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Father of Santa Fe Shooter – My son is the victim here
Tribunist ^ | 05/22/18

Posted on 05/22/2018 1:58:45 PM PDT by Simon Green

There’s a new wrinkle in the aftermath of the shooting at Santa Fe High School on Friday. The family of the shooter, the boy who killed 10 people, are speaking out. They’re claiming that their son, the one who shot his classmates and teachers, should be seen as a victim. They claim the boy was bullied and “mistreated” by his classmates.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, is being held on capital murder charges. Pagourtzis has admitted to killing 8 students and two teachers. The shotgun and .38 revolver he brought to campus both belonged to his father.

That man, Antonios Pagourtzis, is now making statements. He says his son was a ‘good boy’ and that he must have been bullied.

“My son, to me, is not a criminal, he’s a victim,” Antonios Pagourtzis, who immigrated to the U.S. from Greece, reportedly told Greece’s Antenna TV. “The kid didn’t own guns, I owned guns.”

“He pulled the trigger but he is not this person,” he said.

“It is like we see in the movies when someone gets into his body and does things that are not done. It’s not possible in one day for the child to have changed so much.”

Pagourtzis said his son never displayed any signs that he would be capable of such violence, explaining that he didn’t fight with others, didn’t drink alcohol and seemed to enjoy healthy pursuits such as working out.

Pagourtzis also spoke with the Wall Street Journal. He told them that his son was “mistreated at school” and “that’s what was behind” the carnage.

“He never got into a fight with anyone. I don’t know what happened,” he said.

“Somebody probably came and hurt him, and since he was a solid boy, I don’t know what could have happened. I can’t say what happened. All I can say is what I suspect as a father.”

“I hope God helps me and my family understand. We are all devastated. It would have been better if he shot me than all those kids.”

“I have guns. I am a hunter and had a farm which I rented in the 1980s,” he said. “The guns in my house are legal and declared.”

Antonios Pagourtzis and his wife were allowed to visit their son in prison for 15 minutes.

“I saw the child. I didn’t see a child who is a murderer. A pure child, a child who was ashamed to look me in the face,” Pagourtzis said.

“He was thinking of his sisters, how his sisters will be able to get about. He said he loves me, he told his mother he loves her and he will try to be strong to help us cope.”

It was during this visit that the younger Pagourtzis reportedly told his parents that he had spared “the kids who were the good kids so they can tell his story.”

Pagourtzis will have his story told. Much of what’s known about the incident will become public during the sentencing, if not before.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: boohoo; thug
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To: Simon Green
Thanks for posting, I'm very interested in these cases.

I think the parents are bewildered and wish the attorney had advised them against speaking to the media. Would not be surprised to learn the guns had been secured.

The Facebook and Instagram captures I've seen suggest the boy employed some duplicity.

Hard to believe no one investigated him over the coat in warm weather...right out of the movies.

Columbine copycats are to be expected ...especially when fools commemorate shootings with marches. Yet there does seem to be a revenge motive here.

81 posted on 05/22/2018 7:27:56 PM PDT by PsyCon
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To: Simon Green

He should kill his son then so all the “victims” will be equal.


82 posted on 05/22/2018 8:13:24 PM PDT by fish hawk (MACA Make America Christian Again)
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To: Peter ODonnell

>>>but in a culture like yours (where guns are available) I might have done that too, seriously, because I was that frustrated with the non-stop bullying<<<

“Gun Culture” is just another Liberal Dog Whistle. More People in this Country do NOT own Firearms than DO own Firearms. Sounds like an Anti Gun Culture to me, not that has anything to do with our Constitutional Rights.

I do know that America has a “Car Culture”, so if this Murdering SOB decided to run over and kill the Bullies as they crossed the Street (ISIS Tactics) we wouldn’t be blaming the Car Culture in America.

I was Bullied in High School. I never thought about coming to School with a Gun or running over somebody who Bullied me. I’ve owned Guns since I was eight and Cars since I was fifteen. I was obviously a major threat to Society.

As an aside, my older Brother took his Rifle to High School back in the late 50’s since he was in the School Gun Club. The only thing that has changed since then is the rise of Liberalism and the decay of the Civil Society as a result.


