Category: Crime

George Floyd and ‘The Riot Ideology’

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The best book on the failure of liberal urban policy is Fred Siegel’s The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. Siegel devotes much analysis to the “riot ideology” whereby organized violence (or the threat thereof) is used to intimidate officials into doing the bidding of “community leaders.”

What we are witnessing in the trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin is how the “riot ideology” impacts law enforcement. Because George Floyd was black, and because Officer Chauvin is white, there is no presumption of innocence. Chauvin’s guilt is assumed as a fact, and if he is not convicted, the verdict will be regarded as an injustice — “systemic racism” — as a pretext for a riot, much the same way the verdict in the Rodney King case inspired the Los Angeles riot of 1992.

From the standpoint of law enforcement, this is a lose-lose proposition. Either officers are effectively prohibited from enforcing the law — because cops face legal jeopardy if they attempt to apprehend a suspect who resists arrest — or else the city is destroyed by violence. This is “democracy” as mob rule, where the criminal element holds the entire community hostage with the assistance of “civil rights” activists (e.g., Ben Crump) and the liberal media. The narrative of racial “injustice” requires that certain inconvenient facts be made to disappear.

It should be obvious, for example, that Officer Chauvin and other members of the Minneapolis police were not just randomly killing black people to advance some “white supremacist” ideology. When cops were called to the Cup Foods store last May to deal with a counterfeiting case, they did not murder every black person present at the store. George Floyd was in the company of two black accomplices, Morries Lester Hall and Shawanda Renee Hill, both of whom had criminal records, but neither of whom was harmed by the police. How can “systemic racism” explain this?

Body camera footage from Officer Thomas Lane, one of the first two cops to arrive on the scene, shows George Floyd’s erratic behavior:

 

Floyd’s movement inside the SUV caused Lane to fear he might be reaching for a handgun, so he ordered Floyd at gunpoint to put both hands on the wheel, while he radioed for backup. Lane then told Floyd to put his hands on top of his head and step out of the vehicle (1:02 in the video). It took about 30 seconds to get Floyd to exit the vehicle, then another 30 seconds to get him handcuffed. After that, Lane leaves Floyd to his partner, Officer Alexander Keung, while Lane deals with Hall and Hill. Things take a turn for the worse when Lane and Keung try to put Floyd in the back of their squad car:

Lane: What, are you on something right now?
Floyd: No, nothing.
Kueng: Because you are acting a little erratic.
Lane: [leading Floyd to the car] Let’s go. Let’s go.
Floyd: I’m scared, man.
Lane: Let’s go.
Kueng: You got foam around your mouth, too?
Floyd: Yes, I was just hooping earlier.

We are told that “hooping” is slang for “putting drugs in the anus, resulting in a quick and intense high.” Is that how George Floyd got a dose of fentanyl that was three times the lethal level?

Floyd refused to sit in the squad car, saying he was “claustrophobic” and his resistance — Floyd was 6-foot-4 and 220 pounds — made it impossible. It was at Floyd’s request that the officers put him on the ground instead, but not before he had said seven times “I can’t breathe.”

 

The activist narrative insists these facts be ignored. They call it “victim blaming” when critics point to Floyd’s behavior, and assert, “Derek Chauvin is on trial, not George Floyd.” But you see that (a) there never would have been a trial if Floyd had simply gotten in the back of the squad car, (b) Floyd’s erratic behavior is evidence of the severity of his fentanyl overdose, and (c) how are cops supposed to deal with a drug-crazed giant who refuses to cooperate with his arrest?

Do we or don’t we want to enforce the law? That is the real question, and what sort of answer do we get if this question is reduced to the eight-minute video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck?

Too little consideration is being given to the larger social consequences of permitting the Black Lives Matter narrative to prevail, not just in this specific case, but in the general matter of how placing unreasonable limits on law enforcement will allow crime to proliferate. What happens if “social justice” makes it impossible for cops to do their jobs? Well, in Minnesota, the number of handgun permits increased last year to 96,554, up from 51,404 in 2019 — a one-year increase of 88%.

If cops can’t protect you — and Black Lives Matter is about destroying law-enforcement in America — you’ll have to protect yourself.

Liberal are not likely to be happy with the result.




 

Report: Nation of Islam Supporter Killed After Attacking Cops at U.S. Capitol

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When the news broke Friday afternoon that there had been an attack at the Capitol, intelligent people waited for police officials to identify the suspect before we speculated about the possible motive. But some people are not intelligent, and stupidly jumped to conclusions.

