting our privacy as we grieve. A private memorial will be held at a later date."

___

Associated Press writer Alex Dominguez in Baltimore and Baseball Writer Ben Walker in New York contributed to this report.

    Medical Examiner Rules Flanagan's Death a Suicide, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/08/25/sports/baseball/AP-BBO-Obit-Flanagan.html

Police Seek Witnesses After SF Stadium Shootings

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The mayors of San Francisco and Oakland and the NFL called for an end to acts of violence at sporting events, after two men were shot and wounded following a San Francisco 49ers-Oakland Raiders preseason game.

Investigators Sunday looked for suspects and interviewed witnesses to the violence the night before in the parking lot at Candlestick Park after the matchup.

Motives for the shootings — including whether they were influenced by emotions surrounding a game involving fiercely rival teams — weren't known.

But the shootings evoked memories of another recent disturbing act of post-game violence involving two rival California pro sports teams — the near-fatal beating this spring of a San Francisco Giants fan outside Dodger Stadium.

In Saturday's attacks, a 24-year-old man, who reportedly was wearing a "F--- the Niners" T-shirt, was shot several times in the stomach. Police said he managed to stumble to stadium security for help despite the severe injuries. He remained hospitalized in serious condition Sunday.

A second victim, a 20-year-old man, was treated for less serious wounds in a separate shooting, also after the game.

Sgt. Mike Andraychak said no arrests have been made and that police are looking for "a person of interest" connected to at least one of the shootings. He would not specify which shooting.

Apart from the shootings, a third victim, a 26-year-old man, was also hospitalized in serious condition Sunday after he was knocked unconscious in a stadium bathroom during the game. That attack appeared unrelated to the other two, police said.

The victims' names have not been released as the violent spree overshadowed the 49ers' 17-3 victory over the Raiders.

The crimes prompted San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and Oakland Mayor Jean Quan to issue a joint statement saying that violence at stadiums in both cities will not be tolerated.

"The incidents ... are completely unacceptable and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," the mayors said. "Fans come to our stadiums to enjoy an afternoon of football, not to be subjected to intimidation or violence. These games are family events and the types of images we witnessed last night have no place in our arenas."

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello echoed similar comments, saying "we deplore the activities of a handful of fans at last night's game and pledge our full support to Mayors Lee and Quan and to state and local law enforcement agencies."

49ers coach Jim Harbaugh, who once was a coach in the Raiders organization, said he was saddened to hear about the violence.

"I didn't know anything was going on during the game. I wasn't aware of that," Harbaugh said. "I feel bad for the people who got injured and the people who had to see that, for those who had to witness it."

The team said that "these kinds of events are disquieting to everyone in the Bay Area community. We are working to assist the San Francisco Police Department in any way possible to understand how and why this happened."

Raiders CEO Amy Trask said in a statement that "the incidents at last night's game are not acceptable to the Raiders or to any National Football League team and our thoughts are with all affected."

Head Coach Hue Jackson also shared his desire for a safe fan-friendly environment "where we wish that people come out and enjoy a game and hopefully that those things don't happen."

On Saturday, Sgt. Frank Harrell said the man shot wearing the T-shirt drove his truck to a gate and stumbled to stadium security. A second man shot before that in the parking lot and had superficial face injuries, Harrell said.

He said the two shootings were being treated separately "but we believe they are related."

The attacks come nearly five months after San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow was severely beaten by two men in Los Angeles Dodgers gear outside Dodger Stadium after the archrivals' season opener in Los Angeles. Two men charged in the beating, Louie Sanchez, 28, and Marvin Norwood, 30, have pleaded not guilty.

Stow, 42, a Santa Cruz paramedic, suffered severe brain injuries and remains hospitalized in serious condition.

That attack drew widespread attention and focusing the spotlight on security at Dodger Stadium, and the intense rivalry among Dodgers and Giants fans.

Christian End, an assistant professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, who specializes in sports fan behavior, said there are several factors for unruliness at sporting events — including the magnitude of the game, if it is between arch rivals, adrenaline and alcohol. There's also "deindividuation," when fans supporting a particular team adopt a group mentality and may become uncivil.

"The anonymity of large crowds can afford some fans the opportunity to act in a way that they typically wouldn't because there's less accountability and less fear of repercussion," End said.

End said violence between fans of opposing teams can typically begin with light banter, followed by "one-upping" each other with statistics or other chatter that could draw a crowd.

"Then it could be taken up a notch where the fun aspect is gone and it just escalates," End said.

End said he doesn't believe fan violence has increased in the last 10 years but may appear that way partially due to new technology at hand.

"There are more cameras covering games and more fans using their smartphones," End said. "Any acts of aggression have a higher probability of being captured and being shown over the Internet and on television.

"It would give the impression that, 'Boy, fans are engaging in all of this aggressive behavior.' But you have to remember that a vast majority of them are not."

___

Associated Press sportswriters Janie McCauley in Oakland and Josh Dubow in Alameda contributed to this report.

    Police Seek Witnesses After SF Stadium Shootings, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/08/22/sports/AP-US-49ers-Stadium-Shooting.html

Lawmakers, Armed and Dangerous

July 16, 2011
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

WHILE all the country gaped last week at the acrimony ensnarling the Federal government, Arizonans were treated to an additional, equally bizarre spectacle. You’ll be shocked to hear that a firearm was involved.

It was a classic case of he said/she said, but of a particular stripe hard to imagine outside Arizona, where guns are so fervently embraced that I imagine they rank above waffle irons as popular wedding gifts and make the occasional appearance at christenings, too.

In dispute was this: Did a local lawmaker intentionally point her loaded .380 Ruger at a newspaper reporter during an interview, or was it all just a silly misunderstanding?

The reporter, Richard Ruelas, who writes for The Arizona Republic, said it was deliberate. Not hostile, mind you, but purposeful: State Senator Lori Klein was proudly showing off her piece. He told this story first in an article published Sunday in The Republic, repeated it in subsequent public comments and went through it one more time on the telephone with me. He sounded incredulous still.

He said that as he sat with Klein just outside the Senate chamber to discuss her gun-toting ways, “I looked down and saw a red dot on my chest.” He looked up and realized the dot was the laser sight of the Ruger, which she carries in her pocketbook. Although he wasn’t sure just then whether it had bullets in it, she informed him — after she’d lowered the pistol — that it always does.

