Kansas Jewish Center Shooting Suspect Identified as Former KKK Leader
The 73-year-old man charged with murder in the shooting at a Jewish community center and retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas, that left three people dead is reportedly the former Grand Dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Fraiser Glenn Cross Jr., of Aurora, Mo., was taken into custody in the parking lot of an elementary school near the scene of the shootings, and was booked on a charge of first degree murder, according to the Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff’s Office.
Cross is an alias for Frasier Glenn Miller, the former KKK leader, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In a statement released Sunday night, the SPLC said it was able to identify Cross as Miller after a phone conversation with Miller’s wife, Marge, in which she told them police had come to her home and told her that her husband had been arrested in the shootings.
The address listed by the sheriff’s office for Cross is the same address Frazier Glenn Miller used when filing candidate papers to run for Congress in Missouri in 2006 and when he sued the secretary of state for refusing to let him on the ballot.
Among the three people killed in the shootings were a 14-year-old Eagle Scout and his grandfather, according to the family of the two.
“It is with deep sadness that we confirm the tragic loss of Dr. William Lewis Corporon and Reat Griffin Underwood (Losen) who died as a result of the injuries they sustained in today’s shooting at the Jewish Community Center. Dr. Corporon was Reat’s Grandfather, whom he loved very much,” said a statement signed “Will Corporon, Son and Uncle.”
The two were shot at the town’s Jewish Community Center, Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said. One died at the scene and the other died after being taken to a hospital, he said.
The third victim was a woman who was shot at Village Shalom retirement community, Douglass said. She died on the scene.
It was believed the shooter fired at two other people, but neither was hit, the police chief said.
“We have no indication that he knew the victims,” Douglass said.
“We’re investigating it as a hate crime, we’re investigating it as a criminal act, we haven’t ruled out anything,” Overland Park Police Chief John Douglass said.
“There was a shotgun that was involved,” he said. “We are exploring the possibility that a handgun was involved in the shooting at the two persons that he missed, and we are looking at the possibility of an assault rifle.”
According to the family statement, Underwood was a freshman at Blue Valley High School, and participated in debate, theatre “and had a beautiful voice. Reat had a passion for life, and touched so many people in his young age.” He was an Eagle Scout and “loved spending time camping and hunting with his Grandfather, Father, and brother,” the statement said.
Corporon practiced family medicine in Marlow and Duncan, Okla., from 1976 through 2003, before moving with his wife to the Kansas City area to be closer to their grandchildren, the statement said.
Police had still not released the identities of the victims late this evening, but Rev. Adam Hamilton of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood said the two male victims were members of the church.
Hamilton led prayers for the victims’ family this afternoon during Palm Sunday services.
The Jewish Community Center confirmed the shooting on its Facebook page and said it occurred near the Lewis and Shirley White Theater entrance and that the building was put on lockdown. According to the center’s website, a production of “To Kill a Mockingbird” was scheduled to start at 2 p.m.
1 dead in shooting at Purdue University; 1 person in custody
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One person was fatally shot Tuesday afternoon on Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus, prompting a large-scale police response, officials told Fox News.
A suspect has been taken into police custody and police say there is no threat of another gunman. The suspect and the victim were identified as two males. The suspect’s only intention was to shoot the one victim at the Electrical Engineering Building on campus, police said at a press conference. The suspect walked out of the building and was met by police. There was an all clear issued later at the school.
The shooting prompted a swift police response and a mobile command center was assembled across from where the reported shooting occurred.
Later, a spokeswoman from the school told Fox News that there is no other threat on campus and tweeted, “The EE building remains closed by police, other campus buildings are now open & the shelter in place order has been lifted.”
The Journal and Courier reported that a male was removed from the building with his hands behind his back. Two students told the paper that they might have heard two shots. Two students told the paper they saw someone who appeared to have blood on their hands.
Students described a chaotic scene when the first report came in.