How many times have I warned about this in breaking news situations? You cannot know the motive for a shooting until you know the identity of the shooter, so when these incidents happen, the thing to do is to be patient. But the idiots on Twitter never seem to learn this lesson, so their wrong takes become part of the public record, permanent evidence of their folly. Meanwhile, the facts finally got reported:

Noah Green, 25, struck two officers, killing one, at the US Capitol just after 1 p.m. Friday, cops said.
Green got out of the car, wielding a knife, and lunged at officers before being fatally shot. Capitol Police Officer William Evans died 30 minutes after the attack at the hospital.
Green’s Facebook page, reviewed by The Post before it was taken down, wrote about Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and losing his job after graduating college.
In Instagram stories, some posted just hours before the attack, Green blamed the US government for his issues and wrote he believed federal law enforcement agencies were trying to conduct mind-control experiments on him, according to CNN.

Police said this was not a terrorist attack, by which standard, all the claims about “incel” attacks as terrorism are now invalid. What happens in most of those cases is (a) some guy’s life is miserable and (b) he turns to a weird hateful ideology to justify a “blaze of glory” fantasy where he kills a bunch of people and, usually, dies in the attack — either committing suicide or getting shot by cops. Frankly, most “lone wolf” white supremacist attacks also fit this description — the combination of a miserable life and a weird hateful ideology. So what, if anything, is the difference between those cases and Noah Green?

Hateful ideologies in general do not attract successful, happy people. In the case of Noah Green, we know that he embraced Nation of Islam as a teenager, because in his college football biographical sketch he said “person in history he’d most like to meet is Malcolm X.” But there was no indication of a tendency toward violence, and Green apparently had no criminal record before Friday’s attack. He lost his job and his mind slowly began unraveling:

Andre Toran, who was a captain on the football team at the time, said Green was a “really quiet guy” who would crack jokes every once in a while but usually just smiled instead of chiming in on conversations.
“I know people say this all the time, but the guy who I played with is not the same person who did this,” said Toran, a reporter at the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky . . .
Toran said while he moved away to attend graduate school in Chicago, Green’s mental state became an issue of concern among their friends.
Toran shared a Facebook post from Green during the COVID-19 pandemic in which Green accused his roommates of drugging him. Green wrote that he’d moved out but was suffering from withdrawals that included seizures and a lack of appetite, along with “paranoia” and “depression.” He wrote in the post that he was also experiencing “suicidal ideation.” . . .
KC Humphries, who attended CNU with Green, told USA TODAY they worked together at the school’s gym.
“He kind of came off as the average football athlete,” she said.
But, she added, she noticed the recent changes in his social media posts.
“They were very weird. It was posts about joining his church and ‘one day you’ll see’ kind of stuff,” Humphries said. “It was just a lot of weird, kind of cult stuff.”
On what appeared to be Green’s Facebook page, he posted last month about struggling over the last several years and his issues during the pandemic, including losing a job. He talked about his recent “spiritual journey.” . . .
One of Green’s brothers told The Washington Post that Noah Green appeared to have mentally unraveled in the last several years. He abruptly moved from Virginia to Indiana and told his brother, Brendan, he was suffering from hallucinations, heart palpitations, headaches and suicidal thoughts. Brendan Green told the paper his brother informed him the drugs told him to move to Indianapolis.
In Indiana, Noah told his brother that people were attempting to break into his apartment. Brendan Green said he flew out to Indianapolis but didn’t see anything suspicious and told The Post that Noah’s “mind didn’t seem right.”
A few months ago, Noah Green moved to Botswana, his brother told the Post. The brothers kept in contact and at one point, Noah told Brendan that “his mind was telling him to basically commit suicide” and said he’d jumped in front of a car, Brendan told The Post. Several weeks ago, Brendan allowed Noah to come live with him after Noah said he was “in a really bad situation.”

As is typical in such cases, there were “red flags” in the case of Noah Green, just as there were “red flags” in the case of Elliot Rodger, and “red flags” in the case of Robert Aaron Long, and other mass-murder cases.

Moral of the story? Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

What Was George Floyd Doing?

