Was there a possible link between the Idaho student murders suspect Bryan Kohberger and one of his victims? Fox Nation’s “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace” tackles this very question with the former prosecutor’s team of experts.
While forensic evidence seems to be pointing towards Kohberger — the criminology Ph.D. student accused of ambushing a group of University of Idaho undergrads in November and who’s since been charged with quadruple homicide — the case could hit a snag without a connection that indicates motive.
“Finally, have we found the link between Bryan Kohberger and his four murder victims, according to police? Of course the state never has to prove motive, but any jury would wonder why would he target people he had never met — or had he?” crime expert Nancy Grace posited.
“There’s a lot of forensic evidence, but… if you don’t give them a motive or a nexus, you’re going to have a problem come verdict time,” the former prosecutor and Fox Nation host explained.
The ‘Crime Stories’ episode explores how a source who spoke to People Magazine shared that Kohberger sent multiple direct messages (DM’s) to one of the victims through the social media app Instagram, but never received a reply.
Grace shared how DMs are sent and viewed, indicating to Fox Senior Correspondent Laura Ingle that the victim may have not even read or known about the messages from the suspect.
“It has been revealed now that it looks like there was a message coming from somebody that appeared to be Bryan Kohberger,” Ingle noted.
“And if somebody messages me from a post that I make or great report last night or something, I will see it. But if I’m not following that person, it’ll go to this kind of envelope that I forget about,” Ingle went on to explain.
“So sometimes I’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, I need to look at that. You need to accept the messages.’ And they’ll be a long string of random strangers saying things. And sometimes I don’t see it. And then you can either accept that message, you can delete that message. Sometimes they’re creepy messages, as we all know, being on Instagram. So there is a very big chance that she or he, whatever victim was didn’t see those messages because there wasn’t a reply according to the source.”
Grace posed the question about the importance of the phones involved, and how the interactions on social media between the victims and Kohberger could be the missing link for a motive.
Think about this for a minute. If you’re on Instagram, how often do you check your DMs? And if the DM is from someone you don’t follow, you may not even know they’ve DM’ed you. So here is the cute, popular college girl who probably had hundreds of followers, and here is this creepy loner type who has become obsessed with her, sending her DMs that she never answers because she never even sees the messages. In the creepazoid’s mind, he is being cruelly rejected by this girl, but she doesn’t even know he exists! Which is pretty damned scary to me, considering my daughter is a cute, popular college girl who uses Instagram. Like, there could be some creepy stalker loner out there at this very minute, boiling with rage because my daughter hasn’t answered his DMs.
Georgia ain’t Oregon and Atlanta ain’t Portland, OK? So if the unbathed terrorist mobs of Antifa want heroic martyrdom, Atlanta’s the place to be, because cops down in Georgia shoot to kill:
Seven militants have been arrested and charged with domestic terrorism following a deadly shootout with law enforcement at their “autonomous zone” in a wooded area south of Atlanta. They are all from out of state.
(Because nobody from Georgia would try this bullshit.)
On Wednesday morning, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies conducted a raid on the so-called autonomous zone at the site of the future Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Since June 2021, Antifa and other far-left extremists from across the US have occupied the area to prevent the construction of what they call a “cop city.” The GBI says a Georgia State Patrol trooper was shot and severely injured during Wednesday’s raid by a man camped in the area. Officers returned fire and killed the gunman, who allegedly used a pistol.
(Folks down in Georgia call that “justice.”)
Georgia’s Department of Public Safety will not name the injured patrol trooper, saying it would “compromise security against criminal or terroristic acts due to retaliation,” but told local media he was in the ICU after having emergency surgery. The deceased gunman was named on Thursday by the GBI as 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Teran. He used the alias “Tort” and “Tortuguita.”
“Manuel used they/it pronouns…please make sure we are remembering them properly and respectfully,” wrote the Atlanta Community Press Collective in their statement revealing the shooter’s identity.
(“The only good Commie,” etc.)
Following the shooting, the GBI and its law enforcement partners continued to clear the autonomous zone and several arrests were made of suspects—all of whom are from out of state. The GBI say they confiscated a cache of weapons that include mortar-style fireworks and edged weapons. Matthew Ernest Macar, 30, Spencer Bernard Liberto, 29, and Sarah Wasilewski, 35, all from Pittsburgh, are each facing charges of domestic terrorism and aggravated assault upon a public safety officer.