Julissa Martinez, a freshman nursing student from Portage, said she was in psychology class on another part of campus when she received the text message saying the university was on lockdown. She said her professor briefly kept teaching, then stopped lecturing so that students could contact people to let them know they were safe.
“He tried to get everything under control because people were freaking out,” she said.
She said students were nervous because there was a lot of speculation about the severity of the situation.
“It was scary because you hear about it, but you never expect it to happen on your campus,” Martinez said.
Senior Saran Mishra, editor of the Purdue Exponent, the campus newspaper, said some students reported hearing fire alarms and were told to evacuate.
“Right now I’m still in shock,” he said.
Television footage from the scene shows a fire truck and several law enforcement vehicles around the building. The building is in the middle of campus and across from the administration building housing President Mitch Daniels’ office.
Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said in a statement that the Indiana State Police are on the scene and will continue to assist local law enforcement with the ongoing investigation.
ROSWELL, N.M. — It was supposed to be like any other day.
Students escaping New Mexico’s chilly temperatures congregated in the Berrendo Middle School gym before class started. Then, 13-year-old students Evan James and Kayla Koren, standing on opposite sides of the gym, heard a loud pop.
When they looked up, they saw blood and a fellow student on the floor, the victim of a gunshot wound to the face. A 12-year-old classmate holding a 22-gauge sawed-off shotgun stood nearby.
“I just saw blood everywhere,” Essance Sosa, 12, said Tuesday. “Everyone started screaming and running.”
Witnesses say that for the next 10 seconds or so, panic engulfed the gym and, eventually, the entire Roswell school Tuesday. Word began to spread that a student had opened fire, injuring a male and female student. Those who could quickly texted parents and friends, and worried family members began frantically calling the school.
An 11-year-old boy was critically injured and a 13-year-old girl was in stable condition.
Officials credit John Masterson, an eighth-grade social studies teacher, with saving lives as he immediately stepped in and talked the boy into dropping his weapon. Masterson then held him until authorities arrived.
“He stood there and allowed the gun to be pointed right at him,” Gov. Susana Martinez told a packed room of 1,500 or so people at a prayer vigil late Tuesday, “so there would be no more young kids hurt.”
Officials also credit previous “active shooter” drills by Roswell Independent School District for preparing teachers and students, who say they were ready for what happened Tuesday morning. Students say they even thought the shooting was a surprise drill at first.
“I thought it was a drill. I really did,” James said. “Then, I realized it wasn’t.”
Officials at University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, said an 11-year-old boy was flown there in critical condition and a 13-year-old girl arrived in serious condition.
The governor said late Tuesday that the boy had undergone a second surgery. She identified the girl as Kendal Sanders, 13, and said her condition had been upgraded to stable. She was shot in the right shoulder, Martinez told an earlier news conference.
Martinez said the family of the injured boy has asked that his name not be released while he recovers.
Investigators still aren’t sure why the boy, who has not been named by authorities or formally charged, opened fire. Authorities said the boy sneaked the shotgun onto campus through a bag or musical instrument case.
State Police Chief Pete Kassetas disputed a report from a hospital spokesman who said nurses treating the boy indicated he was the shooter’s target. He said a motive still is not known.
“We just don’t have a lot of information,” Kassetas told reporters late Tuesday.
The suspected shooter was transferred to an Albuquerque psychiatric hospital following a hearing Tuesday, according to attorney Robert Gorence, who is representing his family. Gorence said the family would release a statement Wednesday.
Witnesses told CBS Albuquerque, N.M. affiliate KRQE-TV the suspect was a nice kid and a member of the school football team, and neighbors say he was a good kid who liked music.
Kassetas said authorities have issued search warrants for the boy’s locker, his bag and his parents’ home. He said he did not know what had been found by late Tuesday. They’re not yet sure where the boy got the gun.
Police expect to interview about 100 students about the shooting, KRQE reports. As of Tuesday night, they’d spoken with about 60 students, the station says.