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Most people seem to believe that Derek Chauvin is going to be found guilty, simply because of the emotional content of the testimony, and I suppose they’re right. Today, the prosecution called George Floyd’s girlfriend as a witness, and she boo-hooed during most of her testimony, which was characterized in the media as being about her and her boyfriend’s “struggle with addiction.” Excuse me if my eyes just rolled out of my head, but where was all this sympathy for drug users back when I was a teenage dope fiend? If I had gotten myself killed by cops while being arrested back in the day, I’m pretty sure nobody would have rioted on my behalf. Just another dead teenage dopehead — so what?

The emotional components of this trial, with George Floyd turned into a martyr for “social justice,” and Derek Chauvin treated as a symbol of “systemic racism,” may well indeed suffice to produce a guilty verdict, but on the other hand, maybe facts still matter. And the fact is that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, with three times the lethal level of fentanyl in his system. It was obvious to Chauvin and the other cops on the scene that Floyd was under the influence of something, but they had no way of knowing that he had swallowed enough fentanyl to kill himself. However much emotion is generated by the video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck, that’s not what killed him.

But let’s talk about something else that’s quite relevant to this case, namely, what was George Floyd doing at that store?

You can click here to read a detailed timeline of events. The fact is that George Floyd arrived at that store in the company of two career criminals, Morries Lester Hall and Shawanda Renee Hill. Early media accounts of Floyd’s death described Hill as Floyd’s girlfriend, even though he had another girlfriend, Courteney Ross, who was the one who testified at the trial today. Both Hill and Hall had records:

Morries Lester Hall (42) would flee Minneapolis two days after the incident and hitchhike to Houston, Texas, where he was originally from. He had outstanding warrants for his arrest in Minnesota. He had a previous arrest record and convictions in Minnesota for first-degree felony assault, burglary, aggravated robbery, and multiple domestic assault charges between 2012 and 2018. He would be detained in Houston and interrogated by Minneapolis investigators there pending extradition. He also had a criminal history in Texas. He was wanted for being a felon in possession of a firearm. . . .
Shawanda Renee Hill (45) . . . had a previous arrest record and convictions for check forgery, felony theft, disorderly conduct, solicitation for prostitution, and stalking and domestic abuse between 1997 and 2016.

Courteney Ross testified that she believed Hall and Hill were supplying Floyd with drugs. They also had evidently involved him in attempting to pass counterfeit currency, which was why the cops were there.

This wasn’t made clear in the media accounts of the events leading up to Floyd’s death. What happened was that Floyd and Hall went into the store while Hill waited outside in the SUV Floyd was driving. Floyd bought a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 while Hall attempted to buy some electronic equipment with more counterfeit $20s. The clerk who dealt with Hall spotted the counterfeit and refused the purchase. Then the store manager, realizing Floyd had entered the store with Hall, asked the clerk at the tobacco counter to check the $20 Floyd had given him, and learned that it was also counterfeit.

Then two store employees, seeing Floyd still outside leaning on the hood of the SUV, go out to confront him, demanding he return the cigarettes and the change he’d gotten. Floyd refuses. The two employees go back inside the store, then return with a third employee. Again, Floyd refuses to return the cigarettes and the change. One of the employees takes down the tag number of the SUV, and then they go back inside the store. It’s now about 8 p.m., roughly 15 minutes after Floyd first entered the store. At 8:01, one of the employees calls 911:

Operator: 911 what’s the address of the emergency?
Caller: This is ah 3759 Chicago AV.
Operator: How can I help you?
Caller: Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car. We tell them to give us their phone, put their (inaudible) thing back and everything and he was also drunk and everything and return to give us our cigarettes back and so he can, so he can go home but he doesn’t want to do that, and he’s sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he’s not in control of himself.
Operator: Okay, what type of vehicle does he have?
Caller: And…. um he’s got a vehicle that is ah…ah he got a vehicle that is ah…one second let me see if I can see the license. The driver license is BRJ026.
Operator: Okay, what color is it?
Caller: It’s a blue color. It’s a blue van.
Operator: Blue van?
Caller: Yes, van.
Operator: Alright blue van, gotcha. Is it out front or is it on 38th ST?
Caller: Ah it’s on 38th ST.
Operator: On 38th ST. So, this guy gave a counterfeit bill, has your cigarettes, and he’s under the influence of something?
Caller: Something like that, yes. He is not acting right.

You see that the store employee mentioned Floyd’s intoxication — he was “not in control of himself . . . not acting right.” As it turned out, he had taken fake Percocet tablets that were actually a mixture of fentanyl and methamphetamine. This was the garbage dope Hall was apparently dealing, and also, it seems, running a counterfeit cash operation.