The Republic article caused a public outcry that she had been reckless. Even Arizonans have their limits. She then disputed Ruelas’s account, saying that he had strayed into the gun’s sight as she demonstrated how it worked. After that she went silent. She didn’t respond to either a phone message I left at her senate office or an e-mail I sent.

No matter. Anyone who focuses on where she was or wasn’t aiming can’t see the desert for the cactuses. And that desert spreads beyond Arizona, which may be extreme but is nonetheless illustrative. Massacre after massacre hasn’t changed this nation’s mind-boggling blitheness about guns.

The most recent massacre to dominate the country’s attention was of course in Arizona in January, when Jared Loughner fired off 31 rounds in 15 seconds, killing 6 people and wounding 13, including United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords. A bullet ripped through her brain.

Just two days later, Klein, a state senate freshman, showed up for her swearing-in ceremony in Phoenix with her Ruger.

“I pack heat,” she informed Senator Robert Meza, a fellow freshman who was walking alongside her, as he told me in a telephone interview last week. Her tone of voice, he said, was nonchalant.

After a security guard noted her gun, so did the news media. A public discussion ensued, and the senate’s president, Russell Pearce, a Republican, had to clarify the chamber’s rules. He said that, while signs posted outside said weapons were banned, that prohibition applied to visitors but not lawmakers, who could keep their guns with them. So Klein, also a Republican, did.

Citing the incident between her and Ruelas, Senator Steve Gallardo, a Democrat, called last week for an ethics probe into her actions, but the chairman of the ethics committee, Senator Ron Gould, a Republican, said it wasn’t necessary. Like Klein, he sometimes comes to the Capitol armed, according to local news reports.

You’d think Arizona would be cracking down on guns after the January bloodletting. You’d be wrong. Since then, not only did Pearce make clear that Klein and her colleagues could pack heat as they pleased, but state lawmakers voted expressly to allow guns on college campuses. Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, had the good sense to veto that legislation. Sadly, she cited fuzzy language in it — not principle — as the reason.

It’s not entirely fair to single out Arizona. Just over a week ago, Wisconsin enacted a law allowing civilians to carry concealed weapons, and the state has been embroiled in a discussion about whether that creates the possibility of guns at Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play and passions, as well as intoxication levels, run high. This new law means that the only state that still forbids concealed weapons is Illinois, said Chad Ramsey, Federal legislation director for the Brady Campaign, a gun-control advocacy group.

Over the last three years, as Michael Luo recently reported in The New York Times, more than 20 states have passed measures enabling people who have been denied firearms because of mental illness to petition to have their rights to own guns restored.

And on the Federal level, gun-control legislation promoted in response to the Giffords shooting has gone nowhere fast. The kind of high-capacity clip that enabled Loughner to get off as many rounds and shoot as many people as quickly as he did was illegal from 1994 to 2004, when the Federal assault-weapons ban expired, and there are bills in the House and Senate to make it illegal again. But they have Democratic sponsors only, Ramsey said, and have not been brought up for serious discussion.

President Obama hasn’t made gun control any kind of priority. Then again, how could he? An enormous unacknowledged cost of the protracted wrangling over the debt ceiling and the budget is the inability of politicians to devote energy and political capital to much of anything else.

Meanwhile, a cavalier attitude about guns persists and even flourishes.

Klein, 57, a divorced mother of three who lives in a Phoenix exurb, told Ruelas that she bought a .40-caliber revolver 11 years ago after she was spooked by a rattling at her front door one night. She got the gun on Ladies Night at Shooter’s World. The Ruger came later.

She owns several guns now. She wouldn’t specify the number. She said they make her feel safe. But she assured Ruelas that she doesn’t press that view on anyone else.

“I don’t like chocolate ice cream,” she said, according to his article. “Am I going to force you not to have any?”

Firearms, Häagen-Dazs — it’s all the same. Her Ruger is pink, like a Barbie convertible. Showing it to Ruelas, she reportedly said, “Oh, it’s so cute.”

No, Senator Klein, it’s not. It’s a potentially deadly weapon. When are you and the rest of the country going to wake up to that?

    Lawmakers, Armed and Dangerous, NYT, 16.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17bruni.html

A Bloodbath in a Country Home,

Then a Siege on a Vengeful Man

July 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

At a sprawling, tree-shaded country house in rural Pennsylvania, a place of serenity that most city dwellers can only dream about as a retreat from the mean streets, two weekending couples, one with a 2-year-old boy, were relaxing on Saturday night when the nightmare strode in from the darkness.

He was a bull-necked career criminal with a record for robbery, burglary and insurance fraud in New York and Massachusetts — mug shots show a brutish face framed by long flowing hair — and he had a .22-caliber pistol. Officials identified him as Mark Richard Geisenheyner, 51, and said he was bent on revenge.

“Guess you never thought you’d see me again,” he said to Paul Shay, 64, a New York City plumber who, with his wife, Monica, 58, an associate professor at the Pratt Institute, lives in the East Village in Manhattan and jointly owns the country retreat near Bechtelsville, Pa., 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

The gunman shot everybody in the head, starting with Mr. Shay, whom he knew from a 2006 insurance dispute that involved Mr. Shay’s home, according to the Montgomery County, Pa., district attorney, Risa Vetri Ferman, who cited accounts from two survivors.

Killed outright were Paul Shay’s nephew, Joseph Shay, 43, of Yarmouth, Mass., and New York City, and the child, Gregory Bosco Erdmann. Critically wounded were the boy’s mother, Kathryn Erdmann, 37, of Fall River, Mass., described as Joseph’s girlfriend, and Paul and Monica Shay.

Despite her wound, the authorities said, Ms. Erdmann was able to call 911 about 10:30 p.m. Kevin R. Steele, the first assistant district attorney in Montgomery County, reviewed the 911 tapes and described a horrific account from Ms. Erdmann.

It was, he said, “the mother of the 2-year-old calling for help,” adding: “It’s a haunting tape where she says that she was shot. She’s covered in blood and she is pleading for help for her son.” Mr. Steele said he could not say why the man had shot the toddler, but gave an account of how it happened.

“He puts the gun and shot the 2-year-old, who was asleep in a bed, and he shot the child in the back of the head,” Mr. Steele said.

Responding to Ms. Erdmann’s call, police officers from Bechtelsville, Douglass Township, other communities and the county, swarmed with helicopters and ambulances to the site of the shootings, about 100 miles southwest of New York City.

