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<img src=”https://le.cz-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/active-2.jpg” alt=”Sheriff: 17 dead in Fla. school shooting”/><br>
By Terry Spencer and Kelli Kennedy Associated Press
PARKLAND, Fla. — A former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at a Florida high school Wednesday, killing at least 17 people and sending hundreds of students fleeing into the streets in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since a gunman attacked an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
The shooter, who was equipped with a gas mask and smoke grenades, set off a fire alarm to draw students out of classrooms shortly before the day ended at one of the state’s largest schools, officials said.
Authorities offered no immediate details on the 19-year-old suspect or any possible motive, except to say that he had been kicked out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which has about 3,000 students.
Students who knew the shooter, identified as Nikolas Cruz, described a volatile teenager whose strange behavior had caused others to end friendships with him, particularly after the fight that led to his expulsion.
Frantic parents rushed to the school to find SWAT team members and ambulances surrounding the huge campus. Live television footage showed emergency workers who appeared to be treating the wounded on sidewalks.
“It is a horrific situation,” said Robert Runcie, superintendent of the school district in Parkland, about an hour’s drive north of Miami. “It is a horrible day for us.”
The suspect was taken into custody without a fight in a residential neighborhood about a mile away. He had multiple magazines of ammunition, authorities said.
“It’s catastrophic. There really are no words,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters.
The attacker used the fire alarm “so the kids would come pouring out of the classrooms into the hall,” Sen. Bill Nelson told CNN.
“And there the carnage began,” said Nelson, who said he was briefed by the FBI.
The Florida Democrat said he did not know if the gunman used the smoke grenades, but he assumed that’s why he had a gas mask on.
Most of the fatalities were inside the building, though some victims were found outside. The dead included a football coach, the sheriff said.
More than a dozen other people were wounded and taken to hospitals, doctors said.
Victoria Olvera, a junior at the school, said Cruz was expelled last school year because he got into a fight with his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. She said he had been abusive to his girlfriend.
“I think everyone had in their minds if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be him,” she said.
Dakota Mutchler, another junior, said he used to be friends with Cruz. But he cut off the friendship as Cruz’s behavior “started progressively getting a little more weird.” Cruz posted on Instagram about killing animals and threatened one of Mutchler’s friends, he said.
He remembered that Cruz had a pellet gun and did target practice in his backyard.
shooting at stoneman douglas high school in Parkland florida (broward county). wish the best to the families who suffered in this pic.twitter.com/GtvFN9Lq2Y
— zezima (@AJ_sesh) February 14, 2018
Student Daniel Huerfano said he recognized Cruz from an Instagram photo in which Cruz had posed with a gun in front of his face.
Cruz “was that weird kid that you see … like a loner,” he said.
Freshman Max Charles was in class when he heard five gunshots.
“We were in the corner, away from the windows,” he said. “The teacher locked the door and turned off the light. I thought maybe I could die or something.”
As he was leaving the building, he saw four dead students and one dead teacher. He said he was relieved when he finally found his mother.
“I was happy that I was alive,” Max said. “She was crying when she saw me.”
About an hour after the attack, Michael Nembhard was sitting in his garage on a cul-de-sac when he saw a young man in a burgundy shirt walking down the street. In an instant, a police cruiser pulled up, and officers jumped out with guns drawn.
“All I heard was ‘Get on the ground! Get on the ground!'” Nembhard said. He said the man did as he was told.
The day started normally at the school, which had a morning fire drill. Students were in class around 2:30 p.m. when another alarm sounded.
Junior Noah Parness said he and the other students calmly went outside to their fire-drill areas when he suddenly heard popping sounds.
“We saw a bunch of teachers running down the stairway, and then everybody shifted and broke into a sprint,” Parness said. “I hopped a fence.”
Beth Feingold said her daughter, Brittani, sent a text that said, “We’re on code red. I’m fine,” but sent another text shortly afterward saying, “Mom, I’m so scared.” She was later able to escape.
Students heard loud bangs as the shooter fired. Many of them hid under desks or in closets and barricaded doors.
Television footage showed students leaving in a single-file line with their hands over their heads as officers urged them to evacuate quickly.
The scene was reminiscent of the Newtown attack, which shocked even a country numbed by the regularity of school shootings. The Dec. 14, 2012, assault at Sandy Hook Elementary School killed 26 people — 20 first-graders and six staff members.
