Tag Archive: Chief of police


Ariel Castro charged with kidnapping, rape of three Cleveland women

Ariel Castro will be charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape in the case of the three women in Cleveland, Ohio. Onil and Pedro Castro do not face charges at this time.

By Yamiche Alcindor, Donna Leinwand Leger and Gary Strauss, USA TODAY6:07 p.m. EDT May 8, 2013

CLEVELAND — The man at whose home three women were found after a decade of captivity was charged Wednesday with multiple counts of kidnapping and rape.

Ariel Castro, 52, faces three counts of rape and four counts of kidnapping involving victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. The three vanished between 2002 and 2004. Castro was also charged with kidnapping in connection with Berry’s six-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, who was also found at the home Monday and is believed to be Castro’s child.

Authorities revealed little about their investigation into the case, which is on-going, but said they had gathered hundreds of pieces of evidence. The felony charges against Castro came 48 hours after Berry – now 27 – made a frantic flight from Castro’s Seymour Avenue home early Monday evening. Authorities say that may have been the first opportunity any of the victims had to escape captivity.

Castro is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Additional charges could be filed at a later date. Police reports say Castro allegedly lured all three into his car on three separate occasions.

Castro’s brothers, Pedro and Onil, were also arrested Monday. But Victor Perez, chief deputy prosecutor for Cleveland, said there is no evidence that either – who did not live at the Seymour Ave. home – had any involvement in the crimes against the three women or Berry’s daughter. Both face Thursday court hearings on outstanding misdemeanor warrants, Perez said.

Earlier Wednesday, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus returned to their Cleveland homes, where they were surrounded by family and friends. Knight was still in a Cleveland hospital Wednesday.

DeJesus, wearing a lime green hoodie, stepped from a car, and gave a thumbs up as the crowd chanted “Gina! Gina!” A woman then pulled her into a tight embrace and hustled her inside through a forest of flowers and balloons.

Nancy Ruiz, DeJesus’ mother, thanked those who had helped the family over the past nine years. “Even the ones that doubted, I want to thank them the most,” she said. “They’re the ones that made me stronger, the ones that made me feel the most that my daughter was out there.”

Gina’s aunt, Sandra Ruiz, called on friends, relatives and the media “to give us time and privacy to heal.”

“There are not enough words to say or express the joy that we feel with the return of our family member, Gina,” she said. “And now Amanda Berry, the daughter, and Michelle Knight, who is our family also.”

Ruiz also called on the community to help search for Ashley Summers, another young woman from the area who went missing at the age of 14 in 2007.

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A year after chaos, Seattle police say they are ready for May Day

Seattle Times staff reporter

One year after a May Day demonstration erupted in vandalism and caught Seattle police ill-prepared, the Police Department says it has learned from its mistakes and is ready to respond to problems when marchers return to the streets for Wednesday’s events.

Capt. Chris Fowler, who has been assigned to oversee this year’s planning, said Monday he was given a clear directive from the police brass about a month ago: Allow peaceful marchers to exercise their free-speech rights but be prepared to arrest people who commit crimes against people or property.

That message got muddled last year, when planning didn’t begin until a week before May Day and officers were sporadically deployed, with conflicting messages regarding when they could use force to stop violence.

As a result, police found themselves undermanned when dozens of violent protesters, including black-clad anarchists, broke away from a midday march, smashing windows at the William Kenzo Nakamura U.S. Courthouse, businesses and cars in the downtown core.

Assistant Chief Mike Sanford became a lightning rod for some critics when he bolted on his own in civilian clothing to make an arrest — forcing officers to come to his rescue and use force when he tripped and found himself surrounded by hostile protesters.

While no one was hurt, the business-oriented Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), upset at the police response, called for a thorough review.

The department responded with two reviews, one internal and another by a former Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief, but they were only released April 2 after delays.

This year, police are preparing for a 1:30 p.m. rally at Judkins Park in South Seattle, followed by a march to the downtown Henry M. Jackson Federal Building beginning at 3:30 p.m.

 

Read Full Article Here

 

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OLYMPIA — The countdown to May Day is on.

Local police are hoping for the best, and planning for the worst.

CAPITOL photoAt a small coffee shop on 5th and Water in downtown Olympia, protesters, some who consider themselves anarchists, gathered for a strategy session… May Day planning, but they didn’t let the media in and declined to send somebody out to talk with us.

We did talk with Mark McElroy across the street.

He’s not a protester but he supports their right to do so.