A fourth suspect who would not identify himself in jail was later identified as 20-year-old Geoffrey D. Parson, of Baltimore.
Additionally, Timothy A. Murphy, 25, of Rockport, Maine, Christopher Reynolds, 31, of Dayton, Ohio, and Teresa Yue Shen, 31, of Brooklyn, New York, were charged with domestic terrorism.
TPM can report that several of the suspects come from well-to-do backgrounds. Shen is an alumna of the Manhattan liberal arts institution Barnard College. Macar graduated with a master’s degree in international affairs from Penn State University in 2016.
It’s unfortunate that not all of them died in Wednesday’s gun battle, but it seems like these terrorists are only getting started with the violence.
Police in Atlanta are on “high alert” following a call to murder cops put out by defenders of the “Atlanta Forest,” an autonomous zone occupation south of the city. They want revenge for their gunman comrade who died carrying out a shooting. #Antifahttps://t.co/PoXLJMtp3K
Let me tell you something: If these out-of-town hippies think they’re going to be safe on the streets of Atlanta on a Friday night . . .
Well, the cops will be the least of their problems. Crime in Atlanta has spun out of control the past couple of years. The local gang-bangers might not be too kind to these affluent “save the forest” kids.
By the way, don’t believe anything you read on the Internet about this situation. It seems that the Antifa lunatics and their “progressive” friends have orchestrated a propaganda campaign so that everything on Wikipedia about the site of this proposed police-training facility has been written in the past few months by supporters of the “autonomous zone.”
Beginning around 1920, the Atlanta Prison Farm used inmate labor to produce food for those incarcerated at the city’s federal penitentiary. At some point in the 1960s, the city of Atlanta acquired the property, and parts of it were used for a middle school campus. The remaining property is about 350 acres, including dilapidated buildings from the old prison farm, and the nonprofit the Atlanta Police Foundation reached an agreement with the city to develop about a quarter of the site — 85 acres — as a modern police training facility. But OMG! What insane propaganda has been produced to “Save the Atlanta Forest,” as if this were some pristine nature preserve, an untouched slice of wilderness!
You can read (at CNN, the pro-Antifa network) how the site is located “less than half a mile away from a tributary of the South River, which is one of America’s most endangered, according to nonprofit conservation group American Rivers. That’s a result of decades of neglect and pollution the area, which is overwhelmingly Black, has endured, local advocates say.” Anyone can look at a map and see that there are all kinds of development in the area — the nearby industrial park, a truck stop next to I-285, etc. — so the idea that the police training facility would do environmental damage to this allegedly vital “tributary” (Intrenchment Creek) is nonsense. And, as I say, only a quarter of the existing site will be used for the training facility, leaving more than 200 acres of parkland.
Being a native of Atlanta, let me tell you something about Georgia, in case you’re not familiar with the area. It’s hot and humid, which means that all manner of plant life grows with astonishing rapidity there. The house where I grew up in Douglas County had a chain-link fence around the backyard, and every summer one of my chores was to go out and cut the honeysuckle vines off that fence. If you didn’t cut those vines off — and it was tedious work, trust me — the whole fence would be covered in vines. The ditch down by the road? Oh, the hours spent with a slingblade cuttting back the brush and briars that sprang up relentlessly there! And the pine forest up the hill across the road? Oh, just 40 or 50 years earlier, that had all been farmland, until the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Stop farming your property for just a few years, and next thing you know, what used to be a pasture becomes a tangled forest — and that, my friends, is what happened to the old Atlanta Prison Farm.
The overgrown Atlanta Prison Farm
Reckon all those out-of-town hippies camping out in what they’ve dubbed “The Atlanta Forest” never handled a slingblade in their whole lives, and they sure as hell don’t realize that this “forest” only dates back to the 1960s or so, when the inmates stopped cultivating the property. Now it’s a tangled mess of briars and vines and oaks and pines and, if you’re a damned tree-hugging fool from Pittsburgh or someplace, maybe it seems like a South American rain forest or something, but it’s just what happens to any property in Georgia that’s gone untended for a while.
Converting this property into a police training facility seems like a worthwhile use of the otherwise neglected site, but what do a bunch of anarchist scum care about property and its worthwhile uses?
Breaking: Multiple violent suspects have been arrested & charged with domestic terrorism following the deadly shooting involving their comrade at the #Antifa-linked #Atlanta autonomous zone. They're all from out of state.
