One thing I learned as a crime reporter – acts of violence are usually personal. Most murders are crimes of passion. People have arguments and it gets out of hand and one person is killed. Despite living in towns that were supposed to be away from the “big city crime,” I did see a lot of during my time as a journalist. Murders, rapes, assaults, batteries, fights, it seems that people had a grudge against someone else that got out of hand. Sometimes drugs or alcohol was involved.
Only a few cases were really pre-meditated. The ones that were were too gruesome to go into great details. A man killed his wife while she slept, ransacked the house to make it look like a burglary and left the scene to be found by his elementary school daughter. Another woman and her daughter hired some punk kid to kill her husband. And then there was the execution style murder of four people. There are a lot of bad people.
On Aug. 27, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, shot and killed three people, Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19, and Jerrald Gallion, 29, all African-Americans, in Jacksonville, Fla. Palmeter was white and he was known for his racist views, which considering his age had to be fed to him by older people. It’s no surprise he was living with his parents and if he didn’t learn it from them, he probably learned it from others in the years since Donald Trump rose to the Presidency. I wouldn’t doubt that he cast his votes for Trump and DeSantis in the last two general elections.
Palmeter had an AR-15 rifle and a handgun on his person. He had gone to the Edward Waters University in the New Town area of Jacksonville. It’s a private Christian historically black university but Palmeter left when his presence reportedly wearing a bullet-proof vest was made aware to campus police. For reasons that don’t make sense, he went to a Family Dollar before going to the university and then leaving to go to a Dollar General that was in the area. It’s likely Palmeter was looking for a location where there are a lot of black people. Incidentally, Palmeter reported worked for a Dollar Tree for about 13 months from 2021 to 2022.
It’s possible didn’t see as many people at the Family Dollar and then targeted the university but underestimated the campus police. Since most Dollar Generals now have the same outline of their buildings, he probably went there because there is only one public entrance/exit. In the parking lot, he shot Carr in a black Kia and then went inside to to target customers and employees where he shot Laguerre. Everyone fled out the back security door and Palmeter followed them before he went back inside and shot the security cameras.
Unfortunately, Gallion had been unaware of what was happening mere minutes earlier as he walked into the store with his girlfiend and was shot by Palmeter shortly after the first 911 call went out at 1:09 p.m. EST. At around 1:18 p.m., Palmeter texted his father and said he had left a suicide note in his bedroom. About a minute later, law officers entered the store and heard one gunshot which was a self-inflicted by Palmeter.
It’s bad enough that it happened to regular people out trying to shop on a Saturday afternoon. And now, it’s been reported that Palmeter had been held in custody under the Baker Act in 2017 which states people can be held involuntarily at a mental health facility if it’s deemed necessary. He was still able to purchase his firearms legally. Even worse was when Flordia Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to spin the massacre into something other than it was. His speech was drowned out by boos and cheers and comments from people saying, “You’re not welcome here” and “Your polices caused this.”
DeSantis tried to speak but the crowd overpowered him to the point that Jacksonville Councilwoman Ju’Coby PIttman tried to quell the crowd by saying they need to put party politics aside. “A bullet don’t know a party,” she said. But the person firing it does. There are reports and pictures that Palmeter had swatiskas drawn on his rifle. In the past year, DeSantis and others in his administration are tring to suppress actual history to leave out certain key issues. One of the most infamous is to suggest that slavery was good for the people because they learned skills they could use later on. Cheap animation “educational” videos produced by PragerU, a very conservative advocacy group, has produced a video of a white person voicing Frederick Douglass who was black as he tries to suggest slavery was a necessary evil the Founding Fathers did. This wasn’t the case with Douglass at all.
Congressmember Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, said the reaction at the prayer vigil was the type of energy that is needed. He said while some community and Christian leaders want “unity,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, “This is a campaign stop. Don’t let your community be used as a prop. If he wanted to help, he’d do something.” He’s right, DeSantis is trying to win brownie points while avoiding the question of how Palmeter was able to purchase guns at such a young age with his history.
Florida state rep. Angie Nixon, a Democrat, whose district includes where the shooting happened, said DeSantis has “blood on his hands” during an interview with MSNBC. “He has had an all-out attack on the Black community with his ‘anti-woke’ policies, which we know very well was nothing more than a dog whistle to get folks up — and riled up — in the way in which it just happened,” she said. It’s just like a firefighter who will start a fire in hopes of being able to put it out to be the hero.