The 20-year-old Connecticut gunman, who also fatally shot his mother in her bed, then killed himself.
When Caesar Figueroa got to the Florida school to check on his 16-year-old daughter, he saw helicopters and police officers wielding guns.
“It was crazy and my daughter wasn’t answering her phone.” She finally texted him that she was inside a closet with friends.
Len Murray’s 17-year-old son, a junior at the school, sent his parents a chilling text: “Mom and Dad, there have been shots fired on campus at school. There are police sirens outside. I’m in the auditorium and the doors are locked.”
A few minutes later, he texted again, “I’m fine.”
Murray said he raced to the school only to be stopped by authorities under a highway overpass within view of the school buildings. He said he told his son to save his battery and stop texting. The boy’s mother told him to turn off his ringer.
Murray said he’s had just one thought running through his mind since his son’s text: “All I keep thinking about is when I dropped him off this morning. I usually say, ‘I love you,’ and I didn’t this morning. He’s 17, he’s at that age. And I didn’t say it this morning, and I’m just kicking myself right now over and over and over.”
The school was to be closed for the rest of the week.
“Again, they are asking those students, those faculty members, those staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to stay barricaded inside the school, to not try to run out of there. Stay barricaded. Police are on their way. They are heavily armed.” pic.twitter.com/Okivcylz4T
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) February 14, 2018
Update: Students escorted out with hands up after Florida school shooting, search for gunman in burgundy shirt. Updates and livestream: https://t.co/84FoysxuVL pic.twitter.com/8jr6C2N78S
— NBC Los Angeles (@NBCLA) February 14, 2018 ]]>
<br> Thu, 15 Feb 2018 04:33:01 GMT
<img src=”https://le.cz-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/6e6e8cb975ad4bd68b8d71245929d7e5-1-1.jpg” alt=”Former dominatrix loses fight to keep job as LEO”/><br>
By David Boroff New York Daily News
JERSEY CITY, N.J. — A New Jersey sheriff’s officer who appeared in bondage films as a dominatrix was fired on Wednesday after fighting to keep her job.
A hearing officer made the decision to fire Kristen Hyman, and Hudson County Sheriff Frank Schillari told the Jersey Journal he agrees with the decision.
She was suspended six days before her academy graduation last year after she did not disclose that she appeared in the films and sometimes saw clients privately for money. Hyman told investigators she never appeared naked and didn’t perform sex acts in the videos, according to court documents obtained by the newspaper.
A judge rescinded the suspension, and she was sworn in June 8. She then went on paid administrative leave pending the hearing.
A source told the Jersey Journal that lying about her previous work on her sheriff’s office application was a major reason why she was dismissed. She may not have been accepted to the academy if she was truthful, the source told the newspaper.
The videos in question were produced between 2010 and 2012, and made the sheriff’s office a “subject of inquiry and ridicule among law enforcement,” the department previously said.
Hyman is described in the films as being “a true sexual sadist who hurts people not because she has to, but because it truly brings her pleasure,” according to a website that promotes her films.
She was featured in the fetish videos using “whips,” and she kicked “the groin area to inflict pain upon the recipient,” according to court documents previously obtained by the Jersey Journal.
©2018 New York Daily News
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<br> Mon, 12 Feb 2018 12:00:00 GMT
<img src=”https://le.cz-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/DV8q_m4WsAEJdWV.jpg” alt=”Officer fatally shot in downtown Chicago”/><br>
By Don Babwin Associated Press
CHICAGO — An off-duty police commander was shot and killed Tuesday afternoon in downtown Chicago after he spotted a man matching the radio description of an armed suspect officers were chasing on foot, the city’s police superintendent said.
Cmdr. Paul Bauer was shot multiple times after he “saw the offender and engaged in an armed physical confrontation,” Superintendent Eddie Johnson said. He choked back tears as he spoke to reporters outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Bauer was pronounced dead.
The shooting occurred near the James R. Thompson Center, the state government office building. Johnson said officers initially confronted the suspect because he was acting suspiciously. Police captured the man a short time later, and a gun was recovered at the scene, he said.
Bauer, 53, was a 31-year veteran of the department.
There were initial media reports that the man may have been involved in the robbery of a local business, but Johnson did not provide details about what the man was doing that prompted officers to want to speak with him.
