Piece Of Art

On the half-month anniversary of the NIU shootings, the volume of rampage-style shootings and school violence stories have been on the increase. Yesterday, February 27, 2008, was no exception, with new incidents in Tennessee, Arkansas, and California, sweeping across the nation, from time zone to time zone. Here is a summary of yesterday's events: At Bristol, Tennessee, at 11 a.m., on Wednesday, February 27, Rusty L. Rumley, 26, fatally shot four people at a public housing complex, Edgemont Towers on Ash Street, before dying by suicide. The police initially said Rumley was captured shortly after the shooting when he crashed his car about 20 miles away. A short time later they said he was dead and had apparently shot himself. Bristol, considered to be the "Birthplace of Country Music," is on the Virginia-Tennessee border. At Little Rock, Arkansas, at 2:10 p.m., on February 27th, shots were fired in a parking lot near University Theatre and Stabler Hall, hitting a young ...

As the half-month anniversary of the Valentine's Day shootings approaches on February 28th, a potential date for copycats, campus alerts have occurred in the wake of the Northern Illinois University event. Two-week, one-month, first-year, and then on-going annual anniversaries are worthy of extreme caution for educational and law enforcement officials. Here are examples of a few recent campus scares: At Jersey City, New Jersey, St. Peter's College locked down its campus for several hours on February 20, 2008, after the discovery of a message threatening violence at the Jesuit school. At 10:40 a.m., campus security became aware of the handwritten note, taped in the stairwell of an administration and classroom building on the 3,000-student campus. The note referenced the Virginia Tech killings. No danger was found in a massive search of the campus, and an all-clear was called shortly before 3:00 pm. In Louisville, Kentucky, also on February 20th, Fern Creek Traditional High Sc...

Hours before school stabbings left two students dead in China , coincidentally in California, two people were stabbed at a Fullerton theater during a film about brainwashed killers. The stabbings took place approximately 45 minutes into the showing of the R-rated suspense/horror motion picture, The Signal . The suspect, who was described as a white male, fled out of one of the back doors. The assailant was noted to be a heavy set white man in his late to mid 20s, 5 feet 10 inches tall, with black hair. "The suspect is still outstanding," Fullerton police Sgt. Jason Schoen said early Tuesday. Orange County Register reporter Denisse Salazar wrote : Two men were stabbed and injured Sunday night while watching a horror film at the AMC Theater in Fullerton during what appears to be a random attack, police say. Shortly before 7:30 p.m., officers were sent to the theater at 1000 S. Lemon St. after someone reported finding a bag with what appeared to be illegal substances, said Full...

"I call it the death cult of Columbine," Loren Coleman, author of The Copycat Effect , said to The Chicago Tribune . "It lives on in YouTube, in MySpace, in special sites and in all kinds of ways we might otherwise call inappropriate." This is the era of a new kind of suicide note, pushed along in cyberspace by keyboards and by texting. Steve Johnson, the Internet critic of the Chicago Tribune , interviewed me extensively last week about Steven Kazmierczak's presence on the web. We discussed how I discovered more about the NIU killer than was being released in the mainstream press, including his identity, his reviews, his work background, his possible teenage abuses, and other items mentioned here at this blog or others. I talked about how this has created another dimension to the copycat effect phenomenon among school shooters. Hastily and sometimes harshly written goodbye paper notes by someone dying by suicide, research has shown, have been found to exist onl...

To place the breaking news of today's school stabbing in context, I have created a summary list of recent Japanese and Chinese stabbings. A significant cluster occurred in China during the last half of 2004. June 8, 2001 ~ Ikeda, Osaka, Japan 8 dead, 15 injured ~ Osaka school massacre. Armed with a kitchen knife, a 37-year-old former janitor Mamoru Takuma trespassed into Ikeda Elementary School attached to Osaka-Kyoiku University and stabbed school children and teachers. Eight children were killed and 15 wounded, among those were 13 children and two teachers. June 1, 2004 ~ Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan 1 dead ~ An 11-year-old student, identified only as "Girl A," killed, with a knife, a 12-year-old classmate, Satomi Mitarai, at the Okubo Elementary School. August 4, 2004 ~ Beijing, China 1 dead, 17 injured ~ Xu Heping, a 51-year-old doorman with a history of mental illness, stabbed several students and teachers in Beijing University's Number One Hospital, killing a child...