“I think it’s important for people to have the right to protest.  That’s one of the cornerstones of American democracy is protest so I think that’s a valuable component of being an American citizen,” Mark McElroy said.

Valuable component as long as it doesn’t go too far.

Police fear the violence that erupted in Seattle last year.

“Peaceful protests are fine. Our concern is a criminal element getting mixed up in legitimate protests and causing trouble and for those folks we want them to know that won’t be tolerated,” Olympia Police department spokesperson Laura Wohl said.

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Yet  they  want  us to believe  that  the  XL  Pipeline  will  be  perfectly   fine and the  Aquifer  for  will be  safe?  Yeah   Right ………….

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Earth Watch Report  -  Environmental Pollution

Photo by Carl Dement shows oil on street in front of homes near Mayflower.

Today Environment Pollution USA State of Arkansas, Mayflower Damage level
Details

Environment Pollution in USA on Saturday, 30 March, 2013 at 04:34 (04:34 AM) UTC.

Description
Authorities are working to clean up an oil spill in central Arkansas after a crude oil pipeline ruptured. Mayflower Police Chief Robert Satkowski said an ExxonMobil pipeline sprung a leak Friday afternoon in the small city about 20 miles northwest of Little Rock. Satkowski says the pipeline has since been shut off. The spill forced authorities to evacuate dozens of homes Friday. Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokesman Brandon Morris said earlier Friday that oil reached nearby Lake Conway, but he later said that information was incorrect. Oil spilled onto the road and lawns, but it’s not clear exactly how much. ExxonMobil says it’s working with emergency responders and local authorities to respond to the oil spill. The company says the incident is under investigation.

Authorities evacuate dozens of homes after pipeline ruptures in central Arkansas

The Canadian PressBy The Associated Press | The Canadian Press – 10 hours ago

MAYFLOWER, Ark. – Authorities are working to clean up an oil spill in central Arkansas after a crude oil pipeline ruptured.

Mayflower Police Chief Robert Satkowski said an ExxonMobil pipeline sprung a leak Friday afternoon in the small city about 20 miles northwest of Little Rock.

Satkowski says the pipeline has since been shut off.

The spill forced authorities to evacuate dozens of homes Friday.

Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokesman Brandon Morris said earlier Friday that oil reached nearby Lake Conway, but he later said that information was incorrect.

Oil spilled onto the road and lawns, but it’s not clear exactly how much.

ExxonMobil says it’s working with emergency responders and local authorities to respond to the oil spill. The company says the incident is under investigation.

‘We’ve lost respect for life’: Detroit records deadliest year in decades

Carlos Osorio / AP

Detroit Interim Police Chief Chester Logan answers a question as Mayor Dave Bing looks on during a news conference in Detroit on Thursday.

By Andrew Mach, NBC News

The homicide rate in the city of Detroit continued a grim upward trend in 2012, hitting its highest peak in nearly two decades, officials said Thursday.

A dwindling population — 706,585 people in 2011, according to the U.S. Census estimate — and the rise in homicides combined to make Detroit’s murder rate among the highest in the nation, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Police Chief Chester Logan announced at a press conference.

“We’ve just lost respect for each other; we’ve lost respect for life,” Bing said. “I don’t want to say that you can forget about this generation or the generation before us, but if we’re going to solve the problem, we’ve got to get into the heads and the minds and the hearts of our young people, and it’s going to take all of us to do that.”

Detroit’s total of 411 homicides in 2012, up from 377 the previous year, includes 386 criminal homicides and 25 “justifiable homicides” that included three shootings by police, according to numbers released by the city. The number of criminal homicides increased 12 percent from 344 in 2011. The total in 2010 was 308.

Even as violent crime rates in the U.S. fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2011, the homicide rate in Detroit rose to a level higher than nearly 40 years ago when the city was known as the Murder Capital, the Detroit News reported. The same day the city’s official crime statistics were announced, a Detroit woman was charged with fatally stabbing her 8-year-old daughter and a cab driver was killed in a double shooting on the city’s northwest side.

“I think the message that we want our citizens to understand is that we need them. We need them to help us. I just don’t believe that our police department should have the total responsibility for safety in the city,” Bing said. “There are, as the chief said, he can have an additional thousand cops, but there are things that are happening in homes and families in the communities and the neighborhoods that whether a cop was there or not is not going to stop the crime.”