Joseph Shay and the little boy were already dead in blood-spattered scenes in the house. Monica Shay was in very critical condition and Paul Shay and Ms. Erdmann were reported as critically wounded, although both were said to be conscious when the police arrived and able to speak to investigators later.

As the victims were airlifted to nearby Pottstown Memorial Medical Center and Lehigh Valley Hospital, the authorities, who apparently learned the identity of the gunman from Paul Shay, began an extensive manhunt for Mr. Geisenheyner, first in the pastures and woods of Montgomery County, and then in a wider area of Eastern Pennsylvania.

Meantime, the assailant had fled south about 40 miles to Trainer, Pa., a small Delaware County community just south of Philadelphia, and sought refuge Sunday night at the home of a friend he had known at a halfway house in Chester, Pa., about 10 years ago.

Mr. Geisenheyner, whose criminal record dated back to the 1970s, had been jailed repeatedly. Since his release about a year ago, officials said, he had lived in various places and had repeatedly vowed revenge against Paul Shay. On Sunday, he told his friend that he had finally taken it. He also mentioned details of the Bechtelsville slayings that had not been made public, officials said.

“He obviously indicated that he intended to seek revenge against the one victim,” said G. Michael Green, the Delaware County district attorney, referring to Paul Shay. “There’s no explanation that I’m aware of as to why he would have shot at and killed multiple victims, including a 2-year-old child.”

In an interview, the friend, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the gunman fell asleep about 2 a.m. Monday. Two hours later, with the gunman still asleep, the friend and a companion sneaked out of the house and called the police.

About 5:30 a.m., a force of police officers, including five SWAT teams, surrounded the house, which is in a working-class neighborhood opposite an oil refinery near the Delaware River and a police station.

Once the cordon of firepower was in place, the police made contact with the gunman by cellphone. But negotiations went nowhere. “He was determined not to surrender, not to end up in a prison again,” Mr. Green said.

Neighbors reported hearing shots in the morning, but it was unclear who was firing them. In the distant background, people in a neighborhood of houses festooned with American flags for the Fourth of July stood about, watching and wondering. “We’d been hearing pop, pop, pop all morning,” Chris Bartoliomeo, 38, a garbage truck driver who lives nearby, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The standoff lasted about six hours. Then, about 11:30 a.m., the police stormed the house. The gunman fled into the basement, where he was killed, apparently in an exchange of gunfire with the police. None of the officers were hit, the authorities said.

The man, pronounced dead by a medical examiner at 11:48 a.m., was armed with a .45-caliber pistol. He was believed to have discarded the .22 pistol from Saturday’s shootings, the police said.

Asked if Mr. Geisenheyner had committed suicide, Erica Parham, a spokeswoman for the Delaware County prosecutor, said: “We believe it was not self-inflicted. We believe it is the result of police action.”

The particulars of the insurance dispute that apparently led to the bloodshed were under investigation, Mr. Steele, the Montgomery County assistant prosecutor, noted. But the matter apparently involved the Shays’ country home, a regular weekend retreat that had been in Ms. Shay’s family for years and had been bought from her mother, Ann Newbold, in 2003 for $200,000. It is a lovely property, set back in dense woodlands 300 feet from the nearest road.

Neighbors said the original house there had been destroyed in a fire, and the Shays replaced it with a large, three-story structure. Edward Newbold, 60, of Seattle, one of Ms. Shay’s two older brothers, was quoted by The Inquirer as saying that the unfinished house would take “a lifetime” to complete. He said he had been told there was “no hope — zero, zero, zero” that his sister would survive.

Mr. Steele said the insurance dispute was apparently unrelated to Mr. Shay’s business, A Real Good Plumber, in New York.

Paul and Monica Shay, who have lived at 263 East 10th Street for many years, are highly regarded in the East Village. He took part in battles that shaped the East Village over the past 20 years, neighbors said, and sided with squatters who took over abandoned city-owned buildings, helping to unclog drains and connect waste pipes to make them habitable, often at no charge. And when a homeless encampment was erected in Tompkins Square Park, the Shays encouraged park inhabitants to resist city efforts to dislodge them.

Mr. Shay, neighbors said, also employed men down on their luck, including his slain nephew Joseph, who had a criminal record in New Jersey dating to 1992, when he went to prison on a drug charge. More recently, correction records show, he served 10 months in prison in New York on a grand larceny charge for passing more than $10,000 in false checks.

Since his release in 2009, Joseph Shay had lived at the Shays’ apartment, and had become a familiar figure in the neighborhood. Mr. Steele discounted reports that he might have been the assailant’s primary target. There were no indications that Mr. Geisenheyner even knew Joseph Shay, other officials said.

Ms. Shay joined the Pratt faculty in 2000 and heads the arts and cultural management department at the school’s Manhattan campus.

Scott Trent, a public health worker in Greensboro, N.C., said he had known her for a decade in the October 22 Coalition, a national effort to curtail police brutality and assist its victims. “She’s a very rare kind of person,” he said. “The kind of person who is very serious and dedicated and committed to people.”

 

Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting from Pennsylvania, and Al Baker and Colin Moynihan from New York.

    A Bloodbath in a Country Home, Then a Siege on a Vengeful Man, NYT, 4.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/nyregion/suspect-in-pa-shootings-is-killed-after-a-standoff.html

Toddler and Manhattan Man Are Killed

and 3 Are Wounded in Pennsylvania Shooting

July 4, 2011
The New York Times
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

A 43-year-old man and a young boy were killed in a quintuple shooting at the Pennsylvania country home of a New York City couple, the authorities said on Sunday.

The couple, Paul Shay, 64, and his wife, Monica Shay, 58, longtime residents of the East Village, were wounded.

The Montgomery County district attorney’s office and the Douglass Township Police Department identified the dead as Joseph Shay, 43, who was believed to be a relative of the couple, and Gregory Erdmann, a toddler whose precise age was not immediately known. The boy’s mother, Kathryn Erdmann, 37, was also wounded.

All five victims were shot in the head, and the three survivors were in serious condition, the authorities said.

There were no arrests by Sunday night, and none of the survivors had been able to speak to investigators.

Paul Shay, a plumber, and Monica Shay, an associate professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, are the owners of the house, at 50 Renninger Road in Bechtelsville, Pa. They also have an apartment in a five-story tenement building on East 10th Street.

Paul Shay is the type of person who “would hire people nobody else would hire,” said Dan Hoyt, 48, who lives in the building next door to where the Shays live on 10th Street. “He always wanted to give people a chance to get on their feet.”