So, let us wish Antifa luck with their plans for a “Night of Rage” in Atlanta. Maybe the cops will kill a few more, then more out-of-town anarchists will show up to protest about that, and so on and so forth, until Georgia cops finally finish killing every last one of them.
Just hope the cops have plenty of ammunition . . .
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, is more than 300 miles from Chicago, and it’s almost a five-hour drive — if you’re doing the speed limit, that is. On the other hand, if you’re doing 110 mph in a late-model Dodge Charger, the trip won’t take nearly as long. Except, of course, if you get pulled over by the cops, which is what happened last year to Keyonis Langston:
A state trooper saw a vehicle traveling east on I-94 July 10 at mile marker 58 in Eau Claire County hitting a speed of 104 mph.
The trooper activated his emergency lights but the vehicle failed to stop. The driver of the vehicle then turned off the headlights in an attempt to elude officers.
The vehicle then increased its speed to near 135 mph, passing vehicles and semi trucks on both the right and left shoulders. The vehicle swerved between both lanes of traffic, almost crashing with other vehicles on multiple occasions.
The pursuit was then terminated.
A pursuit with this same vehicle was again initiated in Monroe County, where it was involved in a crash.
The vehicle eventually left I-94, turned down a dead end road and the driver left the vehicle.
After a brief foot chase, officers took the driver into custody and identified him as Langston.
If convicted, Langston could be sentenced to up to 18 months in prison.
The pursuit and subsequent capture of Langston was recorded on police dashcam and bodycam video, which was recently released:
Langston had neither a valid driver’s license nor insurance, but these were trivial matters in comparison to fleeing/eluding an officer, which is a Class I felony in Wisconsin. After his arrest, Langston became hysterical, shouting, “I’m not a criminal,” babbling about a girlfriend in Minneapolis that just broke up with him, while asserting that he actually did have a license and insurance, but “when it pops up, it says invalid,” and could he please call his mom? After seeing this, I became curious, because I suspected that this wasn’t Langston’s first time at the rodeo, if you get my drift. Like, a previously law-abiding citizen doesn’t just suddenly decide to lead police on a 100-mph chase.
You see that mug shot? Not from his Wisconsin arrest. It’s from Chicago, where in February 2022 — just five months before his arrest in Wisconsin — Keyonis was busted after he ran a stop sign and, in addition to that infraction, was also charged with (a) driving on a suspended license, (b) driving an uninsured vehicle, and (c) multiple counts of resisting arrest/obstructing an officer. Nor was that his first encounter with law enforcement. In 2018, when he was 21, Keyonis Langston was arrested in Joliet for “speeding 26 to 34 mph above the speed limit.”
All of these arrests were mere traffic violations, you may say, and we have no reason to believe that Keyonis was really a criminal. Maybe he was just an urban version of the Dukes of Hazzard:
Just good old boys,
Never meanin’ no harm.
Beats all you never saw,
Been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.
If it hadn’t been for that high-speed pursuit through Wisconsin, and the video being posted to one of my favorite “real police action” YouTube channels, I never would have heard of Keyonis, who was facing up to 18 months in prison for fleeing and eluding. But there won’t be a trial and he’ll never go to prison, because Keyonis was from Chicago, where he became a statistic this past Thanksgiving weekend:
Eight people have been killed and 25 others wounded in shootings so far over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. . . .
Thursday night, two men were killed in separate shootings just over an hour apart and about five miles from each other on the South Side. Keyonis Langston, 25, was in the 8000 block of South Vernon Avenue when someone shot him in the head just before 8 p.m., authorities said. About 9:20 p.m., Randle Roby, 28, was found fatally shot on a sidewalk in the 100 block of West 112th Street. He suffered a gunshot wound to the face and abdomen and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Beats all you ever saw . . .
Y’all drive safely. It’s dangerous out there on the road.
If it’s not earthquakes, it’s pandemics. If it’s not droughts, it’s floods. But if there aren’t any natural disasters in California, there’s always the political variety in the Democrat-controlled state, and rumblings of a new Democrat-inflicted catastrophe can be heard now that Sen. Dianne Feinstein is rumored to be retiring, leaving the seat up for grabs in 2024. Some background from Wikipedia:
In August 2020, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden selected California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. After they won the general election, [California Secretary of State Alex] Padilla was mentioned as a possible choice as Harris’s successor in the Senate. Governor [Gavin] Newsom had the power to appoint her successor. In December 2020, Newsom announced that he would appoint Padilla to the seat, making him California’s first Hispanic senator and the first male U.S. senator from California since Alan Cranston retired in 1993. . . .