 

Read Full Article Here

Sandy Hook: Huge Hoax and Anti-Gun “Psy Op”

By Jim Fetzer and Dennis Cimino

“The page you requested was not found.”–Anthony J. Hilder facebook page notice


There are obvious signs that tell the difference between genuine and fabricated event. The recent shooting of police and firemen responding to a deliberately-set fire has all the signs of being a bona fide event: there is a single consistent narrative, one shooter has been clearly identified, and there has been no good reason to doubt that the subject, William Spengler, went off the rails and committed the crimes. There are many articles about it, which relate the same basic themes: “Killer of 2 NY Firemen had semiautomatic rifle, left note”: Police say the man who lured firefighters in Webster, N.Y., into a deadly ambush had the same make and caliber semiautomatic rifle as the one used in the Connecticut school massacre. Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said Tuesday that 62-year-old William Spengler was armed with a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, a .38-caliber revolver and a 12-gauge shotgun in Monday’s ambush. Spengler killed two firefighters and wounded two others before fatally shooting himself.” However bizarre the event, there is nothing about it that suggests it was either a hoax or a psy op.

In the case of Sandy Hook, however, the situation is completely different, where we have one inconsistency after another: the mother was a teacher there and Adam was a student; the mother was not a teacher there an Adam was not a student. One shooter was involved, yet police radio reports show a second suspect was apprehended at the scene and a police helicopter video show yet a third suspect being tracked in the woods. The principal called the local paper about the shooting; the principal was dead on the scene. Excellent studies of the incoherence of the Sandy Hook narrative have been published by Niall Bradley, “Sandy Hook massacre story spins out of control” (Veterans Today, 20 December 2012) and by Professor James F. Tracy, “The Sandy Hook School Massacre: Unanswered Questions and Missing Information” (Global Research, 25 December 2012). Even NBC News has reported that there were four rather than two handguns inside the school and no long gun. There is no consistent story or coherent narrative.

The Bushmaster Hoax

Perhaps the most important point made by Niall Bradley concerned the Bushmaster, which was supposed to be the weapon that was used to slaughter 20 children and six adults as follows:

Professor Tracy observes that the report given by the medical examiner raises further questions about the weapon used, leading Tracy to question whether the man who participated in this interview was the real H. Wayne Carver or an impostor: ” . . . the H. Wayne Carver who showed up to the December 15 press conference is an almost entirely different man, appearing apprehensive and uncertain, as if he is at a significant remove from the postmortem operation he had overseen. The multiple gaffes, discrepancies, and hedges in response to reporters’ astute questions suggest that he is either under coercion or an imposter. While the latter sounds untenable it would go a long way in explaining his sub-pedestrian grasp of medical procedures and terminology.”

“With this in mind,” Tracy continues, “extended excerpts from this exchange are worthy of recounting here in print. Carver is accompanied by Connecticut State Police Lieutenant H. Paul Vance and additional Connecticut State Police personnel. The reporters are off-screen and thus unidentified so I have assigned them simple numerical identification based on what can be discerned of their voices”:

Reporter #1: So the rifle was the primary weapon?
H. Wayne Carver: Yes.
Reporter #1: [Inaudible]
Carver: Uh (pause). Question was what caliber were these bullets. And I know—I probably know more about firearms than most pathologists but if I say it in court they yell at me and don’t make me answer [sic]—so [nervous laughter]. I’ll let the police do that for you.
Reporter #2: Doctor can you tell us about the nature of the wounds. Were they at very close range? Were the children shot at from across the room?
Carver: Uhm, I only did seven of the autopsies. The victims I had ranged from three to eleven wounds apiece and I only saw two of them with close range shooting. Uh, but that’s, uh y’know, a sample. Uh, I really don’t have detailed information on the rest of the injuries.
[Given that Carver is Connecticut’s top coroner and in charge of the entire postmortem this is a startling admission.-JT]
Reporter #3: But you said that the long rifle was used?
Carver: Yes.
Reporter #3: But the long rifle was discovered in the car.
State Police Lieutenant Vance: That’s not correct, sir.
Unidentified reporter #4: How many bullets or bullet fragments did you find in the autopsy. Can you tell us that?
Carver: Oh. I’m lucky I can tell you how many I found. I don’t know. There were lots of them, OK? This type of weapon is not, uh … the bullets are designed in such a fashion that the energy—this is very clinical. I shouldn’t be saying this. But the energy is deposited in the tissue so the bullet stays in [the tissue].