In an e-mail, a Pratt spokeswoman, Mara McGinnis, called Monica Shay an “esteemed educator.”

“Our hearts and prayers go out to her and her family,” Ms. McGinnis wrote.

On Sunday night, two tall white candles in glass sleeves were burning on the stoop of the red brick building.

Reporting was contributed by Colin Moynihan.

    Toddler and Manhattan Man Are Killed and 3 Are Wounded in Pennsylvania Shooting, NYT, 4.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/nyregion/2-killed-and-3-wounded-in-pennsylvania-shooting.html

Some With Histories of Mental Illness

Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back

July 2, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

PULASKI, Va. — In May 2009, Sam French hit bottom, once again. A relative found him face down in his carport “talking gibberish,” according to court records. He later told medical personnel that he had been conversing with a bear in his backyard and hearing voices. His family figured he had gone off his medication for bipolar disorder, and a judge ordered him involuntarily committed — the fourth time in five years he had been hospitalized by court order.

When Mr. French’s daughter discovered that her father’s commitment meant it was illegal for him to have firearms, she and her husband removed his cache of 15 long guns and three handguns, and kept them after Mr. French was released in January 2010 on a new regime of mood-stabilizing drugs.

Ten months later, he appeared in General District Court — the body that handles small claims and traffic infractions — to ask a judge to restore his gun rights. After a brief hearing, in which Mr. French’s lengthy history of relapses never came up, he walked out with an order reinstating his right to possess firearms.

The next day, Mr. French retrieved his guns.

“The judge didn’t ask me a whole lot,” said Mr. French, now 62. “He just said: ‘How was I doing? Was I taking my medicine like I was supposed to?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

Across the country, states are increasingly allowing people like Mr. French, who lost their firearm rights because of mental illness, to petition to have them restored.

A handful of states have had such restoration laws on their books for some time, but with little notice, more than 20 states have passed similar measures since 2008. This surge can be traced to a law passed by Congress after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that was actually meant to make it harder for people with mental illness to get guns.

As a condition of its support for the measure, the National Rifle Association extracted a concession: the inclusion of a mechanism for restoring firearms rights to those who lost them for mental health reasons.

The intent of these state laws is to enable people to regain the right to buy and possess firearms if it is determined that they are not a threat to public safety. But an examination of restoration procedures across the country, along with dozens of cases, shows that the process for making that determination is governed in many places by vague standards and few specific requirements.

States have mostly entrusted these decisions to judges, who are often ill-equipped to conduct investigations from the bench. Many seemed willing to simply give petitioners the benefit of the doubt. The results often seem haphazard.

At least a few hundred people with histories of mental health issues already get their gun rights back each year. The number promises to grow, since most of the new state laws are just beginning to take effect. And in November, the Department of Veterans Affairs responded to the federal legislation by establishing a rights restoration process for more than 100,000 veterans who have lost their gun privileges after being designated mentally incompetent by the agency.

The issue goes to the heart of the nation’s complicated relationship with guns, testing the delicate balance between the need to safeguard the public and the dictates of what the Supreme Court has proclaimed to be a fundamental constitutional right.

Mike Fleenor, the commonwealth’s attorney here in Pulaski County, whose office opposed restoring Mr. French’s rights, worries that the balance is being thrown off by weak standards.

“I think that reasonable people can disagree about issues of the Second Amendment and gun control and things like that, but I don’t believe that any reasonable person believes that a mentally ill person needs a firearm,” Mr. Fleenor said. “The public has a right to be safe in their community.”

In case after case examined by The New York Times, judges made decisions without important information about an applicant’s mental health.

Larry Lamb, a Vietnam veteran from San Diego who has suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, lost his gun rights and his cache of weapons in 2006 when he was involuntarily hospitalized after his dog’s death left him suicidal. A psychiatrist who examined Mr. Lamb wrote that he “is extremely paranoid with a full-blown P.T.S.D., believing that he is still at war in the active military and he is a personal bodyguard of the president and many senators.”

In early 2008, a Superior Court judge in San Diego granted Mr. Lamb’s petition to have his firearms rights restored, after his psychologist testified that he was not dangerous. But the judge, without access to Mr. Lamb’s full medical history, was unaware of a crucial fact: the local Veterans Affairs hospital had placed a “red flag” on Mr. Lamb, barring him from the hospital grounds because he was perceived to be a threat to personnel there.

The spread of these restoration laws is especially striking against the backdrop of the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and others in Tucson early this year by a suspect who has been declared mentally incompetent to stand trial — a case that spotlighted anew the link between mental illness and violence.

Supporters of gun rights and mental health advocates point out that a vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent. At the same time, though, a variety of studies have found that people with serious mental illness are more prone to violence than the general population.

The difficulty of assessing risk emerges in places like Los Angeles, where the Superior Court conducts a relatively thorough review of firearms rights requests. The Times found multiple instances over the last decade in which people who won back their gun rights went on to be charged with or convicted of violent or gun-related crimes, including spousal battery, negligent discharge of a firearm or assault with a firearm.

Then there are the nightmare cases — like that of Ryan Anthony, 35, a former Emmy Award-winning animator at Disney who was involuntarily hospitalized in mid-2001 after losing his job and separating from his wife. Mr. Anthony filed a petition to get back his gun rights in early 2002, telling a court-appointed psychiatrist that he wanted to go skeet shooting.

A few weeks after the court granted his petition, Mr. Anthony bought a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, holed up in a Holiday Inn in Burbank, Calif., and committed suicide.

 

An N.R.A. Victory

The galvanizing revelation for gun-control advocates after the Virginia Tech massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history, was that the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, should never have been able to buy the guns he used in the rampage.

Two years earlier, a special justice declared Mr. Cho “an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness” and ordered him to outpatient treatment.

Under federal law, anyone involuntarily committed or adjudicated a “mental defective” is barred from buying or possessing firearms. But the prohibition is often toothless because many states do not share their mental health records with the F.B.I.’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Mr. Cho’s case offered Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, a chance to advance a stalled bill that she had sponsored several years earlier to improve reporting by states to the F.B.I. database.

Ms. McCarthy’s political career and commitment to gun control was born out of tragedy. In 1993, a deranged gunman opened fire on a commuter train on Long Island, killing six people, including her husband, and gravely injuring her son. After more than a decade working on the issue in Congress, however, she had little to show for it.