Most Latinos, who are 40% of California’s population, supported Padilla’s appointment, but some black leaders, who wanted another black woman to replace Harris, criticized it. San Francisco Mayor London Breed called Padilla’s appointment “a real blow to the African American community.”
Got that? Hispanics are 40% of California’s population, whereas blacks are less than 7%, but appointing Padilla to the Senate was “a real blow to the African American community” and, of course, Black Lives Matter.
This is the problem with identity politics — everybody competing in the Oppression Olympics thinks they’re entitled to the gold medal. It defies logic to assert that 7% of California’s population has a “right” to 50% of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, but remember logic is white supremacy.
Perhaps not everybody in California is insane enough to buy into the “progressive” worldview, but the lunatics are clearly in the majority, because most of the sane people have already left the state.
California needs a warrior in the Senate—to stand up to special interests, fight the dangerous imbalance in our economy, and hold so-called leaders like Mitch McConnell accountable for rigging our democracy.
Now you’re probably wondering, what percentage of the California population is pudgy left-wing white women with bad haircuts? But never mind that, Katie Porter is a “Progressive Rock Star,” a protégé of Elizabeth Warren, and raised $24 million to defend her House seat in 2022. This means that Porter will be able to raise money for her Senate race on a nationwide basis, collecting campaign cash from pudgy left-wing women white women with bad haircuts from coast to coast.
Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland, a seasoned progressive with more than three decades immersed in California politics, on Wednesday told congressional colleagues she plans to run for Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat in 2024.
Lee announced her intentions during a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, receiving a standing ovation, but has not officially confirmed she is running or formed an official Senate committee to start raising money in a race expected to be both costly and intensely competitive.
Lee’s private disclosure comes just a day after Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine) launched her campaign to replace Feinstein, 89, who has yet to disclose whether she intends to retire at the end of her term. As one of the most coveted posts in California politics, Feinstein’s Senate seat is widely expected to spur interest from some of the state’s most ambitious and prominent elected leaders.
Lee’s announcement was confirmed by a source close to the congresswoman who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on her political plans. The source cautioned that the congresswoman didn’t announce a Senate campaign — only her intention to run. The news was first reported by Politico.
First elected to Congress in 1998 after nearly a decade in the California Legislature, Lee is a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Did I mention that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is widely expected to launch a 2024 campaign for the White House? So while he’s busy organizing a presidential campaign to save America from another four years of senile Joe Biden, his state’s Democratic Party is heading for an identity politics trainwreck, with the “rock star” fat white woman battling the angry black woman from Oakland in a progressive Armageddon.
Historic Church Burned by Right-Wing White Supremacist — just imagine the 24/7 coverage on CNN and MSNBC if that were the headline about the arsonist responsible for this crime. But that’s not the headline, and the media are ignoring it, because it’s a transgender nutjob:
An arson attack that destroyed a 117-year-old church in downtown Portland, Oregon, this week has become a symbol of disorder in the city.
Cameron David Storer, a trans woman also known as “Nicolette Fait,” was arrested following an investigation by the Portland Fire & Rescue Fire Investigations Unit. The 27-year-old is charged with two counts of first-degree arson, one count of second-degree arson, and two counts of second-degree burglary — all felonies.
According to prosecutors, Storer walked into the Multnomah County Detention Center and confessed to setting the church on fire using a lighter.
“Storer stated that they heard voices in their head saying they would ‘mutilate’ Storer if they did not burn the church down and that they had planned it up to one day in advance,” said the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office in a press release. Storer allegedly told investigators she was taking oxycodone and had a history of mental illness.
Fire crews responded to sky-high flames that had consumed the historic Portland Korean Church in downtown around 5:30 p.m. Jan. 3. The Protestant church was built in 1905 and was previously known as the First German Evangelical Church. The church had remained unused for a number of years after its congregation moved to a suburb. . . .
The suspect was arraigned on Thursday afternoon and prosecutors asked that Storer be denied bail. Storer did not appear to enter a plea, according to court documents.
Storer’s last address is in Rhode Island, where the landlord has an open eviction case against her.
