Mass Shootings

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Five People Shot on I-75 in Kentucky, Officials Say

      by

      The victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. What led up to the shooting on I-75 near London, Ky., was not immediately clear.A section of a Kentucky highway was closed for several hours on Saturday night after five people were shot, the authorities said.What led up to the shooting was not immediately clear. All five shooting victims were in stable condition, said a spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office, Deputy Gilbert Acciardo.The Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that the shooting happened on I-75, which was closed at Exit 49, nine miles north of London, Ky. It said just after 6:30 p.m. that the highway was closed “due to an active shooter situation,” but did not elaborate.Randall Weddle, the mayor of London, said in a Facebook video said the authorities were searching for a “suspect or suspects” in “rugged terrain” in the northern part of Laurel County.Deputy Acciardo said helicopters and infrared scanners were being used to search for the gunman in the woods.The London Police Department said on Saturday night that a person of interest had been identified and asked the public for any information about his whereabouts. The city of London is about 90 miles south of Lexington.Just after 9:20 p.m., the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that while I-75 had reopened, the search for the suspect would continue. Angel Jarrett was working at the 49er Truck Stop when someone told her that shots had been fired nearby.Eventually, multiple police cars surrounded the truck stop near the exit where the shooting took place and placed the facility on lockdown.“We’re not allowed to go in or out,” Ms. Jarrett said. “It’s a little panicky but we’re OK. They’re surrounding us, the cops are.”Saint Joseph London, a hospital in London that is a part of CHI Saint Joseph Health, said that it had “received multiple patients and is treating them for minor injuries.”Two patients were being treated at the University of Kentucky’s Albert B. Chandler Hospital, a spokeswoman said. Their conditions were unknown.The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said on social media that it was sending agents from its Louisville office to help the State Police and local authorities “with a critical incident” near Interstate 75 in Laurel County.Yan Zhuang More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Georgia to Put School Shooting Suspect’s Parent on Trial, Testing a Novel Tactic

      by

      After four people were killed at Apalachee High School, prosecutors charged a student and his father, who officials say had given the boy the gun as a gift.In a landmark criminal case in Michigan earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents convicted in connection with killings carried out by their child in a mass shooting.Now, in the first mass school shooting in the United States since those convictions, Georgia officials appear poised to try the same tactic. On Thursday, prosecutors filed charges, including two counts of second-degree murder, against the father of the suspected gunman, saying he had provided a gun to his son “with knowledge that he was a threat to himself and others.”Such charges were all but unheard of before the Michigan case, and the Georgia prosecution will test the emerging push to hold parents responsible for mass shootings by young people.The bigger test may be whether the prospect of criminal prosecution spurs parents to do more to seek help for troubled children and to keep them away from guns in a country awash in firearms.Proponents of such prosecutions have said that charging parents can help prevent young people from carrying out such shootings. But critics say it’s a misguided effort that scapegoats parents while lawmakers fail to act to reduce gun violence. And its effectiveness as a deterrent may be limited by the deep dysfunction already at play in the families of some of the young people implicated in mass shootings.The prosecution of the Crumbleys, after their 15-year-old son killed four people in 2021 at a high school outside Detroit, was seen as a long shot. But in separate trials, the Crumbleys were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 10 years in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Father of Accused Georgia Shooter Charged With Two Counts of Second-Degree Murder

      by

      The father of the 14-year-old accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school was arrested and charged on Thursday with two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the attack, the state’s Bureau of Investigation said.The father, Colin Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, officials said at a news conference on Thursday night.The charges against Mr. Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, the bureau director, said at the news conference. He declined to provide details, including what evidence had given the authorities probable cause to charge Mr. Gray in the attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.Earlier on Thursday, Charlie Polhamus, the teenager’s maternal grandfather, said he believed his grandson was responsible for what happened, but he also cast some of the blame on the tumult in the teenager’s home life with his father, who had split from Mr. Polhamus’s daughter. “My grandson did what he did because of the environment that he lived in,” Mr. Polhamus said. When investigators looking into an online threat spoke to Mr. Gray last year, he said he had been teaching his son, then 13, about hunting and guns to divert his attention from video games. The teenager denied making the threat to “shoot up a middle school” and claimed his account on the social media platform Discord had been hacked, according to a transcript of the May 2023 interview.Mr. Gray told the investigator that he had often discussed “all the school shootings, things that happen.” He also suggested that he had emphasized the dangers of using a firearm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Tip on Georgia School Shooting Threat Last Year Led to Suspect’s Door