Ms. McCarthy said she was wiser after years of setbacks. “I don’t believe in introducing legislation that won’t go anywhere,” she said.

She joined forces with Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat and former N.R.A. board member, who acted as a liaison with the gun lobby. The N.R.A. had long been interested in gun-rights restoration. It also wanted to help tens of thousands of veterans who lost their rights after being designated mentally incompetent and unable to handle their finances by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“We don’t want to treat our soldiers as potential criminals because they’re struggling with the aftermath of dealing with their service,” said Chris Cox, the association’s chief lobbyist.

The gun lobby secured a broad provision in the legislation. The new law made money available to states to help improve their record sharing, but the provision pushed by the N.R.A. made it a prerequisite for states to establish a “relief from disability” program for people with histories of mental health issues to apply for the restoration of gun rights. The Veterans Affairs Department and other federal agencies were required to do the same.

Gun-control groups attacked the provisions. “You make one bad judgment, and you could have another Virginia Tech on your hands,” Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, said in an interview.

But the most prominent gun-control organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, ultimately supported the bill. “She felt if she didn’t do this, it wasn’t going to proceed,” Paul Helmke, the group’s president, said of Ms. McCarthy. “An imperfect bill is better than no bill.”

Ms. McCarthy said her background as a nurse made her amenable to restoring someone’s rights, “if they could prove they are no longer mentally ill.”

After the bill became law in 2008, the N.R.A. began lobbying state lawmakers to keep requirements for petitioners to a minimum.

In Idaho, for example, a committee of law enforcement and mental health officials proposed requiring courts to make findings by “clear and convincing” evidence and mandating that petitioners have a recent mental health evaluation. But without the N.R.A.’s imprimatur, the legislation went nowhere.

Instead, a Republican state representative, Raúl R. Labrador, who is now a congressman, worked with the N.R.A. to draft a bill, passed last year, that dropped the requirement for a mental health evaluation and lowered the standard of proof to a “preponderance of evidence.”

A few states have set stricter standards. In New York, decisions are made by mental health officials, and applicants must submit a long list of documents, including five years’ worth of medical records and records of psychiatric and substance abuse treatment going back 20 years. State officials can also require applicants to undergo clinical evaluations and risk assessments.

So far, there has been only a trickle of petitions in states with new restoration laws. The statutes are not yet well known, and federal authorities have yet to certify many of the state programs, making them fully operational under federal law.

But the demand will almost certainly grow, given the experience of states with longer-standing restoration statutes. In California, for instance, judges restored gun rights to 180 people in 2010. At the federal level, the Veterans Affairs Department has already received more than 100 applications, of which 12 were processed and one was granted.

As for the original aim of Ms. McCarthy’s legislation, the reporting of mental health records by states to the F.B.I. database remains woeful. The reasons vary, including privacy laws, technological challenges and inattention from state officials.

But one significant hurdle has been that only a handful of states have received the federal money to improve their reporting capabilities. Officials with the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicated that while 22 states applied for grants in 2009 and 2010, only nine have gotten financing. Most of those that did not receive grants were rejected because they did not have certified restoration programs in place.

 

One State’s Experience

Lawmakers in Virginia, the scene of Mr. Cho’s rampage, were among the first to respond to the federal legislation by amending the state’s existing restoration statute to reflect the new law. To restore firearms rights, judges must find that the petitioner “will not likely act in a manner dangerous to public safety” and that “the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest.” There are few specific standards or guidelines beyond that.

In 2010, judges in Virginia considered roughly 40 restoration applications and granted firearms rights under state law to 25 people — 14 who had been involuntarily committed, and 11 who had been the subjects of temporary detention orders and were voluntarily admitted for mental health treatment, according to figures from the Virginia Supreme Court and the State Police. In 2009, the courts restored rights to 21 people.

There is no central repository for cases heard around Virginia, but to get a picture of how the process works in one state, The Times obtained dozens of petitions and judges’ orders, mainly from 2009 and 2010, along with supporting documentation, and interviewed petitioners, lawyers and judges. The hearings were often relatively brief, sometimes perfunctory, and judges had wide latitude in handling the petitions.

Teresa Hall, who had moved to Idaho, said she simply wrote a letter to Hampton General District Court explaining that her commitment several years earlier occurred when she was experiencing marital difficulties. To her shock, she got a judge’s order granting her petition several days later in the mail.

“I was surprised it was that easy,” Ms. Hall said.

Some judges insisted on seeing a doctor’s note, but others did not.

In a typical case, Joshua St. Clair, who served in Iraq with the National Guard, got his gun rights back last year. About six months earlier, Mr. St. Clair, now 22, had heard a rattling at his gate. He said he “kind of blacked out” and the next thing he knew, he was pointing his M-4 assault rifle at his friend’s chest. That led to a temporary detention order, treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and loss of his firearms rights.

He took a note from his psychiatrist to his restoration hearing, which he said “lasted maybe about five minutes,” but he said the judge did not even ask to see it. The judge asked Mr. St. Clair’s father a few questions and asked Mr. St. Clair himself whether he thought he should have his rights restored. He said, “Of course.”

Often the doctors’ recommendations came from general practitioners, not mental health professionals. The notes tended to be short, often just a few sentences.

In many cases, the hospitalizations occurred just a few months, or even weeks, earlier.

Bobby Bullion, 37, got his gun rights back about four months after he left a note for his wife and son that indicated he was considering suicide — his wife had told him she was divorcing him — and the police found him in his car with two loaded weapons. Mr. Bullion presented the judge with a letter from his psychiatrist endorsing the restoration.

Oran Greenway, 68, had his rights restored in August, just two months after he was involuntarily committed. The judge’s restoration shocked Mr. Greenway’s relatives, who said they had been worried for years about his mental stability. In an interview, he said he started taking Lexapro for depression several years ago. In 2005, he slammed a large branch on a neighbor’s head during an argument, resulting in a conviction for assault and battery.

“Knowing what I know about Oran, I wouldn’t let Oran have a gun,” said Elizabeth Dequino, a cousin who lives up the road.

Even when a court-ordered commitment occurred years ago, the wisdom of restoring certain petitioners’ firearms rights was open to question. David Neal Moon, 63, was involuntarily committed in 1995 after his struggles with schizoaffective bipolar disorder got so bad that he had threatened to commit suicide and was walking in circles around his house with a MAK-90 assault rifle, as if on guard duty, according to medical and court records and an interview with Cynthia Allison, who is now his ex-wife.