The shooting game about more than a week after Laura Ann Carleton, 66, was fatally shot at her store Mag.Pi, a clothing and home store she had in the moutain community of Cedar Glen about 60-70 miles east of Los Angeles. Carleton was killed over an argument she had with Travis Ikeguchi, 27, who was upset over the Rainbow Pride flag she flew in support of the LGBTQIA community. People had been taking down the flag and tearing it up but Carleton was defiant and kept putting up a new one.
The fact that she was killed for something she had in her store, her business and property, is an irony many people have noted on social media and other media as conservatives have been critical of “wokeness.” Ikeguchi had become very vocal and critical of anti-LGBTQIA communities. Both him and Palmeter represent an ugliness in youth today that is willing to resort to whatever violence possible over trivial matters. I doubt for one minute Ikeguchi was a customer at Mag.Pi.
Unlike Palmeter, he didn’t take his own life but was fatally gunned down in a shoot-out with San Bernandino County deputies. Oddly, Ikeguchi, who had posted a video of himself burning a pride flag, had also been posting anti-law enforcement posts. Ikeguchi’s father, David Jay Ikeguchi, is a Master Trooper with the Florida Highway Safety. Ikeguchi had reportedly become upset with his father over his parent’s divorce in 2018.
Whatever fueled Ikeguchi’s hatred, I don’t doubt it was sudden and recent. As young men, I think both Palmeter and Ikeguchi don’t fully grasp that the world is changing around them. It’s only going to get worse as we have people trying to hold on more to the past. This is becoming more common and aggressive as people are targeting movies like Barbie for their “End the Patriarchy” messages.
Recently, on Aug. 28 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel, a faculty member was shot and killed. However, at this time, no motive is known. It’s very likely, it could have been a very personal issue that didn’t have any racial or prejudiced background. And with all due respect to South Park, just because all violent crimes may seem like “hate crimes,” targeting people just because they’re a different skin color or don’t adhere to your strict views is far worse than have a disagreement that turns physical.
Surprisingly, Oliver Anthony, who became famous earlier this month with his song “Rich Man North of Richmond” went after the Republican Party for playing his song on Aug. 23 saying he’s not a fan of the Republican Party. He has even refused a $8 million contract, revealing his real name to be Christopher Anthony Lunsford. It could be he saw the backlash Jason Aldean got for his song “Try That in a Small Town” and realized it’s best to stay humble at this time.
While I can respect him as an artist and not wanting people to use his work for their own political reasons, I feel the song still misses the mark. But it doesn’t encourage violence against certain people the Aldean song has. Strangely, this type of rhetoric didn’t start with Trump but in the post 9/11 era where people targeted brown-skinned people who may or may not be Muslims.
America has a history of politicians and elected leaders encouraging violence against other people. The worst I saw it in my lifetime was during the campaign of Barack Obama. This was when Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, became a conservative darling for his questioning of Obama’s tax policy. Unfortunately, the right tried to make him a celebrity and in subsequent videos, he really showed his ignorance when questioned.
Wurzelbacher, like so many other people, seemed to think since he was a white man with a bald held he should be the alpha male. The problem was he had a lot of problems such as lying about buying a plumbing business. But after losing a race in 2012 for Congress, Wurzelbacher, it seemed it was past time for his 15 minutes but he popped up again in 2014 to stick his foot in his mouth.
On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others in the Isla Vista community near the University of California at Santa Barbara. Rodger was reportedly motivated to kill and harm women. In an open letter, Wurzelbacher stated to the parents of the killed and injured, “As harsh as this sounds—your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights … We still have the Right to Bear Arms … Any feelings you have toward my rights being taken away from me, lose those.”
In the end, Wurzelbacher proved to be just another angry white man who felt everyone should cater to him. He reportedly died of pancreatic cancer on Aug. 27 and had set up a GoFundMe account to cover medical expenses. As of this posting, it’s only raised about half of the $25,000 goal. While I offer my condolences to his family, maybe the reason no one else has donated is they have their own medical expenses or family funerals from gun violence.
I can think of four people who are more deserving.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 