      by

      The teenager charged with killing four people at his Georgia high school on Wednesday denied making an online threat, and the authorities could not prove he did. He, and now his father, face murder charges.JEFFERSON, Ga. — The threat posted online last year to “shoot up a middle school” was the kind that the authorities have become all too familiar with in the United States.After receiving tips about the threat, the authorities homed in on a 13-year-old boy in Georgia, and an investigator spoke with the teenager and his father.During the conversation in May 2023, the boy, Colt Gray, assured the investigator, from the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., that he had not made the threat. He said that he had not used Discord, the social media site where the threat was posted, in months, and that he had deleted his account.“The only thing I have is TikTok, but I just go on there and watch videos,” the teenager said, according to a transcript obtained by The New York Times.The teenager’s father, Colin Gray, confided that his son had been picked on in middle school and said that he had been teaching him about firearms and the outdoors to get him away from video games.“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them,” the elder Mr. Gray said, adding that his son had recently shot his first deer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      What We Know About the Apalachee High School Shooting Victims

      by

      The shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., on Wednesday killed two teachers and two students, becoming the deadliest episode of school violence in the state’s history. At least nine others were injured.The authorities identified the dead students as two 14-year-olds, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo. The educators killed were identified as Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, officials said. Spellings of the names were not confirmed by the authorities.Law enforcement officials said in a news conference that the victims taken to the hospital were expected to make a full recovery.“Those that are deceased are heroes in my book,” said Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. “Those that are in the hospital recovering right now are heroes in my book.”Mason Schermerhorn was described by friends of his family as a lighthearted teenager who liked spending time with his family, reading, telling jokes, playing video games and visiting Walt Disney World. He had recently started at the school.“He really enjoyed life,” said Doug Kilburn, 40, a friend who has known Schermerhorn’s mother for a decade. “He always had an upbeat attitude about everything.”Louis Briscoe, a co-worker and friend of Schermerhorn’s mother, said the boy and his family were looking forward to an upcoming vacation there.When Mr. Briscoe learned about the shooting at the high school in the afternoon, he called Schermerhorn’s mother to ask if everything was OK. She told him: “Mason’s gone.”“My heart just dropped,” said Mr. Briscoe, 45. He added, “Nobody should have to go through this type of pain.”The gunman — who the authorities identified as a 14-year-old student at the school — will be charged with murder, officials said. Students heard gunfire as they barricaded themselves in classrooms.The shooting has shaken residents in Winder, which has about 18,000 residents and is roughly 50 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta.At the high school, Ms. Irimie and Mr. Aspinwall were math teachers. Mr. Aspinwall was also the football team’s defensive coordinator.David Phenix, a math special education teacher and the school’s golf coach, was injured during the shooting. Katie Phenix, his daughter, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that he was shot in the foot and hip, shattering his hip bone.“He arrived to the hospital alert and awake,” she wrote in the post, adding that he had surgery earlier that day.Kate Selig More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Demolition Crew Tears Down Texas Church Where Gunman Killed 26