A psychiatrist’s report described him threatening to “bash in the face of his wife” and ranting about getting his guns so he could “shoot everybody.” It also mentions a violent hair-pulling episode with his wife.

He had not been committed since, but he had continued to struggle with his illness and was bad about taking his medication, Ms. Allison said.

In an interview, Mr. Moon insisted he took his medication and was not mentally ill. Yet he alluded to his phone being tapped by the State Police and “by maybe the Pentagon.”

His firearms hearing in early 2009 in Amherst General District Court, where Mr. Moon showed up in military camouflage, lasted “about eight minutes,” said Mr. Moon’s lawyer, Gregory Smith, adding that he did not recall presenting any recent medical evaluation.

Just over a month later, another judge granted Ms. Allison a protective order against her husband. The pair had split up, and Mr. Moon had been making veiled threats by phone and telling his children about demons in the walls, according to her court affidavit.

“The judge just sat there and listened to him talk,” Ms. Allison said. “I didn’t even say anything. If you listened to him talk, you could tell he’s as crazy as a bedbug.”

Among those whose applications were denied, many were turned down for technical reasons, like filing in the wrong jurisdiction or failing to show up for a hearing.

In others cases — like one last year in Lynchburg in which the petitioner, Undreas Smith, submitted a letter explaining he had been struggling with recent deaths in his family — the judge ruled against the petitioner because he failed to provide documentation from a mental health provider.

In the case of James Tuckson Jr. of Harrisonburg, who was involuntarily committed in 2006 and applied in October to get back his gun rights, prosecutors said his multiple arrests probably played a significant role in the judge’s decision to deny Mr. Tuckson’s petition.

Presented with The Times’s findings, Richard Bonnie, the chairman of the Virginia Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which was formed after the Virginia Tech shootings, expressed concerns about the restoration process, particularly the vagueness of the statute. Mr. Bonnie said the panel would begin collecting information on the petitions on a monthly basis to better evaluate how they were being handled.

“There is an ambiguity in the statute that we need to look at,” he said.

 

‘A Hole in the Process’

When Sam French, the man with bipolar disorder whose daughter removed his guns, appeared late last year in Pulaski General District Court, he presented his recent medical records. Progress notes over several months showed that his bipolar disorder and substance abuse were in “remission.”

Nevertheless, Bobby Lilly, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney, opposed the petition, partly because Mr. French’s latest update indicated he had expressed interest in lowering the dosage of his medication. Mr. French’s two most recent hospitalizations had come after he went off his medication.

Mr. Lilly was also worried because it had been less than a year since his release. “We didn’t have a demonstrated track record of being able to comply with whatever the mental health provider’s directives were,” Mr. Lilly said.

In fact, a few months later, in March, a judge at the circuit level — the higher court in Virginia — denied Mr. French’s application for a concealed weapons permit because a five-year wait after a psychiatric commitment is required for such a permit.

But there is no waiting period for the restoration of basic gun rights.

Mr. French’s case fell to Judge Royce Glenwood Lookabill, a genial presence on the bench since 2006. Judge Lookabill said he quizzed Mr. French about whether he had had any other episodes and whether he was taking his prescribed drugs.

“I was satisfied that he wasn’t a danger — again, subject to him taking his medication,” Judge Lookabill said in an interview.

The judge acknowledged, however, that he might have made a different decision had he been aware of Mr. French’s previous commitments, including one that came after he was arrested for public drunkenness and later allegedly assaulted two police officers. (The assault charges were dropped.) No one had checked a state database for his commitment history.

“It’s a hole in the process,” said Mr. Lilly, who added that his office had only limited access to such information.

Judge Lookabill suggested that the process belonged in a higher court and should be made more adversarial. “I would feel a lot more comfortable,” he said, “if there were more safeguards.”

 

An Increased Risk

Most people with mental health issues, of course, will never be violent. But there is widespread consensus among scientists that the increased risk of violence among those with a serious mental illness — schizophrenia, major depression or bipolar disorder — is statistically significant. That risk rises when substance abuse, which is more prevalent among people with mental illness, is also present.

One frequently cited study, led by Jeffrey W. Swanson, an expert on mental health and violence who is now at Duke University, showed that 33 percent of people with a serious mental illness reported past violent behavior, compared with 15 percent of people without a major mental disorder. Violent behavior was defined as including acts ranging from taking part in more than one fistfight as an adult to using a weapon in a fight. The rate for those with substance abuse issues but without a serious mental illness was 55 percent. The highest rate, 64 percent, was exhibited by people with major mental disorders and substance abuse issues.

Other studies have concluded that additional factors significantly increase the risk of violence among people with mental illness, including exposure to violence and being a victim of violence.

But taking these data and applying them to individuals is profoundly difficult.

Scientists have concluded that it is most accurate to augment clinical judgments with an “actuarial” approach, in which variables like psychiatric diagnosis, history of violence and anger control are plugged into a risk assessment model. The models categorize people into higher and lower risk groups. But many clinicians are unfamiliar with the technique. Indeed, none of the doctors who wrote letters on behalf of their patients in cases The Times reviewed appeared to utilize the approach.

Doctors’ declarations clearly influenced judges. But most wrote their letters at the request of their patients, which Randy Otto, a former president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology and an associate professor at the University of South Florida, said can be problematic.

“They’re more subject to pressure from their patients to offer opinions that will help the patients get what they want,” Dr. Otto said.

He said many doctors, particularly those not in the mental health field, are probably not steeped in the most important clues to future violence. Even psychologists and psychiatrists, relying on their clinical judgment alone, are extremely unreliable in predicting violence, studies have shown.

“Unstructured clinical judgments, just judgments of mental health professionals about how risky someone is,” Dr. Otto said, “are probably the least reliable and the least accurate.”

 

Weighing the Threats

The difficulties of predicting violence are particularly striking in Los Angeles County, where the Superior Court has a relatively rigorous process for determining whether to restore gun rights.

In California, anyone placed on a 72-hour or 14-day psychiatric hold and determined to be a danger to themselves or others loses gun rights for five years. But upon discharge, the person can apply to have these prohibitions lifted. Applicants in Los Angeles County are required to provide records from all involuntary hospitalizations, which are checked against a list provided by the State Department of Justice. They must also be examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist, who can call friends or relatives to gather more information.

Under the statute, the burden is on the district attorney to establish that the petitioner “would not be likely to use firearms in a safe and lawful manner.”