Witnesses to parts of the incident near said they heard gunshots.
“I was walking down the street and I heard ‘pop pop pop pop pop,'” Noreen Danko, who was walking to her office nearby, told the Chicago Tribune. “And I said to the girl next to me, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ And she said ‘Yep.’ I said ‘Aw geez.’ And everybody is scurrying all over and I see the police head to the stairs there. There’s a stairwell there. And it goes downstairs. I heard that the door is locked there. It used to be a pedway, but now, for security reasons they have it locked.”
She told the paper that she saw officers lead the shackled suspect away and put him in a squad car, and then watched as emergency workers administered CPR to Bauer, who was lying on a stretcher, before he was put inside an ambulance and rushed to the hospital.
“I just ask the citizens of this city to keep the Bauer family in their prayers,” Johnson said before he turned and left the briefing.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered his condolences, too, calling Bauer’s death “a tragic reminder of the dangerous duty the men and women of our police department accept to ensure the safety of us all.”
Supt. Johnson confirmed the CPD member killed at the Thompson Center was 18th District Commander Paul R. Bauer pic.twitter.com/N0QneDD9MI
— Sam Unger (@SamUngerWGN) February 13, 2018
An emotional Eddie Johnson ID’s slain officer as Commander Paul Bauer of the 18th District. A large police presence remains at NW Hospital pic.twitter.com/34r4Vf3b6Y
— Ava Kelley (@kelley_ava) February 13, 2018
Shooting – Thompson center. CPD member shot. Transported to area hospital. Superintendent Johnson and command staff en route. Updates to follow.
— Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) February 13, 2018
A Chicago police officer was shot this afternoon at the downtown state office building and hospitalized in unknown condition. Sidewalks blocked by police tape. Huge police presence. pic.twitter.com/Ujjx0tpeWx
— Mitch Smith (@MitchKSmith) February 13, 2018
Red police tape outside Chicago City Hall, near where a police officer was shot. Local, state and federal law enforcement are at the scene. pic.twitter.com/dR1jc7jY3w
— Mitch Smith (@MitchKSmith) February 13, 2018 ]]>
<br> Tue, 13 Feb 2018 23:24:15 GMT
By PoliceOne Staff
ANDERSON COUNTY, S.C. — South Carolina deputies said they found a woman holding her own eyeballs after she gouged them out.
WYFF-TV reports that deputies were called after a witness said she heard a woman screaming outside a church for someone to call 911 and saw blood on her. The 19-year-old woman was kneeling nearby train tracks, gouging out her eye with her hands, according to WCSC-TV.
Witnesses said they tried to stop the woman before calling 911. When deputies and emergency crews arrived, witness said she had gouged out her other eye. The woman reportedly was holding her eyes in her hands and fought with anyone who approached her.
Anderson County Sheriff Chad McBride said it took two or three deputies and three emergency crew members to subdue the woman and render aid. The woman was eventually loaded into a medical helicopter.
The woman is in stable condition and on a respirator.
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<br> Fri, 9 Feb 2018 18:41:58 GMT
<img src=”http://feeds.policeone.com/data/Grossman-&-Wyllie-285w.jpg” alt=”Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denial”/><br>
“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed… school fire… North America… 50 years… How many? Zero. That’s right. Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”
So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.
Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement — the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others — but violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I’ll focus on that issue here.
Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student “In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly.’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”
Grossman went on, “Why can’t we be like little Johnny Firefighter?” Grossman asked as he prowled the stage. “He’s our A+ student!”
He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”
Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”
Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”
Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!
“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. …They’re in denial.”
Teaching the Teachers The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.
“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.
“But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”
Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.
Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”
Arming Campus Cops is Elementary Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary. Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.
“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.
“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.
“Imagine if someone said, ‘I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers.’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun.’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.
“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman. “It is denial.”
Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.
Grossman’s Five D’s Let’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.
1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.
2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero
3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.
4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.
a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target. b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.
5. Destroy — Police officers and agencies should consider the following:
a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid. b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.” c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function. d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care. e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors. f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch. g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.
Coming Soon: External Threats Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?
“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.
The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”
What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.
“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.
Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.
As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.
Hooah, Colonel!
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<br> Wed, 5 May 2010 13:00:00 GMT