A school attack has occurred Monday in China that has left three dead and four injured. It ended in the suicide of the attacker, as frequently happens in North America. But unlike USA school shootings, the event was carried out through the use of a knife. Knives and hatchets are a common method for lethal Asian school invasions of suicidal individuals, as gun control laws preclude firearms being employed. The attack took place this evening, February 25, 2008, at a Guangzhou school in the Leizhou city of south China's Guangdong Province. The news agency Xinhua gives these further details, via editor Yan Liang: A young man named Chen Wenzhen broke into Leizhou No. 2 Middle School at around 7:35 p.m. [on Monday] killed a boy and a girl of Senior Two with his knife and injured four before he stabbed his own abdomen and jumped off the fifth floor, said Zheng Jiu, the school headmaster....The four injured, including three students and a teacher who tried to stop the killing, were bei...

Revealing of the hidden and the covert, the twilight language of school shooters, could prevent future tragic incidents. Late in the afternoon of February 20, 2008, Mike Nizza posted at his blog, "The Lede: Notes on the News" at The New York Times , a short essay entitled "After Illinois Shooting Rampage, a Cold Digital Trail." Nizza wrote, in part: The hunt for digital clues in the latest school shooting got off to a promising start last Friday. Hours before the police or news organizations identified the gunman, Loren Coleman of the Copycat Effect took tidbits plotted by a Chicago Tribune article and quickly connected them using the Web. “Matching the two, you find it is Steve Kazmierczak,” he wrote. “I expect an in-depth examination of Kazmierczak’s visible internet life within hours.” But the trail went cold without any major discoveries. No hints to Mr. Kazmierczak’s motive, no explanation for why a well-liked graduate student decided to open fire on a lectur...

Bill O'Reilly (on the right) who only recently has thrown around the word " lynching " in conjunction to Michelle Obama, may allegedly have been part of the reason for the rage inside the man who turned his guns on the students at Northern Illinois University on Valentine's Day. Apparently undiscovered by most investigators or even Bill O'Reilly observer Keith Olbermann (on the left, above) of MSNBC's "Countdown," the NIU shooter Steve Kazmierczak wrote a critique of O'Reilly's book Culture Warrior online, giving a clue as to things that set him off. Kazmierczak did leave behind some Internet footprints, after all. He was a reviewer of a few items, such as the O'Reilly book, at Amazon.com. Here is what Kazmierczak wrote on January 1, 2008, about O'Reilly's tome, which campus shooter Kazmierczak gave just two stars out of five: The main problem I have with Culture Warrior is that O'Reilly writes like he talks-in short talkin...

On February 9th, I wrote: "Look for major surprises in school shootings and similar mass rampages...." On February 14th, the NIU campus shooting occurred. More events are coming. Will an assassination attempt be next? Another rampage shooting? I have a strong track record for predicting. What do I see on the horizon? Few take notice. Dates A blogger at Circle of 13, however, quoted me heavily on Sunday, February 17, 2008, in "Valentine's Massacre (Again) In Illinois" : Loren Coleman...noticed a change in pattern. “Change is in the air. And danger,” he wrote on Feb. 9, 2008. There have been “shifts in rampage shootings.” And, warned Coleman, “Look for major surprises in school shootings and similar mass rampages for this spring, unfortunately. Look again, too, to the months of March and April, with the red zone of the ten days from April 16 through April 26, 2008, as especially dangerous.” ( “Shootings Shatter Gender Barrier,” by Loren Coleman. ) Coleman's “...