Over all, 1,579 petitions have been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court since 2000. More than 1,000 were dismissed, usually because applicants did not furnish the required documentation or failed to show up. Of those who actually got hearings, 381 won their cases.

“Dealing with somebody who suffers from severe mental illness and mixing that with firearms, you really have to cross the t’s and dot the i’s,” said Richard J. Vagnozzi, a deputy district attorney who handles these cases. Mr. Vagnozzi said the process “isn’t perfect, but we do the best we can with the available data and what we’re allowed to do.”

Even with the vigorous checks, there are people like Afshin Poordavoud, who lost his gun rights in June 2000. During a heated argument with his brother, Mr. Poordavoud threatened to shoot himself. His brother called the police, and Mr. Poordavoud was hospitalized briefly, according to court records.

Several months later, Mr. Poordavoud petitioned to have his firearms rights restored and to have the police return his shotgun and 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. A court-appointed psychiatrist recommended that the decision be put off for three months and that Mr. Poordavoud get a full psychiatric evaluation and treatment, pointing out that the hospital had found him to be “likely depressed and minimizing his level of depression and suicidal risk.”

Mr. Poordavoud returned to court three months later with a letter from a therapist, indicating he had been undergoing treatment. This time, a different psychiatrist examined him but wrote at the end of his report, “Inconclusive: I have no opinion.” The psychiatrist suggested that the case be referred back to the initial doctor so she could interview Mr. Poordavoud’s therapist and obtain the full file from his hospitalization.

The judge, however, granted Mr. Poordavoud’s restoration request that same day in a pro forma hearing.

In late 2004, Mr. Poordavoud drove up to a house in Chatsworth, Calif., in the middle of the night and began banging on the windows and the doors, shouting for an acquaintance to come out, according to court testimony.

When a man opened the door, Mr. Poordavoud sprayed him and two others with mace, according to court testimony. In the ensuing fight, Mr. Poordavoud slashed at one of them with a pair of brass knuckles fitted with blades.

Mr. Poordavoud retrieved a gun from his car and fired a single shot that missed. In an interview, he said he had only fired in the air in self-defense.

The police eventually charged Mr. Poordavoud with multiple felonies. He pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and using tear gas not in self-defense, and he was sentenced to about a year in county jail.

“I had an anger problem,” said Mr. Poordavoud, who is no longer allowed to have guns because of his felony record. “I still have an anger problem.”

Violence against others is not the only concern.

Ryan Anthony, the talented but troubled Disney artist who had a history of alcoholism, had talked about suicide for years with relatives. His father, Michael Anthony, said his son once threatened to jump off a highway overpass; another time, he vowed to hang himself from a chandelier in his home. A few months before he filed his petition to restore his firearms rights, he had attempted suicide by swallowing some pills, said his brother Loren.

But Mr. Anthony was able to hide his troubled past when a court-appointed psychiatrist examined him for the restoration hearing in April 2002. He told Dr. Rose Pitt, according to court records, that he had simply been going through a difficult period after he lost his job and split up with his wife. He was normally not a drinker, he said, but began drinking heavily. Since his involuntary hospitalization in mid-2001, he had been sober and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Dr. Pitt wrote in her report.

“Does not own guns but wants to skeet shoot, and so wants to purchase guns,” Dr. Pitt wrote. “There does not appear to be any contraindication to his being able to get guns.”

His relatives were incredulous. Had they been called, they said, they would have told officials to deny his request.

“I would have said, ‘No, that doesn’t sound right,’ ” Loren Anthony said. “He didn’t like guns.”

Mr. Anthony had been staying with Steven and Sofia Shafit, family friends. They said he had been doing better but was still hurting.

About two weeks after he got his firearms rights restored, he borrowed $300 from Ms. Shafit, saying he wanted to take a girl on a date. Instead, he went out and bought a shotgun — investigators found the receipt by his body — and checked into a room at a Holiday Inn.

On the desk, he left a three-page suicide note, according to a report from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. At some point, he lay down on the bed, placed the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Toby Lyles, Lisa Schwartz and Jack Styczynski contributed research.

    Some With Histories of Mental Illness Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back, NYT, 2.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/us/03guns.html

Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed;

Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The day before he allegedly shot his father, the sandy-haired 10-year-old boy showed off a prized possession to a visitor. It was a thin leather belt emblazoned with a silver insignia of the Nazi SS.

“Look what my dad got me,” the boy said shyly, perched on the living room stairs, one of the few quiet spots in a house with five children.

A little more than 12 hours later, the police say, the boy stood near those stairs with a handgun and killed his father, Jeff Hall, as he lay on the living room couch. It was about 4 a.m. on May 1; paramedics declared Mr. Hall dead when they arrived.

The police say that the killing was intentional, but that the motives behind it are still not fully understood. But whatever the reason, it has cast fresh light on the fringe group to which Mr. Hall devoted his life: the National Socialist Movement, the nation’s largest neo-Nazi party, whose message stands in surreal juxtaposition to the suburban, workaday trappings of many of its members.

Mr. Hall, who led a chapter of the group in Riverside, Calif., east of Los Angeles, had predicted that his political activities — in a world rife with hatred, suspicion and violence — would lead to his demise.

“I want a white society,” Mr. Hall said. “I believe in secession. I believe in giving my life for secession.”

What he could never have expected was that his death might come at the hand of his son, whom he was steeping in his beliefs of white supremacy and its obsessions with weapons, racist speech and Nazi regalia.

Over the last two months, The New York Times attended and documented a series of events held by Mr. Hall and the National Socialist Movement, or N.S.M., including virulent, hate-filled rallies as well as barbecues and baby showers in the backyard of his Southern California home.

Mr. Hall was a rising force in the party, which has capitalized on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to attract members — young racist skinheads, aging Ku Klux Klan members, and extremists on the left and the right.

Based in Detroit, it is the largest supremacist group, with about 400 members in 32 states, though much of its prominence followed the decay of Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups, experts say. The movement is led by Jeff Schoep, a suit-wearing spokesman for what he calls a “white civil rights movement,” which he views as no different from other groups that defend minorities.

“If we’re a hate group,” said Mr. Schoep in an interview, “then Martin Luther King is a racist or a bigot also.”

Mr. Hall, 32, had embraced the movement and vice versa, earning a loyal following with his energy, unapologetic stands on race and frequent meetings and parties at his home. In recent years, he and other members had staged rallies that sparked street battles in several states, including a skirmish in Pemberton, N.J., during the group’s national conference in April, where rocks, tree branches, folding chairs and pepper spray were used as weapons.