Murders declined slightly this year in Philadelphia. Through Monday, Dec. 26, the city had recorded 512 homicides this year — down from a record 562 in 2021 — according to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Most of the victims were young Black men, with the violence intensely concentrated in neighborhoods where poverty, blight, and other systemic disadvantages collide. The number of people who were shot and survived — nearly 1,800 through Monday — also rivaled last year’s record-setting pace.
And while other crime categories, particularly those not involving guns, had been declining over the last few years to decades-long lows, police statistics show several offenses had marked increases in 2022: Commercial burglaries were up by 41% compared to last year, retail thefts by 51%, and auto thefts by 30%.
More than 2,800 robberies involved guns this year, police said — about 55 per week — a 22% increase over last year, and the highest annual tally since 2015. . . .
Interviews in recent weeks with violence survivors, community advocates, and law enforcement officials, as well as data on the issue, show some clear trends: Guns continue to proliferate, carjackings have hit record levels, and the effects are being felt widely across impacted communities.
As shootings and homicides have hit sustained new highs, so has the proliferation of the weapons used to commit them.
For the third straight year, according to police statistics, around 90% of all homicides were committed by gun, about 15% higher than both the state and national average.
Police also recovered more than 6,000 so-called crime guns — firearms typically recovered at crime scenes, in drug busts, or from people accused of possessing them illegally. That’s nearly double the tally from just four years ago.
Notice how the Inquirer, after acknowledging that this problem is disproportionately concentrated in the black community, immediately offers the excuse of “systemic disadvantage,” as if poverty (and “blight,” whatever that means) could somehow explain the recent increase in criminal violence. But has there been an increase in “disadvantage” since 2017, when Philadelphia recorded only 259 homicides? No, of course there has been no such thing, and therefore you can’t blame “blight” for the fact that Philadelphia’s deadly violence roughly doubled in a span of four years, 2017-2021, and has just slightly declined this year after setting an all-time record last year. What does explain it, then?
The George Floyd riots of 2020, and the subsequent implementation of “criminal justice reforms,” are the obvious explanatory factors. As for the impact of these national trends in Philadelphia, the drift toward “social Justice” (i.e., irresponsible leniency) in the city was aggravated by the 2017 election of Soros-backed Larry Krasner as the city’s district attorney.
“There is a new culture of disrespect for law enforcement in this City that is promoted and championed by District Attorney Larry Krasner . . . We’ve now endured over a year and a half of the worst kinds of slander against law enforcement — the DA routinely calls police and prosecutors corrupt and racist, even ‘war criminals’ that he compares to Nazis.”
— U.S. Attorney William McSwain, 2019
Here’s a question: Did Larry Krasner create the “culture of disrespect for law enforcement” in Philadelphia or, as I rather suspect, was Krasner’s election an expression of a pre-existing anti-police sentiment in the city?
Joe Biden got 81% of the vote in Phiadelphia in 2020. Hillary Clinton got 83% of the vote in Philadelphia in 2016. No matter who the Democrats nominate for any national or statewide office in Pennsylvania — even the brain-damaged John Fetterman — that candidate will get 80% of the vote in Philadelphia. Are people who vote for Democrats expressing respect for law enforcement? Or are they instead expressing sympathy for the kind of criminals who are terrorizing Philadelphia?
Democrats are the anti-cop, pro-criminal party, and electing Democrats is an invitation to crime. No one should be surprised that deadly violence prevails in Philadelphia — or Chicago, Baltimore, etc. This is what the residents of those cities voted for when they elected Democrats.
Because the media are controlled by “Democratic Party operatives with bylines,” crime is reported in a deliberately misleading way, as reporters strive to conceal the real causes of crime — i.e., the “culture of disrespect for law enforcement” that produces a political alliance between criminals and Democrats. More from the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Carjackings, another gun-related crime, have continued to rise at a startling pace. Police said more than 1,300 carjackings were reported this year, a 53% increase over last year and nearly six times the annual total reported just three years ago.
Eleven people were shot during carjackings this year, police said, and officers made 274 carjacking arrests, sometimes for charges connected to violence, other times for theft or unauthorized use of a vehicle.
Police and community members say the rise in the crime is fueled in part by young people using the cars for joyrides around the city, or to commit additional crimes. Criminal justice experts have also pointed to the increased value of used cars, plus electronic key fobs and heightened vehicle security that require robbers to confront drivers for their keys.