Possession of counterfeit currency is a federal crime that can get you up to 15 years in prison. A lot of people, upon hearing that the cops were called on Floyd because of a fake $20 were like, “They killed him for $20,” but several other fake $20s were found in the SUV, and there hasn’t been much reporting on the investigation of that crime, but this incident might have been the tip of an iceberg of a much larger conspiracy. Somebody in Minneapolis was circulating counterfeit currency, and the role of Morries Hall in this crime cannot be ignored.

Of course, the underlying crime — the reason the cops were there — is being ignored by the media, who are promoting the narrative that the real crime was Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the evidence from the toxicology report that Floyd was already dying of an overdose (and complaining “I can’t breathe”) before the cops put him on the ground. The reason they put him on the ground was because he refused to get in back of the squad car, and they decided to call for EMS because he appeared to be in a state of “excited delirium” which we now know was due to his drug overdose. But the emotional nature of the testimony at the trial is intended to cancel out these known facts, to make the jurors convict Chauvin of murder even though it was the fentanyl that killed Floyd who was, by the way, a criminal:

Between 1997 and 2005, he was convicted of eight crimes. He served four years in prison after accepting a plea bargain for a 2007 aggravated robbery in a home invasion.

That’s nine crimes total, that we know of, before he tried to pass counterfeit currency that day and — oh, by the way, another crime — possession of the illegal narcotics that killed him.

Please explain to me how dopehead criminals became secular saints in our culture. When did this happen? Because as I say, when I was a teenage dopehead, nobody treated me like a saint, and if I had died of an overdose with a cop’s knee on my neck, no one would have rioted.

Maybe I was being oppressed, but was too stoned to know it. Also, I’m pretty sure I saw Excited Delirium open for Cheap Trick in 1979.




 

‘Insurrection’? Most Capitol Rioters Probably Won’t Face Prison Time

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This should have been obvious from the start: Trespassing and disobeying police commands are the only charges likely to stick against most of the Trump supporters involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Most of them just got swept up in the excitement of the moment and certainly were not part of an “anti-government” conspiracy. This reality was obscured by a lot of prosecutorial bluster and media hype:

Americans outraged by the storming of Capitol Hill are in for a jarring reality check: Many of those who invaded the halls of Congress on Jan. 6 are likely to get little or no jail time. …
In recent days, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys have all indicated that they expect few of these “MAGA tourists” to face harsh sentences.
There are two main reasons: Although prosecutors have loaded up their charging documents with language about the existential threat of the insurrection to the republic, the actions of many of the individual rioters often boiled down to trespassing. And judges have wrestled with how aggressively to lump those cases in with those of the more sinister suspects. . . .
The prospect of dozens of Jan. 6 rioters cutting deals for minor sentences could be hard to explain for the Biden administration, which has characterized the Capitol Hill mob as a uniquely dangerous threat. … Justice Department prosecutors sent expectations sky-high in early statements and court filings, describing elaborate plots to murder lawmakers — descriptions prosecutors have tempered as new details emerged.

(Hat-tip: Hot Air via Instapundit.)

Joy Pullman at The Federalist points out that the FBI has been missing a lot of terrorists while it has been devoting such enormous efforts to investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot:

For that investigation, USA Today says, “agents in all but one of the FBI’s 56 field offices have been drafted to track down” people who attended the Capitol protest that day, the vast majority of whom peacefully protested. “Investigators who typically work cases involving the trafficking of drugs, child pornography and sex have taken calls from rioter’s angry ex-wives and former girlfriends and employers turned tipsters.”
Meanwhile, the FBI and other investigators appear to be hiding the truth about the one death that occurred in connection with this havoc that hasn’t yet been definitively proven to be an accident, besides the rioter a police officer shot to death.
It also appears the FBI is using its police power to prosecute people in connection with the Capitol riot who participated in no violence, including one who never went inside the Capitol nor harmed any person or public property, according to Julie Kelly’s reporting of court documents. His true crime appears to be belonging to a group in which some members believe, according to the federal indictment, that “the federal government has been co-opted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights.”

Read the whole thing.