After the fight, Mr. Hall — wearing a black Nazi military uniform — was hungry for more. “That’s why I joined N.S.M.,” Mr. Hall said, his eyes red from mace. “What a night! I can’t wait for tomorrow!”

Mr. Hall, a garrulous plumber with a cross and a skull tattooed on the back of his shaved head, ran as a National Socialist for a seat on a local water district last fall and won a surprising 28 percent of the vote. He planned to run for office again.

Mr. Schoep has said the group wants to try its hand at more elections, and it has even tried to mimic the populist language used by some candidates during the 2010 campaign, railing against banks receiving “tax-funded federal bailouts” while Americans continue to struggle.

“The government tells us we’re in recovery,” Mr. Schoep told a crowd in New Jersey. “Well yeah, if you’re a fat cat on Wall Street, if you’re some greedy Jew running a bank that got a whole bunch of kickbacks, maybe it is better. But not for us.”

Illegal immigration has also emerged as a potent neo-Nazi talking point, and Mr. Hall relished heading to the desert on armed “border patrols.” He organized his members and spent his plumbing proceeds on night-vision goggles and ham radio licenses. Mr. Hall also bragged that he was teaching his son to use night vision equipment and shoot a gun.

And while many of those involved in the N.S.M. are alienated from their families, or struggle to explain their beliefs, Mr. Hall was open about his activities with his children. His two-story home in Riverside served as the movement’s headquarters in Southern California. Inside, photos of his five children lined the walls and a copy of “Cinderella” sat on the bookshelf.

At a recent meeting, Mr. Hall showed a video he had made of the national gathering in New Jersey and the brawl. As the end credits rolled, a version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played, with modified lyrics.

“The white man marches on!” it said.

One of Mr. Hall’s young daughters was watching through a screen door and chimed in.

“I love that song, Daddy,” she said.

Raphael Ezekiel, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health who studied skinheads for his book “The Racist Mind,” said: “They’re people who feel very weak. So they’re a pushover if a person with a little bit of charisma comes along.”

And indeed, in March, Mr. Hall led a rally in Claremont, Calif., at which he preached discipline to his followers while grumbling about pat-downs from a large police contingent. About two dozen of the party followers traded insults with a larger group of counterprotesters. Mr. Hall took joy in the taunts of “Nazi Go Home!”

“I have some bad news for you,” he said. “We are home.”

A few hours later, at a St. Patrick’s Day party complete with green shot glasses and German beer, Mr. Hall gamely officiated at a sack race for his children, using the same bullhorn that he had used to lead chants of “White power!” just hours before.

In one corner of the yard, a blue-eyed blond woman wore a white supremacist T-shirt that said, “Because the beauty of white Aryan women must not perish from the earth.” Nearby, a vendor had set up a stand, selling a ragtag variety of racially tinged paraphernalia.

Fund-raising was a constant concern for Mr. Hall. He told the vendor to look into selling Che Guevara T-shirts. “He’s a murderous communist,” Mr. Hall said, “but you sell those shirts, and you fund the movement.”

At a meeting the day before he was shot, Mr. Hall hoisted a swastika banner, not far from his newborn’s bassinet. His 10-year-old son listened as Mr. Hall spoke of finding rotting bodies on the border and discussed fears of being attacked with “AIDS-infected blood” if the group was to rally in San Francisco.

After the meeting, members drifted outside to smoke and drink.

The boy sat nearby on the steps. Was he having a good time? a reporter asked. Yes, he said, though he was annoyed by his four younger sisters. But he was the eldest, he added, and a boy. “And boys are more important,” he said.

That night, Jeff Hall apparently went out with some of his members. He arrived home about midnight and, four hours later, the police received a call about shots fired.

The boy is expected to appear in court later this month; he has been charged as a juvenile with murder, and his public defender said he might plead insanity. The boy and a younger sister had been the subject of a bitter custody battle with Mr. Hall’s first wife, with a series of allegations of abuse on each side. But Mr. Hall had eventually been granted legal custody.

On Saturday, a group of Mr. Hall’s followers gathered in Southern California to mourn their leader. One, an N.S.M. official who asked not to be identified because of the attention Mr. Hall’s death had brought to the group, said that the rallies would continue, and that Mr. Hall’s ashes would be spread on the border during a patrol. The boy was not mentioned.

“Today was all about Jeff, how he would want us to carry on,” the official said. “Nobody was looking for answers.”

Ian Lovett and Julie Platner contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Malia Wollan from San Francisco.

    Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed; Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused, NYT, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11nazi.html

After Houston Officers Are Shot, Suspect Is Found Dead

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HOUSTON (AP) — A man opened fire on two police officers Saturday, injuring them as part of a two-hour episode that began at a downtown Houston bus station and ended with the suspect found dead in a parking garage three blocks away, officials said.

The incident began about 5:15 p.m. Saturday when a Greyhound ticket agent checked the baggage of an unidentified man, saw an exposed handgun butt and alerted an off-duty police officer working security at the station, Houston Police spokesman John Cannon said.

Officer Fernando Meza, a two-year veteran of the force, followed the man outside, demanded his bag, then used a Taser in a failed effort to subdue the man, Cannon said. Instead, the man opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun, wounding Meza in the hand.

The gunman darted across the street to a McDonald's restaurant where he encountered Officer Timothy Moore, who was responding to a report of an officer in distress. There, his first gun empty, the man pulled another gun from his bag and fired at the 12-year police force veteran, wounding him in the leg, Cannon said.

Witnesses say they saw the man apparently bleeding from a wound to his side as he fled two blocks to the Amegy Bank parking garage, beside Interstate 45, and exchanged gunfire with arriving tactical unit officers as he darted inside, Cannon said.

Police closed the interstate and tactical officers searched and cleared each level of the multilevel garage. Officers found the unidentified man dead with a gunshot wound to the head at 7:05 p.m., Cannon said.

The freeway was reopened and the man's body taken to the Harris County medical examiner's office for autopsy and identification, he said.

"There were 80 to 100 patrons in the bus station waiting room or waiting to board their buses just outside," Cannon said, adding that it was nearly miraculous that no one else was injured and that neither police officer's wound appeared to be life-threatening. "That's why Officer Meza waited until the man was outside."

    After Houston Officers Are Shot, Suspect Is Found Dead, R, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/05/07/us/AP-US-Houston-Officers-Shot-.html