The word for this is deflection — blame guns, rather than criminals, for the increased number of carjackings and, while you’re at it, bring in “experts” to cite irrelevant facts, as if “electronic key fobs” and other anti-theft technology didn’t exist prior to the past three years. The real reason that carjackings have skyrocketed is that Krasner won’t prosecute criminals, and the criminals know this, so they’ve run rampant.
Probably the main reason homicide declined in the past year is because not all victims are innocent victims — bad guys killing each other reduced the number of would-be killers. Dozens of Biden voters criminals getting killed? Who says there’s no good news from Philadelphia?
Bryan Kohberger is the suspect and criminology graduate student who is accused in the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students, who were killed in Moscow, Idaho. Kohberger, 28, was arrested on December 30, 2022, in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, court records show. His name was first confirmed by WPVI, a Philadelphia news station.
The accused man’s full name is Bryan Christopher Kohberger,according to Monroe County court records in Pennsylvania. . . .
Kohberger is facing extradition to Idaho on murder charges, the WPVI news station reports. Kohberger, an Albrightsville, Pennsylvania native, is a graduate student at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, not far from Moscow. According to the WSU website, Kohberger is pursuing his Ph.D in criminal justice and criminology. . . .
The deaths were previously ruled homicides, police said.
“These individuals have been identified as Ethan Chapin, 20, Conway, WA; Madison Mogen, 21, Coeur d’Alene, ID; Xana Kernodle, 20, Avondale, AZ ; and Kaylee GonCalves, 21, Rathdrum, ID,” Moscow, Idaho, police wrote in a statement. The cause of death was homicide by stabbing. . . .
When Kohberger was arrested, he “asked if anyone else was arrested,” [reporter Brian] Entin wrote in a tweet, adding, “I’m told he had a ‘quiet, blank stare.’” . . . According to the NBC Philadelphia story, which broke on December 30, 2022, Kohberger was “taken into custody near the Pocono Mountains” in connection with the November 13, 2022, Moscow homicides. . . .
Kohberger . . . obtained a master’s degree from DeSales University, according to a commencement document from DeSales, which is located in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. . . .
Kohberger is listed on Meritpages.com as being a graduate of “Northampton Community College, Class of 2018” and “From Albrightsville, PA.” That website says that he made the dean’s list at Northampton, where he was studying “Liberal Arts, Psychology,” according to Meritpages.com.
UPDATE: The fact that Kohberger was attending grad school at Washington State University, just eight miles from the University of Idaho campus where the four students were murder in November, is certainly intriguing. Some had also previously suggested that the Idaho murders were the work of a serial killer, tying them to unsolved stabbings in Silverton, Oregon, and Washougal, Washington.
Bryan Kohberger's criminal complaint shows he was arrested in Pennsylvania on an active arrest warrant for murder in the first degree, issued through the Moscow Police Department and Latah County Prosecutor's Office. He awaits extradition to Idaho.#MoscowHomicides@IdahoNews6pic.twitter.com/ecsbAivFkQ
UPDATE II: Well, the police in Idaho held a press conference, but because the suspect has not yet been arraigned, they couldn’t divulge anything about the case except (a) they haven’t found the murder weapon yet and (b) a white Hyundai Elantra, matching the description of a vehicle seen near the murder scene at the time of the crime, was seized at Kohberger’s Pennsylvania residence. So we don’t know how the cops broke the case, or what evidence they have against Kohberger, and won’t learn more until after the suspect is extradited to Idaho and gets arraigned, at which time we’ll see the affidavit.
A relative told The New York Post Kohberger is ‘OCD’ about his eating habits and forced his family to buy new pots that had never been used to cook meat.
‘It was above and beyond being vegan. His aunt and uncle had to buy new pots and pans because he would not eat from anything that had ever had meat cooked in them. He seemed very OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder)’ the woman said. …
Law enforcement sources told CNN that his DNA was discovered at the scene of the crime – with officers managing to track down who owned the car seen in the area of the slayings.
However, Kohberger has no prior arrests, according to public records, so it is unclear how officials got hold of his DNA.
Authorities then discovered that he had left the area and traveled to Pennsylvania, where an FBI surveillance team had been tracking the 6ft tall man.
He was kept under surveillance, with the FBI watching him for four days, while investigators from Moscow Police and Idaho State Police worked to get an arrest warrant. . . .
Nick Mcloughlin, who was friends with Kohberger [in high school] told the Daily Beast he was ‘stunned’ to see his old acquaintance arrested.