 

Trump-Hating BLM Activist Charged for Attacking Asian Women in Seattle

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News that doesn’t fit the preferred media narrative:

A Black Lives Matter activist and fervent Democrat Party supporter is accused of committing anti-Asian hate crimes in Seattle.
King County prosecutors charged 51-year-old Christopher Allen Hamner, of SeaTac, Wash., with a felony hate crime for targeting multiple Asian victims on two separate occasions in March. Hamner, who is mixed-race, is accused of threatening women and children of Asian background as young as five years old with racial slurs.
On March 16, Hamner allegedly harassed a woman while she was in her car with two children, ages five and 10.
Pamela Cole, the victim, alleged in a Facebook post that Hamner yelled, “F— you, Asian bitch!” She says he jumped out of his vehicle and started “punching his fist together” before throwing projectiles at her car. She called the police.
Three days later on March 19, Hamner allegedly cut off two Asian women with his sedan near a supermarket, blocked traffic in the middle of the road and screamed similar profanities at them. Hamner then got out of his car, charged at the victims who were driving together and launched an object at them, the probable cause affidavit cites. Jenny Wong, one of the victims, posted photos and video of her encounter with Hamner on Instagram.
The Seattle Police Department arrested Hamner on Thursday. His bail is set at $75,000. He is being held at the King County Correctional Facility for the felony hate crime charge plus three additional counts of malicious harassment.
The videos and accusations against Hamner have been surprising for some given his reputation as a staunch BLM and racial-justice activist in the Seattle-area.
In June 2020, Hamner participated in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), where BLM and Antifa extremists seized six blocks of city property. He recorded video of himself in the zone where he was holding an anti-Donald Trump and anti-police sign.
His social media is filled with posts expressing hatred of Donald Trump and Republicans.

Don’t expect to see this reported on CNN.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

The Murder of Mohammad Anwar

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The word “tragedy” is often used by the media to describe deaths that aren’t really tragic, but the murder of an Uber Eats driver in Washington, D.C., last week certainly deserves that description. Mohammad Anwar, 66, was a grandfather, a native of Pakistan whose family described him as “a hardworking immigrant who came to the U.S. in 2014 to build a better life for himself and his family.” His killers were subhuman scum:

An Uber Eats delivery driver, described by relatives as a hardworking Pakistani immigrant grandfather, was killed in a crash after officials said he was carjacked by two teenage girls in Washington, D.C.
The 13-year-old and 15-year-old, who have not been identified because they are minors, allegedly used a stun gun on the driver on Tuesday, causing him to crash his car, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.
When responders arrived at the scene, about a block from Nationals Park, they found the victim suffering from life-threatening injuries, police said. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Mohammad Anwar, 66, of Springfield, Virginia, was identified by his family as the victim, NBC Washington reported. He was working for Uber Eats at the time of the assault, according to relatives and Uber.

The description of the fatal incident in this NBC News account doesn’t adequately explain the horror of what was captured on cellphone video by an eyewitness who started recording as Anwar was attempting to prevent the teenage girls from stealing the car. Anwar was at the driver’s side door of the vehicle, holding onto the wheel, when the carjackers sped off with him hanging out the side of the door. They swerved left, evidently trying to ram him into a lightpole, and then turned right around a corner. The vehicle disappears from sight in the video, then a loud crash is heard. The witness runs down the street and, when he turns the corner, we see the car toppled onto its left side, the two teenage carjackers scrambling out while Anwar’s apparently lifeless body lies on the sidewalk.

Question: Was this a “hate crime”? The two teenage criminals were black, and had no doubt carjacked many other victims before they committed this crime in broad daylight. Were they targeting their victims on a racial basis? There has been a nationwide spree of carjacking in America over the past year, and there is a discernible pattern to these crimes. Almost all the perpetrators are black, and the victims . . .

Well, maybe they’re chosen at random. But maybe not.

At any rate we know who is responsible for this crime wave:

The District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department created a task force [in February] to address a rise in carjackings and auto thefts. . . .
The D.C. department assigned a dedicated group of detectives who specialize in robberies and violent crimes to its new team. The District of Columbia has been hit hard by carjackers this past year. Police data shows that between March and mid-October 2020, carjackings and attempted carjackings rose to 193 from 89 during the same period in 2019 — a 117% increase.
In the past few months, those numbers have surged.
Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 21, 2020, there were 11 cases, according to police spokesperson Alaina Gertz. In that same period this year, there have been 71 — a 545% increase.

Did I mention that D.C. has strict gun-control laws? Isn’t it obvious why Democrats favor gun-control laws? They want to disarm law-abiding citizens, to make it safer for criminals to attack them.