The NIU shootings have caused an outpouring of wall-to-wall coverage, complete with conflicting theories about the shooter being on drugs, off drugs, abusing video games, practicing with a specific game, and, of course, about less guns in general vs more guns (as in students being defensively armed). In the beginning, everything from shouting the breaking news to screening archival footage of Columbine, VA Tech, and even Charles Whitman at the Texas Tower on your television set were thrown at you in this visual mix. Then the "blame game" began in earnest, especially at faux news locations. (The videos below are mere examples of the recent state of affairs.) Despite all the claims you will find on television or in blogs that (1) "every school shooting" since Columbine has involved young men on meds, (2) only since drugs being used for psychological problems have there been school shootings, and (3) all these drugs make people suicidal, none of those absolute claim...

Remarkably, authorities have increasingly ignored the obvious links between the suicide cluster deaths sweeping Bridgend, Wales. Reporters from the UK have talked with me often about the situation. Last Monday, I was interviewed by Times Educational Supplement correspondent Madeleine Brettingham, who is writing an essay on the situation. Other articles continue to appear as the sad toll of death mounts. On 17 February 2008, Scotland On Sunday published an article entitled "As the suicides of these two cousins brings the toll to 16 in one small area, a shocked community is asking why them?" by Dani Garivelli. The article reads, in part: It was the news the people of Bridgend least wanted to hear. In a town where suicide seems to be spreading like a contagion, two more young people had taken their own lives within hours of each other. Kelly Stephenson, 20, was found dead in a locked room on holiday in Kent on Valentine's Day. She had just been told her cousin Nathaniel P...

Lots of attention, needless to say, is being given by the media to the Northern Illinois University shootings on Valentine's Day. I've posted my thoughts about that so-called "rampage": here , here , and here . Besides all the other "Valentine's Dangers," there is another case worth mentioning that centers on this date. It will be recalled that Stayner carried out his initial murder spree (or at least the one we know about) over Valentine's weekend in 1999, and used Bigfoot to talk to the park ranger he killed. The following was sent to me by a relative (I'll withhold the name) of Yosemite Killer Cary Anthony Stayner . Stayner said he saw Bigfoot and sent me drawings of it. This following note, at some level, is downright chilling: I would like to add as a family member to Carey Stayner, as long as I could remember Carey was out running [and] climbing mountains. I remember when he first had told me and my brother of what he had seen [the Big...

My book, The Copycat Effect , is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, who died in a Valentine's Day murder-suicide. I penned that dedication this way: For Nellie Gray, The grandmother I never knew, as she was killed during a murder-suicide on Valentine’s Day, 1940. In my book I wrote an entire section entitled the "Significant of Dates," and began with one special example, St. Valentine's Day. I reprint below what you will find in my 2004 book about February 14th on pages 246-247: Dates are important, anniversary events especially so. Suicides, murder-suicides, murders tend to clump around dates of loss for at-risk victims. One such date is one that most people assume should be associated with happy feelings, but it is not. That is Valentine’s Day. For many people, it’s a day that speaks more to emptiness and loss than to joy and love. One cultural event seems to point to this feeling: the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” of February 14, 1929, in Chicago. On this day ...

From hints of information noted in the media, the NIU shooter must allegedly be the former Academic Criminal Justice Association Vice-President Steve Kazmierczak. In an overnight Chicago Tribune article, you will find that it gives enough data about the shooter, without giving his id away, for anyone using the net to find his true identity. The shooter, we are told, was the VP of the above association and the coauthor of a paper on prison self-injury (what is called "parasuicides" in my field). That paper is: Thomas, Jim, Margaret Leaf, Steve Kazmierczak, and Josh Stone. 2006. "Self-Injury in Correctional Settings: 'Pathology' of Prisons or of Prisoners?" Criminology and Public Policy 5(1):193-202. Matching the two, you find it is Steve Kazmierczak. The paper describes Steve Kazmierczak thusly: "Beginning graduate work at Northern Illinois University. In addition to his interests in corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice, he is ...