In fact, as Tracy observes, the Bushmaster .223 the Connecticut police finally claimed was used in the shooting is designed for long range field use and utilizes high velocity bullets with a muzzle velocity of 3,000 fps, the energy of which even at considerable distance would penetrate several bodies before finally coming to rest in tissue. The whole school should have had rounds coming out of the walls and exiting the building, after going through the victims. Possibly not the outer wall, if it was brick; but drywall? Those bullets would have been hitting homes around the school had the Bushmaster been used–another proof the “official account” is a sham.

The inquiry of Allan Rees

I received an inquiry from Allan Rees of noliesradio asking if I could review a view he has archived showing an officer unloading a weapon from the trunk of the car:

Hi Jim,

Can you view the first video in our post here and determine whether or not the Bushmaster was retrieved from the trunk of Adam’s vehicle? If it was the Bushmaster, the official story hits the brick wall. I can see the clip in the video. Also what is the officer doing to the gun? Is what he is doing characteristic to a bushmaster rather than a shotgun or other rifle?


YouTube – Veterans Today -

As a former Marine Corps officer who used to supervise marksmanship training, I studied the video and replied with my observations about what could be seen, in relation to the handgrip or magazine (which extend from the bottom of the weapon) as opposed to the carrying handle (which extends from the top):

Allan,

My observations:

(1) It looks like a Bushmaster, because the handgrip is visible in some of the frames.

(2) He is ejecting rounds from the chamber, which appear to be of a small caliber.

(3) Shotgun shells would be much, much larger and very obvious upon ejection.

I recommend obtaining confirmation, but this appears to have been the Bushmaster.

Jim

P.S. I am going to contact some friends confirm my observations.

Shotguns are more familiar than assault weapons, but here is a photograph to illustrate their typical size and shape, along with a sample of a few shells, which are obviously MUCH LARGER than .223 rounds:

The person I contacted for a second opinion was Dennis Cimino, with whom I have authored articles here on Veterans Today and elsewhere. Dennis has extensive military experience and is one of the smartest men I have ever known at sorting out what is really going on when it comes to covert ops:

I blew [some of these frames] up pretty large, going too much bigger yields too much pixellation to do much with the shot then but this is clearly an assault rifle not a shotgun. The ammo on the cement behind the vehicle looks to be most likely to be .223 ammo, but that’s just a guess as those surely are not SHOTGUN shells.

So, for what it’s worth, I decree this is the assault rifle here in the trunk, and if it was in the trunk, how could it have been used in any shooting unless the ‘dead’ shooter got up and put it into the trunk after he killed himself???

I was initially puzzled there was no carrying handle of the weapon in the trunk, so I checked it out and fond that Bushmaster makes several versions that do not have carrying handles, some camo, some not:

Police Lt. H. Paul Vance

Something is very wrong with the role of Connecticut State Police Lieutenant H. Paul Vance, who, as the extract from the interview reflects, denied that the Bushmaster was found in the trunk of the car rather than beside the body. I strongly suspect that he was the officer who unloaded the magazine at the time, which has raised additional questions about his competence and role, which Dennis has expressed:

If any of the so called ‘victims’ that died were with .223 rounds in them, that it’s impossible for the shooter who offed himself at the scene to have also carried this weapon to the car and put it into the trunk.The handling of the weapon is absolutely not being done by a trained law enforcement official, to be frank about it, they would not have handled the weapon like that before it got taken to a forensics lab and had the prints taken from all of the handled parts of it.

No cop investigating a crime scene would handle it like that. And it’s too thick to be a shotgun so it’s an assault rifle. whether it’s the same one in your pictures is not clear, the weapons has a multi round magazine, why didn’t the ahole eject that before cycling the rounds out thru the weapon like that, when pulling the mag out of it would have sufficed.

Very very very odd.

But handling the thing like that was outrageous. no cop would do that, which is more proof that was being done for the press, not for any investigation.

 

Read Full Article Here

 

Victoria Freile and Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY9:32p.m. EST December 24, 2012

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The gunman, who served prison time for killing his grandmother with a hammer, committed suicide.

WEBSTER, N.Y. — A gunman ambushed firefighters at a house fire in the Rochester suburb of Webster, N.Y., early Monday, killing two firemen and injuring two others before killing himself on a Lake Ontario beach.

Seven homes were destroyed as firefighters waited for police to secure the scene.

The gunman, who shot himself at the scene, was identified as 62-year-old William Spengler. He was charged in 1980 with beating his 92-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer in her home next door.