Mcloughlin said Kohberger was ‘down to Earth,’ when he graduated junior year. But at the start of senior year, Kohberger returned ‘thinner than a rail,’ had turned ‘aggressive’ and taken up boxing.
Recalling how their friendship soured, Mcloughlin added: ‘He always wanted to fight somebody, he was bullying people. We started cutting him off from our friend group because he was 100 percent a different person.’
[Mcloughlin] said he has ‘no idea’ what prompted the sudden change. . . .
The murderer is a vegan? Round up all the vegans! Lock them away! No one is safe from the violence of these killer vegan maniacs!
“I write separately to express my views on the topic of hate speech, disturbingly present in both the facts of the case before the panel and regrettably, a reemerging threat to society throughout the nation today. . . . The continued prevalence of hate speech and crimes against American citizens and residents on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability is evidence of the enduring threat of hate crimes to the fabric of American democratic society and to the safety and security of individuals.”
What bothers me most here is that casual conflation of (a) “hate speech” with (b) “hate crimes,” suggesting that suppression of (a) will prevent (b), a suggestion offered without evidence. And it is my belief that, not only is this false, but that the opposite is true, i.e., that there is likely to be more violence motivated by “hate” if people are forbidden to express whatever resentments and grievances might inspire such violence.
In November 2016, at the suggestion of a friend, [plaintiff] Epple created a private Instagram account to share comments “privately with my small group of friends.” . . .
Chen “followed” the account using the Instagram username “kkkevinkkkkk.” Chen likewise understood that Epple’s second Instagram account was to “be a private forum (by invite only), exclusive to [their] friends, and a place where [they] could share sarcasm, jokes, funny images, and other banter privately.” Not all of the persons who eventually followed the account knew who the owner of the account was.
Between November 2016 and March 2017, Epple used the account to make a number of cruelly insulting posts about various AHS students. These ranged from immature posts making fun of a student’s braces, glasses, or weight to much more disturbing posts that targeted vicious invective with racist and violent themes against specific Black classmates. For example, in early February 2017, Epple uploaded a photograph in which a Black member of the AHS girls’ basketball team was standing next to the team coach, who was also Black, and Epple drew nooses around both their necks and added the caption “twinning is winning.” In another post, he combined (1) a screen shot of a particular Black student’s Instagram post in which she stated “I wanna go back to the old way” with (2) the statement “Do you really tho?”, accompanied by a historical drawing that appears to depict a slave master paddling a naked Black man who is strung up by rope around his hands. On February 11, 2017, he posted a screenshot of texts in which he and a Black classmate were arguing, and he added the caption “Holy shit I’m on the edge of bringing my rope to school on Monday.” Other posts, although not referencing specific students, contained images either depicting, or making light of, Ku Klux Klan violence against Black people. One post included what appears to be a historical photograph of a lynched man still hanging from a tree; another depicts a Klan member in a white hood; and a third combines the caption “Ku klux starter pack” with pictures of a noose, a white hood, a burning torch, and a Black doll.
Epple also created several posts that, while omitting references to violence, still aimed highly offensive racist insults at identifiable Black classmates. In one, he uploaded an image of a Black student sitting in class that was captioned with the statement “The gorilla exhibit is nice today.” . . .
The issue before the court was whether the school could expel students based on private communications that happened off-campus, a relatively narrow question about the limits of public school disciplinary policy. What is of interest to me, however, is what the behavior of these students says about the apparent presumption of the Circuit Court judge who thinks that censoring “hate speech” is the best way to deal with what he calls “a reemerging threat to society.” As if California public schools weren’t already in the iron grip of wokeness?
Isn’t it likely that these teenagers were pursuing the thrill of defying authority — the frisson of rebellion — by expressing beliefs and attitudes they knew were forbidden? Maybe these kids aren’t actually any more racist than their classmates, but instead are just doing what adolescents have always done, rebelling against the prevailing social norms which, in Alameda County, are those of uber-woke liberalism.
While it is certainly not my intention to defend such behavior — crude and deliberately offensive “jokes” — or even to argue against expelling these students, it seems to me that the facts of the case contradict the Ninth Circuit judge’s argument in favor of more aggressive suppression of “hate speech.” It’s not as if Epple and Chen were doing this in an environment of tolerance toward expressions of racism — quite the opposite. So, the judge seems to be arguing, the answer to acts of rebellion against repression is . . . more repression?
Count me as skeptical — or call me a RAAAAACIST! for doubting that more stringent political correctness will solve anything.