Another painful anniversary created: Six people are dead in February 14th's Northern Illinois University shooting, including the shooter. There have been 22 casualties in all. Updated information has clarified some details. The gunman turned the gun on himself on the stage at Cole Hall. All of the victims are students, including the instructor of the class, who is a graduate teaching assistant. The class being taught was a course in the Geology department, an introductory section in ocean science. A total of 162 students are enrolled in the course, but only 100 or so were in the 400-person lecture hall (later reports say 200-person) at the time of the shooting. Witnesses say the gunman came from behind a curtain at the front of the hall and started firing from the stage, targeting the instructor first. Police have identified the suspect but have yet to name him, as of 10:00 pm ET on February 14, 2008. During Spring 2007, the shooter was enrolled as a graduate student in sociolo...

I began writing a blog this morning about "school shootings", and was adding more as this just came in... This Thursday afternoon, CNN is reporting that at least 15 people have been shot and several injured at Northern Illinois University outside Chicago. The gunman who opened fire in a lecture hall is dead according to DeKalb police, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting. The lecture hall is Cole Hall, reports say. The shooting occured shortly after 3 p.m. ET. The shooter was carrying a shotgun and a pistol. The University has ordered its student body to seek shelter and canceled classes on this Valentine's Day, 2008. "Its has been confirmed that there has been a shooting on campus and several people have been taken away by ambulance," the school said in a posting on its DeKalb campus Web site. "All classes are canceled on the DeKalb campus. People are urged not to come to campus." DeKalb is 65 miles west of downtown Chicago and 45 minutes southeast of...

Change is in the air. And danger. The Louisiana Tech killing of two nursing students destroys the recent truism that male shooters were the only ones who have carried out fatal rampages in schools and colleges in the last dozen years. After September 11, 2001, the race and ethnicity of the so-called "classic school rampage killers" have changed from only rural and suburban white youth. Now this new event breaks the invisible gender barrier. Additionally, in the last two years, a major change in school shootings has been to that of a sprinkling of older males who are using the "fishbowl" of educational settings to carry out their deathly attacks, which often have as a component mass hostage situations, as well. Now a little-acknowledged earthquake has occurred with a woman being the suicidal shooter. On Friday, February 8, 2008, at Baton Rouge, two Louisiana Technical College students, Karsheika Graves, 21, and Taneshia Butler, 26, both of Baton Rouge, were kille...

Two mass shootings, a school invasion, and overseas rampages in the last 24 hours appear to indicate something is in the air, and now this... BULLETIN: Woman Opens Fire at LA College ~ BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A woman shot at least two people then turned the gun on herself Friday morning at Louisiana Technical College, police said. Few details were available. Cpl. L'Jean McKneely said he did not know how many people were shot or whether any of the shootings were fatal. More details: At 8:30 am., a female went into a classroom and began firing. Two females were killed, and then the shooter killed herself. Update: Saturday, February 9, 2008. See the blog following for more on the Baton Rouge shooting. Later on Friday, it was learned that a Greenville (South Carolina) Techical College student wounded himself with a self-inflicted gunshot. Officials said 19-year-old Chris Ronoke shot himself in the leg in a dorm room. When he is released from the hospital, he'll be charged for th...

Heath Ledger did not officially die of a suicide. However, his method of playing the Joker role in The Dark Knight may have contributed to his need for the sleeping pills that resulted in his fatal overdose. "Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine," New York City's medical examiner's spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said in a statement on February 6, 2008. In other words, Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs that included painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. The drugs are the generic names for the OxyContin painkiller, the anti-anxiety drug Valium, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and the sleep aids Restoril and Unisom. One media outlet (CBS) in New York reported that hydrocodone is another name for ibuprofen, but that is incorrect information. Hydrocodone or dihydrocodeinone is a semi-synthetic opioid derived from two ...