      by

      The move to raze the church in Sutherland Springs, which had served as a memorial to the victims of the 2017 massacre, came over objections from some in the community.Over the past seven years, Terrie Smith had often stopped to mourn at the small church in the town of Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a U.S. Air Force veteran gunned down 26 people, including her close friend and two of her friend’s children.On Monday, when she saw an excavator at the site, her heart sank and her stomach tightened, she said. “They are going to demolish it,” she said.Despite opposition from many in town, crews began tearing down First Baptist Church, a small sanctuary in the tiny hamlet 45 miles east of San Antonio that became the scene of one of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history.The fate of the building had remained uncertain as a battle over its future played out in the courts. Though a majority of church members had voted in 2021 to raze it, with church officials expressing concern for the 100-year-old building’s structure, others filed a lawsuit claiming that not all members had been allowed to cast votes and should be given the opportunity to have their say.Early last month, a judge in Wilson County, which includes Sutherland Springs, granted a temporary restraining order halting the demolition. Only two weeks later, a different judge denied a request to extend that order, clearing the way to raze the church.Lawyers representing the families who opposed the demolition did not respond to a request for comment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Thomas Crooks, Donald Trump, and the Banality of Gun Violence

      by

      Eleven of the last 12 American presidents have endured an assassination attempt or a plot against their lives. The same is true for 20 of the country’s 45.Most of the recent plots have been foiled early, making the indelible image of Donald Trump fist-pumping in Pennsylvania seem like an atavistic monument or an ominous portent, or perhaps both. In the bedtime-story version of our national mythology, the country left behind the violence and disorder of the 1960s decades ago, for what turned out to be a wobbly but enduring peaceful equilibrium, one whose veneer began to crack only recently, with violent rhetoric rekindling over the last decade especially prominently on the right. But as David Dayen noted in The American Prospect the day after the shooting, in the 1970s Gerald Ford was shot at, and in the 1980s Ronald Reagan was actually shot; in both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s presidencies, shots were fired at the White House.Not all of these attempts were serious, but if amateur marksmanship and a chance gust of wind are what spared Donald Trump’s life last Saturday, similar vicissitudes might have ended Ford’s or Reagan’s, as well, in which case we would all be telling very different stories about the last 50 years of American history. And though we may describe the stochastic terror of the last decade in terms of ugly bumper stickers and reckless speeches, there has been real violence, not just incitement. Gabrielle Giffords was in fact shot, and almost killed; Steve Scalise, too.“America is staring into the abyss,” The Financial Times declared in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting, but often we see chaos around the corner as a way of telling ourselves it hasn’t already arrived. “No political party, movement, ideology or manner of thinking has had an absolute monopoly on this violence, and it really hasn’t mattered whether the surrounding political atmosphere was aggressive or docile,” Dayen wrote. “In our messy reality, political violence exists as a background hum.” Already, it seems, the assassination attempt has faded from the news, having hardly made a mark on the shape of the presidential race or, beyond a few ear bandages worn in showy solidarity, on the Republican National Convention which almost immediately followed.It’s not even clear whether it is right to call last weekend’s shooting an act of political violence. The attempted assassination produced only a brief flare of partisan meaning, though the motive was never clear. The gunman was a registered Republican and recognizably a conservative to classmates but not, it seems, an especially active or outraged political actor, and had not left much of a memorable ideological impression on those who knew him. He apparently donated $15 to a progressive organization in 2021, and as OSINT sleuths and self-deputized detectives argued about it over the weekend, it was striking to think how much meaning seemed to hang on a donation the size of a trip to Starbucks. When no obvious partisan explanation was immediately found, we simply moved on.Perhaps a motive will become clearer in the days ahead. But for now, there is not much more to go on, and it seems likeliest that the would-be assassin remains a kind of cipher. Like the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock before him, Thomas Crooks briefly tore a rupture in the fabric of American reality only to fill the space with a kind of silence, a mute biography and an unstated philosophy — a peculiarly American kind of terrorism in which the act of violence does not call attention to a cause greater than the shooter or generate a politically strategic backlash. Instead, it briefly elevates the profile of the man with the gun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Shooting at a Trump Rally in Pennsylvania: Maps and Photos

      by

      The Associated Press; Photograph By Doug Mills/The New York Times Former President Donald J. Trump was whisked off the stage at his rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday after gunshots were fired toward the area where he was speaking. Officials said the incident was being investigated as an assassination attempt. The rally took place on the […] More