During the prayer vigil at the Roswell Convention Center hours after the shooting, an emotional crowd gathered to sing and hug as pastors spoke of healing and forgiveness. Pastors urged residents to pray for the suspected shooter.
“No superintendent ever wants to go through something like this,” Roswell Superintendent Tom Burris said. “If you ever do, you want to have a strong community like here in Roswell,” which is a center for ranching and farming and has a population of about 50,000.
Before the vigil, an emotional Martinez spoke to students who witnessed the shooting and urged them to talk to counselors and “let it out.”
That’s what she told James, who listened and nodded.
“We’re all in shock,” Koren said. “I’m never going to forget what I saw.”
It was, reports KRQE, a very emotional morning in Roswell.
After police put the school on lockdown, they notified the students’ parents to pick their kids up at a local mall.
Hundreds of parents rushed to the mall parking lot and waited for their kids to be shuttled by bus to safety. Those parents huddled around praying as they waited for their sons and daughters to arrive.
Family members were finally reunited with their loved ones at around 10 a.m., nearly two hours after the shooting.
“As you’re standing there and you’re waiting to pick up your son, seeing the faces of the children coming out and tears and scared it just breaks your heart to see these kids at such a young age to have to witness and be a part of such a tragedy,” Cathy Seely remarked to KRQE.
Nevada school shooting 911 call: ‘I got a kid down who’s been shot’
By Holly Yan. Michael Pearson and Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
updated 8:59 AM EDT, Wed October 23, 2013
(CNN) — “This is a student at Sparks Middle School. Can you please send police out here? There’s a kid with a gun.”
“Somebody brought a gun to school. They shot a teacher.”
“I got a kid down who’s been shot.”
As police tried to piece together how and why a seventh-grader shot and killed a teacher and wounded two other students at his Nevada school, recordings of the first calls to police captured the horror and chaos he unleashed.
The 12-year-old boy, whose name has not been released, began by shooting a fellow student in the shoulder, police said Tuesday. Then he turned his gun on math teacher Mike Landsberry before shooting a second student in the abdomen, Washoe County School District Police Chief Mike Mieras said.
After that, he shot himself to death with his pistol, which Sparks Deputy Police Chief Tom Miller identified as a Ruger 9mm semiautomatic.
“We got a guy with a gun. He’s down from a head shot wound. Could be our shooter,” one of the responding officers is heard telling dispatchers on the 911 calls. “He’s out there on the basketball court.”
Teacher dead in Nevada school shooting
Landsberry walked toward the shooter on a playground basketball court after the first student was hit, saving lives, according to authorities.
“Mr. Landsberry’s heroic actions, by stepping toward the shooter, allowed time for other students in the playground area to flee,” Mieras said.
Despite previous reports indicating the two wounded students had been shot inside the school building, all the shots were fired outside, police said.
Miller, who said earlier on CNN’s “New Day” that it wasn’t yet clear if the boy was targeting specific people, declined to identify the boy out of respect for his family.
“They are grieving parents and are going through” a challenging, difficult time, Miller said.
‘I think he took out his bullying’
Authorities haven’t said why they believe the boy opened fire.
Many have speculated that bullying might have played a role, 13-year-old Kyle Nucum told CNN’s “The Lead.”
That could be the case, said Nucum, a student at Sparks Middle School who didn’t know the shooter but ran for cover after seeing him shoot Landsberry. As he fled, he heard the shooter shouting.
“He was yelling a bunch of things while we were running,” Nucum said. “He was yelling stuff like, ‘Why are you laughing at me? Why are you doing this to me?'”
Before Monday morning, the boy seemed like the antithesis of a school shooter.
“He was really a nice kid,” schoolmate Amaya Newton said. “He would make you smile when you were having a bad day.”
But for whatever reason, the boy took his parents’ handgun to school, a federal law enforcement source said. Miller said Tuesday that authorities aren’t positive where the gun came from, but believe it belonged to the boy’s parents.