 

Syrian Immigrant Ahmad Al-Issa Identified as Boulder Gunman

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Early this morning — it was about 2:30 a.m. — I noted that there was something odd about how police were dealing with the shooting in Boulder. Even though they had the shooter in custody, they didn’t name him. Why? What purpose was served by withholding that information?

It was not until about 11 a.m. today we discovered why:

he 21-year-old Arvada man arrested in Monday’s mass shooting at a Boulder King Sooper’s was violent, short-tempered and paranoid during high school, his former classmates said Tuesday.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa is suspected of killing 10 people at the grocery store Monday when he walked in around 2:30 p.m. and began shooting, according to law enforcement. He was taken into custody about an hour later with a gunshot wound in his leg.
Alissa was hospitalized for treatment and is expected to be transported to the Boulder County Jail Tuesday to face 10 counts of first-degree murder.
He attended Arvada West High School from 2015 until he graduated in 2018, Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Cameron Bell confirmed Tuesday. He was on the wrestling team his junior and senior years.
“He was kind of scary to be around,” said Dayton Marvel, a teammate on the wrestling team. Alissa once had an outburst and threatened to kill people during an intra-team match, Marvel said.
“His senior year, during the wrestle-offs to see who makes varsity, he actually lost his match and quit the team and yelled out in the wrestling room that he was, like, going to kill everybody,” Marvel said. “Nobody believed him. We were just all kind of freaked out by it, but nobody did anything about it.”
He said he did not like spending time with Alissa, and Alissa was not close with anyone on the wrestling team. Another teammate, Angel Hernandez, said Alissa got into a fight in the parking lot after the match.
“(The other wrestler) was just teasing him and goes, ‘Maybe if you were a better wrestler, you would have won.’ (Alissa) just lost it. He started punching him,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez said Alissa frequently appeared to be paranoid about perceived slights against him, and Marvel said Alissa was often concerned about being targeted because of his Muslim faith.
“He would talk about him being Muslim and how if anybody tried anything, he would file a hate crime and say they were making it up,” Marvel said. “It was a crazy deal. I just know he was a pretty cool kid until something made him mad, and then whatever made him mad, he went over the edge — way too far.”
“He was always talking about (how) people were looking at him and there was no one ever where he was pointing people out,” Hernandez said. “We always thought he was messing around with us or something.”
In 2017, Alissa, then 18, attacked a classmate at Arvada West High School, according to an affidavit filed in the case. He punched the classmate in the head without warning, and when the boy fell to the ground, Alissa continued to punch him. The classmate suffered bruises and cuts to his head, according to the affidavit.
Witnesses told police they didn’t see or hear any reason for Alissa to attack the classmate. Alissa told officers that the classmate “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier,” according to the affidavit.
He was convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2018 and was sentenced to probation and 48 hours of community service, according to court records.
Despite his short temper, Hernandez said Alissa could also be friendly and “joyful.”
“The sad thing about it is that if you really were to get to know him, he was a good guy,” Hernandez said. “Whenever you went up to him, he was always so joyful and so nice. But you could tell there was a dark side in him. If he did get ticked off about something, within a split second, it was like if something takes over, like a demon. He’d just unleash all his anger.”
Another former classmate, Keaton Hyatt, said he took a weightlifting class with Alissa and never knew him to be violent. Hyatt liked Alissa’s quick wit and sharp comebacks during locker room banter.
“He was super cool and super funny,” Hyatt said. “… It was never violent jokes about people or America or anything.”
Arvada Police Detective Dave Snelling confirmed Tuesday the local department had at least two interactions with Alissa over the past several years, including a case of criminal mischief. The details of that case were not immediately available.
Snelling would not say whether local police had received any warnings or complaints about Alissa recently, however, and instead deferred the question to the FBI.
Alissa lived with his family in an Arvada subdivision on West 65th Place, a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes. Neighbors said the household appeared to be multi-generational with a large number of family members living there.
The home is owned by Ali Aliwi Alissa, who also owns a nearby restaurant. The eatery, in a strip mall that shares space with a coffee shop, UPS store, battery store and other restaurants, was closed Tuesday.
Jamie Poeling moved her business, Dream Dinners, a few doors down from the restaurant just over a year ago and said she ate there infrequently. Employees there gave Poeling a discount and she returned the favor.
Poeling said she doesn’t know everyone in the family by name, but that she never had a negative experience at the restaurant. Employees would go out of their way to offer food to a homeless woman living behind the restaurant, she said.
“I’ve been in the shop while they’ve given her food and they’re very kind,” Poeling said.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether any of Alissa’s family knew of his plan to attack King Soopers.
A relative told investigators Monday night that she’d seen Alissa “playing” with a gun that looked like a “machine gun” about two days prior, according to the affidavit.
“Alissa had been talking about having a bullet stuck in the gun and was playing with the gun,” the affidavit said. Others in the home became upset that he had the gun inside and took it from him, the relative told police, although she believed it had later been returned to him.
Alissa purchased a Ruger AR-556 pistol six days before the attack, according to a police affidavit released Tuesday. Witnesses to the shooting described the gunman as firing a “patrol rifle,” Boulder police have said.
On a Facebook page that appeared to belong to Alissa and has since been removed, the user posted in 2019 that he believed his former high school was hacking his cell phone. In a comment to someone who asked why the school would do that, he blamed racism.
“I believe part racism for sure,” he replied. “I believe someone spread rumors about me which are false and maybe that set it off.”
In other posts, the user expressed anti-LGBTQ sentiments and warned about perils he perceived from too much government control.

