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Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2012 20:53:06 GMT 10
Connecticut teacher kills masked teen, learns it was sonBy JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN - Associated Press | Friday, September 28, 2012 Visitors arrive at the home of Jeffrey Giuliano in New Fairfield, Connecticut, Friday, September 28, 2012. Giuliano fatally
shot a masked teenager in self-defense during what appeared to be an attempted burglary early Thursday morning,
then discovered that he had killed his son, Tyler, state police said. — Photo: Associated Press/Jessica Hill.NEW FAIRFIELD, Connecticut — A small Connecticut town was sent reeling in grief and confusion Friday after a popular fifth-grade teacher shot and killed a knife-wielding prowler in a black ski mask, only to discover it was his 15-year-old son.
No immediate charges were brought against the father, Jeffrey Giuliano, in the slaying of his son, Tyler, who was gunned down in his aunt's driveway next door to his own home around 1 a.m. Thursday.
"It's something out of a Hollywood script," said John Hodge, the first selectman, or top elected official, in the town of nearly 14,000 people about 50 miles from New York city. He said he couldn't recall another killing in his eight years on the job.
State police spokesman Lieutenant J. Paul Vance said the boy had never been in trouble with the law, and some of those who knew him described him as a good kid with an easygoing personality. Investigators and acquaintances said they were at a loss to explain what he was doing outside dressed all in black and carrying a weapon.
"Certainly, that is the major question we are trying to answer at this point," Vance said.
State police said the shooting happened after Jeffrey Giuliano got a call from his sister next door saying that someone might be trying to break into her home in their neighborhood of attractive colonial-style houses. Giuliano grabbed a handgun and went outside to investigate, troopers said.
He confronted someone in a ski mask and opened fire when the person came at him with something shiny in his hand, police said.
When police officers arrived, Tyler was lying dead in the driveway with a knife in his hand, and his father, in T-shirt and shorts, was sitting on the grass. Detectives informed the elder Giuliano several hours later that he had shot his son, Vance said.
"All in all it's a tragedy," Vance said.
Police were investigating whether the father's gun was registered.
No one answered the door at Giuliano's home or his sister's.
Tyler was a student at New Fairfield High School and a Civil Air Patrol cadet. Some of those who knew him said he enjoyed spending time with his family and flying gliders and small planes. He was adopted by Giuliano and his wife a few years ago, friends said.
One classmate said many students were baffled by what happened.
"I just thought it was so weird when I heard because I knew Tyler, not very well, but he was just a sweet person and he always made everyone laugh. I met him in the chorus room, actually, and he just wasn't the type to do what happened," said Erin Pallas, 16. "So it didn't make sense to us. It doesn't make sense to the student body."
Brett Rasile, a 14-year-old friend, said he and Tyler were playing an online game called Minecraft while talking and laughing together via Skype until about 10 p.m. Wednesday, when Tyler said he had to go to bed. Brett said Tyler wasn't in any trouble that he knew of, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
"Same old Tyler. He was perfectly fine," Brett said. "He didn't really leave any evidence, any hints towards what he would do."
Alicia Roy, New Fairfield superintendent of schools, said the elder Giuliano grew up in the town, holds summer music and zoology camps for his students and plays guitar in a local rock band that raises money for charity. He is affectionately known as "Mr. G" around Meeting House Hill School.
"He was the teacher you requested in the fifth grade. He was a great teacher. All the kids loved him," said Rosemary Rasile, Brett's mother.
Brian Wyckoff, 17, said Mr. G "was always walking around with a smile on his face. He always says hi to everyone."
The high school stayed open late to provide grief counseling for students and parents.
"The community is deeply saddened, and our hearts go out to all the family members," Roy said.• Associated Press reporter Dan Sewell reported from Cincinnati.• Pat Eaton-Robb and Stephen Singer reported from Hartford, Connecticut.• Associated Press video journalist Ted Shaffrey also contributed to this story.www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ihSOm_mKGrkRKuFbPUFreVqTfqRA?docId=49e087761dbf44ef9c227a82d2216d7d
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Post by Deleted on Dec 19, 2012 14:26:31 GMT 10
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Post by KTJ on Jul 25, 2015 19:45:52 GMT 10
from The Washington Post....Another day, another massacre — and it’s hard to explain whyBy JOEL ACHENBACH | 6:08PM EDT - Friday, July 24, 2015 ANOTHER DAY, another massacre, and once again it’s a gunman targeting strangers in a public place for no obvious reason. Each of these mass shootings, or rampage shootings, or “active shooter” events, has its special element of horror, whether it’s racism or misogyny or sheer randomness. In this case, the victims were doing nothing more exotic than watching the new Amy Schumer movie, “Trainwreck”.
The killer sat behind them, alone in the dark. Then the shooting began.
Authorities in Lafayette, Louisiana, identified the shooter as a 59-year-old drifter from Alabama who had been staying at a nearby motel. He killed two people and wounded nine others before taking his own life.