Amaya said she thought the two wounded students were friends of the shooter. They were in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries Monday night, Miller said.
Authorities have not released the wounded boys’ names.
Investigators haven’t determined what prompted the shooting. Miller said only that police are exploring all avenues.
Amaya said she “saw him getting bullied a couple of times, and I think he took out his bullying.”
Sparks Middle School Compassion Fund
Community Foundation of Western Nevada
Surviving Afghanistan, but not school
The teacher who died, Mike Landsberry, appeared to be trying to stop the incident when he was shot dead, Miller said Tuesday.
“It almost appears like he tried to talk him down,” he said.
Slain Nevada teacher ‘put his life on the line’
True to his character, the former Marine, a popular math teacher at Sparks Middle School, rushed to help others when the shots erupted.
“That was the kind of person that Michael was,” said his brother, Reggie Landsberry. “He was the kind of person that if somebody needed help, he would be there.”
Landsberry was an Alabama native who graduated from high school in Reno, next door to Sparks, in 1986. After his stint in the Marine Corps, he got an education degree from the University of Nevada in Reno. He joined the Air National Guard in 2001, rising to the rank of master sergeant and serving as a cargo specialist in Kuwait and Afghanistan, the Guard said.
Teacher killed in Nevada school shooting was ‘good all-around guy’
Returning to a national debate
The Nevada shooting comes almost a year after a gunman killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, igniting a nationwide debate over gun violence and school safety.
Since the Newtown shootings last December, proposed school security plans across the country have included adding armed security guards and bringing in bulletproof backpacks and white boards.
Some teachers have started taking self-defense and combat classes in case a shooter enters their school. One class teaches how to escape or take cover but focuses most of its four hours on how to fight and disarm an attacker — something few educators have ever considered how to do.
Meanwhile, reports of school violence have continued.
Last week, a student at an Austin, Texas, high school killed himself in front of other students.
In August, a student at a high school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, shot and wounded another student in the neck.
Another shooting took place at an Atlanta-area middle school in January, though no one was hit.
That same month, a California high school student wounded two people, one seriously.
Teachers train to face school shooters
The mother of a student killed in Newtown said Monday’s shooting reinforces the need to find solutions to keep students safe.
“The unthinkable has happened yet again, this time in Sparks, Nevada,” Nicole Hockley said in a written statement. “It’s moments like this that demand that we unite as parents to find common sense solutions that keep our children — all children — safe, and prevent these tragedies from happening again and again.”
Three Students Are Shot Near Pittsburgh School
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: November 13, 2013
Three students were shot near a Pittsburgh high school minutes after dismissal on Wednesday, and police officers who surrounded two nearby homes took six people into custody for questioning.
None of the injuries were life-threatening, the authorities said. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said the shooting appeared to be “a targeted incident” rather than a random spree. A police spokeswoman, Diane Richard, said school security officers believed it was retaliation after a fight that led to a lockdown last month.
The victims, a 15-year-old and two 17-year-old males, attend Brashear High School, the city’s largest. One was shot in the leg, a second in the neck and shoulder, and the third was grazed in the head, Ms. Richard said. The victim wounded in the head staggered back to campus, where administrators pulled him inside.
The police surrounded the school and searched the nearby woods before converging on two houses, taking five young men and a young woman into custody. The authorities said that the victims were not cooperating.
Stopped in 80 Seconds: Armed Response
Posted on December 20, 2013
Last week’s tragic shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, left one student in critical condition. The perpetrator, a senior at the school, was reported to have randomly shot 17-year-old Claire Davis as she sat innocently in the hallway. As bad as that was, things could have been much worse.
Information released this week indicates that the perpetrator was planning a much larger attack and was armed with a shotgun, about 125 rounds of ammunition, three Molotov cocktails and a machete.
According to a CNN story, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said of the shooter, “His intent was evil, and his evil intent was to harm multiple individuals.”
On his arm, the perpetrator had written in indelible ink five classroom numbers and a phrase in Latin that translates to “the die has been cast,” according to the sheriff’s office.