Now brace yourself for this:

The suspect’s identity was known to the F.B.I. because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau, according to law enforcement officials.

So the FBI actually knew about this gun-wielding Syrian psycho, but they were too busy chasing down “white supremacists” to do anything.




 

Boulder: 10 Dead, Including Police Officer; Suspect in Custody, Not Yet Identified

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There is something . . . off about this story, and I don’t know what it is yet. We saw the suspect walked out in handcuffs and yet, several hours later, police have still not identified him. While I have seen some speculation online about the gunman’s identity, the fact that police did not name him at their press conference strikes me as significant, because why not name him? Certainly, his identity will be public very soon, so what is accomplished by delaying the release of this information?

What this delay has done, in practical terms, is to allow the media to build the narrative that this is a gun-control story. The shooter reportedly used an AR-15-style weapon, and so the narrative is not about the shooter and his motive, but rather about his choice of weapon.

Is it paranoid to suspect that perhaps police delayed the identification of the shooter for this very reason? That is to say, it may be that police believed that publicly naming the shooter would have some undesired political consequence, and so they delayed this, to prevent the public from reacting in an undesirable way. Meanwhile, this delay gives the media a chance to spin it as a gun-control narrative, even though we have no reason to believe that any proposed gun-control measure (short of outright confiscation) could have prevented this particular shooting.

As always in cases like this, I discourage speculation about motives, particularly when we don’t know the identity of the shooter. Yet the delay in identifying the suspect strikes me as significant. Once we learn who it is, perhaps we will be able to deduce the reasons for the delay.

Anyway, here is what is actually known so far:

The Boulder Police Department confirmed 10 people are dead, including one Boulder Police officer, in a shooting at the King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive.
Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold confirmed Officer Eric Talley, 51, was the first to respond to the King Soopers minutes after initial 911 calls around 2:30 p.m. He was shot and killed. Talley had been with the department since 2010.
“I’m grateful for the police officers that responded, and I am so sorry about the loss of Officer Talley,” Herold said. . . .
The Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said the suspect is in custody and his office will do everything they can do to get justice for the victims.
“I also want to stress how incredibly sorry I am for all victims who were killed at King Soopers. These were people going about their day, doing their food shopping, and their lives were cut abruptly and tragically short by the shooter who is now in custody,” Dougherty said.
Officials confirmed the suspect went to the hospital. They say he is the only person injured that they’re aware of and they know of no other serious injuries at this point.

To summarize, we don’t actually know much yet — and this is unusual. I’ve covered plenty of events like this, and cannot remember any case where a mass-shooting suspect was in custody but police waited more than eight hours before publicly identifying the suspect, as in this case.

In a paranoid age, where trust of the media is at an all-time low, this concerns me, and not just because CNN is using this as an excuse to run 24/7 gun-control propaganda. Let me get ahead of that by saying that the vast majority of homicides in America (about 45 a day, on average) are committed with common pistols — 9mm, .380, .40 — and that the use of “assault rifles” in homicides is a statistical rarity. So the predictable push to ban “assault rifles” in the wake of this Boulder massacre will be in contradiction of facts and logic. For 10 years, beginning in 1994, we had a federal ban and, after Congress allowed it to expire in 2004, it was demonstrated to have no impact on the overall level of violent crime.