Spengler served 17 years in New York State prison on manslaughter charges, police officials said. He was on probation until 2006 and reportedly had lived quietly with his mother, who died in October, and sister at 191 Lake Road, along a sliver of land between Irondequoit Bay and the lake.

Spengler’s 67-year-old sister, Cheryl, remains unaccounted for.

Spengler apparently set fire to the home and a vehicle to lure firefighters, whom he shot from a berm nearby. Police have have not determined a motive for the arson and killings, nor have they released details about the weapons Spengler used or possessed. As a convicted felon, he could not legally own firearms.

Police Chief Gerald Pickering, choking up frequently as he spoke to reporters, said all four firefighters who responded to the call at 5:35 a.m. ET came under fire when they drove up.

The dead are Webster Police Lt. Mike Chiapperini, 43, a volunteer firefighter and the police department’s public information officer, and Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, who worked as a 911 dispatcher for Monroe County. Chiapperini was named “Firefighter of the Year” two weeks ago.

“It is a very difficult situation,” Pickering said, his voice quavering.

“People get up in the middle of the night to fight fires,” he said. “They don’t expect to be shot and killed.”

He said Chiapperini “took public service to the nth degree. He was all about giving back to the community. When he wasn’t working as a police officer he was always the first on the truck.”

Kaczowka, who joined the 125-volunteer West Webster Fire Department a year ago, was substituting for older members so they could be home with their families for Christmas.

“He didn’t have to be there,” said Al Sienkiewicz, a former chief and department now spokesman. “He was bunking in voluntarily so others could stay at home.”

The 911 center’s director said he was “”everyone’s little brother” and would often bring desserts his mother made.

The injured firefighters are Joseph Hofsetter and Theodore Scardino. Hofsetter suffered a severe injury to his pelvis. Scardino was shot in the left shoulder, with the bullet hitting his lung. An off-duty police officer who was driving by at the time also was injured by flying shrapnel.

A Facebook page was set up in honor of the Webster first-responders.

Pickering said Spengler had staked out a position with an arsenal of several firearms on a berm overlooking the scene.

“It appears that it was a trap,” Pickering said. “There was a car in a house that was engulfed in flames, probably set by Mr. Spengler, who lay in wait with his armaments and shot the first responders.”

“Looking at his history, obviously this is an individual who has a lot of problems, who killed his grandmother, and I’m sure there were mental health issues,” Pickering said.

Spengler told police he hit his grandmother, Rose Spengler, with a hammer during an argument. He then went home and told his mother, who found her body at the bottom of the basement stairs. He also reportedly talked about suicide after confessing to a detective.

As his trial for second-degree murder was beginning in July 1981, Spengler pleaded guilty to manslaughter, telling the judge he wanted to spare his family “the pain of a trial.”

Pickering said the 911 call early Monday was apparently called in by a resident in the neighborhood of small lakeside vacation homes.

LISTEN: Emergency dispatches from the Webster, N.Y., shooting

 

Watch  Videos and Read Full Article Here

Gunman attacks ‘Batman’ premiere in Colorado, 12 dead

A Gunman opened fire at a crowed cinema premiere in the U.S. state of Colorado, killing at least 12 people and wounding 59 others. (AFP)

A Gunman opened fire at a crowed cinema premiere in the U.S. state of Colorado, killing at least 12 people and wounding 59 others. (AFP)

By Reuters
AURORA Colorado

A gunman in a gas mask and body armor killed 12 people at a midnight premiere of the new “Batman” movie in a suburb of Denver early on Friday, sparking pandemonium when he hurled a gas canister into the auditorium and opened fire on moviegoers.

Armed with an assault rifle, a shotgun and a pistol, he wounded another 59 with gunfire during a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” at a mall in the suburb of Aurora, which turned into a chaotic scene of bleeding victims, horrified screams and pleas of “I’m hit, help me,” witnesses said.

The suspect, identified by police as James Eagan Holmes, 24, also booby-trapped his Aurora apartment with sophisticated explosives, creating a hazard for law-enforcement and bomb squad officers who swarmed to the scene.

Authorities evacuated five nearby buildings, and created a perimeter of several blocks.

Arriving on the scene within 90 seconds of the first emergency calls, officers immediately took the suspect into custody in the parking lot behind the cinema, where he surrendered without a fight, Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said.

The suspect was armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun and a Glock .40 caliber handgun, Oates said. Police found an additional .40 gauge handgun in his car parked just outside the rear entrance to the cinema, Oates said.

Holmes is a University of Colorado medical school student who was in the process of dropping out of a graduate program in neurosciences, the university said in a statement.