But as reported in the Washington Times, the attacker’s mission was stopped short by the quick response of an armed deputy sheriff who was working as a resource officer at the school. Upon learning of the threat, the deputy ran from the cafeteria to the library, yelling for people to get down and identifying himself as a deputy sheriff. The horrific incident lasted only a total of 80 seconds and ended with the shooter turning his gun on himself in the library as the deputy was closing in on him.
“We know for a fact that the shooter knew that the deputy was in the immediate area and, while the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life,” Sheriff Robinson said. Robinson said the deputy’s response was “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself.
During a December 15 appearance on Face the Nation, Gov. Hickenlooper, was forced to admit that the very gun control bills he signed into law–and which resulted in the historic recalls of two state senators and the resignation of a third to avoid the same fate–did not make “a difference at all” in the school shooting.
“So things like universal background checks, I think they are going to make us safer, but in this specific case aren’t going to make a difference at all. And that’s the challenge,” Hickenlooper said.
What does make a difference is an armed response; but it only works in a situation where properly secured firearms are available onsite to be used by responsible, proficient, courageous people–in other words, the good guys.
A Cleveland.com story concludes that school shooters aren’t interested in a fight; they’re interested in soft targets that will leave them in control of the situation long enough to accomplish their evil deed.
In this case, the perpetrators was met instead with a hard target–an armed, qualified security presence that was ready and willing to stop him–and did so in just 80 seconds.
Gun-control laws didn’t stop a possible massacre at Arapahoe High School. A good guy with a gun stopped the rampage and in doing so almost certainly prevented much greater harm. For that, we can all be thankful.
Posted on December 20, 2013
Last week’s tragic shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, left one student in critical condition. The perpetrator, a senior at the school, was reported to have randomly shot 17-year-old Claire Davis as she sat innocently in the hallway. As bad as that was, things could have been much worse.
Information released this week indicates that the perpetrator was planning a much larger attack and was armed with a shotgun, about 125 rounds of ammunition, three Molotov cocktails and a machete.
According to a CNN story, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said of the shooter, “His intent was evil, and his evil intent was to harm multiple individuals.”
On his arm, the perpetrator had written in indelible ink five classroom numbers and a phrase in Latin that translates to “the die has been cast,” according to the sheriff’s office.
But as reported in the Washington Times, the attacker’s mission was stopped short by the quick response of an armed deputy sheriff who was working as a resource officer at the school. Upon learning of the threat, the deputy ran from the cafeteria to the library, yelling for people to get down and identifying himself as a deputy sheriff. The horrific incident lasted only a total of 80 seconds and ended with the shooter turning his gun on himself in the library as the deputy was closing in on him.
“We know for a fact that the shooter knew that the deputy was in the immediate area and, while the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life,” Sheriff Robinson said. Robinson said the deputy’s response was “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself.
During a December 15 appearance on Face the Nation, Gov. Hickenlooper, was forced to admit that the very gun control bills he signed into law–and which resulted in the historic recalls of two state senators and the resignation of a third to avoid the same fate–did not make “a difference at all” in the school shooting.
“So things like universal background checks, I think they are going to make us safer, but in this specific case aren’t going to make a difference at all. And that’s the challenge,” Hickenlooper said.
What does make a difference is an armed response; but it only works in a situation where properly secured firearms are available onsite to be used by responsible, proficient, courageous people–in other words, the good guys.
A Cleveland.com story concludes that school shooters aren’t interested in a fight; they’re interested in soft targets that will leave them in control of the situation long enough to accomplish their evil deed.
In this case, the perpetrators was met instead with a hard target–an armed, qualified security presence that was ready and willing to stop him–and did so in just 80 seconds.
Gun-control laws didn’t stop a possible massacre at Arapahoe High School. A good guy with a gun stopped the rampage and in doing so almost certainly prevented much greater harm. For that, we can all be thankful.