It has been three years since a similar tragedy occurred, when a mentally troubled and heavily armed PhD student opened fire at a midnight showing of a new “Batman” movie in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. Since then, the United States has seen a number of shootings in public places with elements that seemed designed for maximum shock value.
Their unpredictable nature creates the sense that we’re all caught in a great national crossfire. The motives have been all over the place. So have the locations: a historic African American church, a military recruiting office and now a cinema, just in the past few weeks. The killers have shot up colleges, elementary schools, restaurants, shopping malls and government offices.
“With these types of incidents, everyone and anyone could be the next victim. And there’s really nowhere we’re safe out in the public — or at least that is the perception,” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama who has studied what he prefers to call “rampage shooters”.
The mass shootings are paradoxical in the broader picture of crime in America: The murder rate nationally has been halved in the past two decades. But homicides with four or more victims have held basically steady. Then there are these special “active shooter” events, which appear to be on the rise.
A 2014 FBI study of 160 active-shooter events since 2000 showed a staggered increase over time, with the four most violent years occurring in the last five years of the survey. Criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University has questioned the rigor of the FBI calculation, saying it may be influenced by media reports. But if this is a real trend and not a fluke — a spike that will be followed by a drop in such incidents — then it is one not easily explained. This appears to be an emergent phenomenon with no single cause and no simple fix.
With so many motives in play, it’s hard to know how to screen potential mass shooters, said Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University who specializes in criminal psychology.
“We’re playing whack-a-mole with these things,” Ferguson said.
Some of the shooting rampages in the past two decades have had a narcissistic element, said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of “The Narcissism Epidemic”.
She cited the 1999 Columbine massacre, in which one of the killers talked in a video about getting “the respect we’re going to deserve,” and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, where the killer paused early in the episode to mail a media package to NBC News.
“It’s not just a crime, it’s not just homicide, it’s this attention-seeking that seems to play a key role in these mass shootings,” Twenge said.
In the world of crime statistics, an incident with a total of three dead, including the gunman, wouldn’t traditionally qualify as a “mass shooting”, even though that’s exactly what the Lafayette shooting was. The standard has traditionally been four dead, but a federal law passed in 2013, after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, changed the statistical standard to three deaths.
The common element in mass shootings is, by definition, the use of firearms. Some of the killers have been “pseudocommandos” who have used multiple weapons. The political establishment has taken no action on gun laws in recent years, however, because the electoral math has inhibited efforts to challenge the gun lobby.
The orthodoxy among political advisers for candidates is that no one votes for a candidate because of his or her support for gun control laws, but lots of people will vote against him or her for that single reason. The National Rifle Association continues to take a hard-line stance on gun rights and the Second Amendment, and it can back up that position with muscle at the polls.
President Obama thought he could push through gun legislation after the Sandy Hook shooting, but he and his allies got nowhere on the issue. Just hours before the Lafayette theater shooting, Obama told the BBC that the area where he has been “most frustrated and most stymied” in his tenure is on the gun issue.
“The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings,” Obama said.
Frustration isn’t a plan, though, and the criminologists say there are steps the United States could take that might indirectly limit these kinds of active-shooter incidents, even though it might be hard to measure success.
Ferguson, the Stetson professor, said the United States should provide more access to long-term mental health care. Most people with mental illness are not violent. But it’s the right thing to do in any case, he said. Lankford, the University of Alabama professor, noted that suicidal tendencies are a common thread in many active-shooter cases.
“It’s clear that social isolation is a risk factor for suicidal behavior in general. Having real friends — close, face-to-face friends — those people can be moderating forces on your moods. They can help you get treatment if you really need it,” Lankford said.
These ideas were echoed Friday by Fox, the Northeastern professor and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder”. Fox said there’s no way to screen society for mass killers; they’re just too rare, and their actions are too unpredictable. “It’s a matter of a very large haystack and very few needles,” Fox said.
The killers “tend to be people who are failures,” he said. “They failed at jobs, they failed at education, they failed at marriages, and their ability to cope with life’s frustrations begins to wear thin. They’re isolated. They don’t have a lot of close friends around to serve as a support system or a reality check.”
That suggests to Fox something that everyone can do to make a marginal difference in the violence that afflicts the nation: We can get to know our neighbors again. We can connect in real life and not just online. We can help people who obviously need it.
“We oftentimes try to avoid people who seem angry, because we don’t know what to say and what to do. That’s the wrong move,” Fox said. “We can try to restore the sense of community in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in society more generally.”• Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk and on the “Achenblog”.__________________________________________________________________________ Read more on this topic:
• ‘Why did he come here?’: Police search for Louisiana shooter’s motive
• A reminder that mass shootings are happening more often
• How the NRA’s true believers converted a marksmanship group into a mighty gun lobby
• Colorado shootings add chapter to long, unpredictable story of U.S. mass murder
• There have been 204 mass shootings — and 204 days — in 2015 so far
• The life of victim Jillian Johnsonwww.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/another-day-another-mass-shooting-americans-are-caught-in-a-crossfire/2015/07/24/1c3b01dc-3225-11e5-97ae-30a30cca95d7_story.html
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