His family issued a statement of sympathy for the victims and asked for privacy while they “process this information.”

Holmes had only a speeding ticket on his criminal record and was dressed in black with a gas mask, ballistic helmet, vest, throat guard and crotch guard, Oates said.

The living room of the suspect’s apartment was crisscrossed with trip wires connected to what appeared to be plastic bottles containing an unknown liquid, said Chris Henderson, Aurora’s deputy fire chief. Authorities planned to detonate the suspected explosives with a robot, he said.

“The pictures are fairly disturbing. It looks very sophisticated, how it’s booby-trapped. It could be a very long wait,” Oates said.

The gunman appeared at the front of the theater during the movie and released a canister which let out a hissing sound before gunfire erupted, police said.

“When we got out of the theater it was just chaos. There was this one guy on all fours, crawling. There was this girl spitting up blood,” witness Donovan Tate told KCNC television. “There were bullet holes in some people’s backs, some people’s arms. There was this one guy who was stripped down to just his boxers. It looked like he was shot in the back or something. It was crazy.”

Confusion reigned as shooting broke out during an action scene in the summer blockbuster, one of the more highly anticipated films of the year. The gunman may have blended in with other moviegoers who wore costumes as heroes and villains.

“He looked like he was in the military or like he was a SWAT person so he just kind of blended in with the chaos of the crowd. People thought he was probably like a cop or something,” witness Jennifer Seeger told NBC’s “Today.”

Chandler Brannon, 25, who had been watching the movie with his girlfriend, said that about 20 minutes into the movie he saw a smoke bomb go off and heard what sounded like fireworks. He later realized they were a rapid volley of gunshots.

“I told my girlfriend to just play dead,” he told Reuters. “All I could see was a silhouette.”

President Barack Obama and his Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, pulled their campaign ads from Colorado and dedicated their campaign events to sympathy for the victims.

“There are going to be other days for politics. This, I think, is a day for prayer and reflection,” Obama told supporters at a previously scheduled campaign event in Fort Myers, Florida, which he cut short to address the shooting.

The shooting evoked memories of the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, also a Denver suburb and 17 miles (27 km) from Aurora, where two students opened fire and killed 12 students and a teacher.

Bodies of victims remained in the theater while the investigation continued with some 200 local police, 100 FBI investigators and 25 representatives of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on scene, officials said.

U.S. military personnel apparently were among the casualties but it was not immediately clear whether any were killed, the Defense Department said.

Buckley Air Force Base is the largest employer in Aurora, a city of more than 320,000 people, according to the Aurora Economic Development Council.

“Our hearts go out to those who were involved in this tragedy and to the families and friends of those involved,” read a statement from Holmes’ family in San Diego that was read by police there.

In New York, police will deploy officers at screenings of “The Dark Knight Rises” throughout the city “as a precaution against copycats,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement.

The Paris movie premiere was canceled on Friday, event organizers said. Workmen cleared away barriers that had been set up in preparation for the premiere at a cinema on the capital’s Champs Elysees avenue.

“Warner Bros. is deeply saddened to learn about this shocking incident. We extend our sincere sympathies to the families and loved ones of the victims at this tragic time,” said Jessica Zacholl, a spokeswoman for Time Warner-owned Warner Bros., the studio behind the film.

The film, with a budget of $250 million, opened on 4,404 screens, the second widest release ever behind “Twilight: Eclipse,” and industry analysts had said it stood a good chance of matching or beating the opening weekend box office record of $207 million set by Disney’s “Avengers” in May.

Published on Jul 20, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish

In the US, a gunman wearing a gas mask has shot dead moviegoers who were watching the new Batman film in a suburb in Denver. Reports say some 50 people were also injured. John Hendren joins us on the line from Chicago.

Published on Jul 20, 2012 by

DemocracyNow.org – At least 12 people have been killed and more than 50 wounded in a mass shooting at a movie theater outside of Denver. Ten people reportedly died at the scene and four later succumbed to their injuries in hospital. A number of the wounded are in critical condition. It was one of the worst mass shootings in the United States since the killings of 32 people at Virginia Tech five years ago. The shootings have called to mind the killings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, only 25 miles away from the theater, where 12 students and a teacher were killed in a mass shooting spree by two students in 1999. We go to Denver to speak with Mary Kershner, a registered nurse, gun control advocate and founding member of Nurses Advocating Gun Safety. She has lost three members of her family to gun violence.

 

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