83 posted on 05/22/2018 8:52:49 PM PDT by Kickass Conservative (The only good Commie is a dead Commie. Cast your Vote Accordingly.)
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To: All
I think you should take my remarks as actuarial not moralistic, when I say a culture with guns and bullying, I don't mean this in some liberal dog whistle way at all, the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of guns and there is a lot of bullying.

There may be other countries about which you could say the same. I suspect almost all countries have a lot of bullying within the fabric of everyday society. It is part of the human condition.

Expecting that a teenager (or younger child) will take an adult religious position on this, in a vacuum, is entirely nonsensical. I developed some religious perspectives on this long after the fact when I had the education and the life experience to develop those points of view.

As to parenting being inadequate, I think it is almost universally the case that parents of bullied children react in one of two ways, neither very useful — either they ignore the problem thinking it will go away, and perhaps they counsel “fight back” (which is senseless against continuous multiple bullies), or, they overreact and turn into helicopter parents. Something in between might work better. I don't know, because when it came time for me to be a parent, my own child was seldom bullied and it was not a major problem in our family life. I suppose that was in part because we were then inconspicuous as regular “normal” folks whatever that means.

Nor do I wish to imply that a mass murder reaction is appropriate. It isn't. But no society should expect that it will be immune from these problems if people don't build better structures to deal with (a) guns coming into public spaces and (b) zero-tolerance of bullying.

This does not mean you have to like everybody. Maybe I was a horrid little boy, I'm nothing to write home about now. But in all countries, we need more tolerance of differences, especially those differences which are not meant to be antisocial or against the law. It's one thing to dislike illegal immigrants, I sort of get that, but inviting immigrants into your country and then bullying their kids is just sociopathic behavior. I would say to the bullies, if you're that tough, go bully the adults, they decided to come to your country, not their kids.

84 posted on 05/22/2018 9:09:48 PM PDT by Peter ODonnell (Look for England to do well at the World Cup until it starts)
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To: DoughtyOne

.
You’re on track.


85 posted on 05/22/2018 9:12:54 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: Mears

.
OK, I agree, but still things are on a downward curve.


86 posted on 05/22/2018 9:14:33 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: ClearBlueSky

“Girls whose instincts warn them about sociopaths like this...”

Too bad she didn’t have a gun, and trained in its use.


87 posted on 05/22/2018 9:16:30 PM PDT by 21twelve
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To: Blue House Sue

>> The Parkland shooter also claimed that he was bullied.

The Parkland shooter is truly mental. The Sante Fe shooter is a snowflake.


88 posted on 05/22/2018 9:20:11 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: 21twelve

I understand the girl spoke to school officials about the perps relentless quests for affection.

The massacres are symptomatic of failed public education.

Why did the perp choose to kill the girl at school?


89 posted on 05/22/2018 9:25:42 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: Gene Eric

Back in Junior High my son was getting bullied. We told him to tell the teacher. The teacher called in the mom and dad. The dad told her “His mom deals with that crap, I’m busy.” (Some big-wig executive). The teacher told the dad that if he wasn’t at the meeting the boy would be suspended automatically. Dad made it.

The teacher spent a lot of time with the bully and the family, making them get family therapy, etc. (The bully had personal and family issues).

He and my son later became good friends.


90 posted on 05/22/2018 9:53:18 PM PDT by 21twelve
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To: 21twelve

That’s a responsible educator. Good things worked out.

Best we progress to an education system that answers to minimal govt standards and security measures, but is operated independently of the govt.

If we can have prison reform, we can certainly have education reform.


91 posted on 05/22/2018 10:21:54 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: rktman

Is there a TX law about securing them from minors?
******************************
Not AFAIK. ...When 12-13, dad would take me dove hunting with several of his coworkers for a weekend. I knew gun safety and used a 20ga.

When I was 14 and 15, I’d rush home from school some days. There, I’d grab my dad’s old leather jacket, the 20ga. shotgun and a box of shells.

Soon, my friend’s older brother (Korean Vet) and his buddy would pull up in a Jeepster. The four of us would drive about 5 miles to rabbit hunt until dusk. That land is now the National Cemetery near Mountain Creek Lake in West Dallas.


92 posted on 05/22/2018 11:00:08 PM PDT by octex
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To: Peter ODonnell

There is some truth in your posts

One can call a kid who snaps and kills evil

One can blame parents for not helping him

One can also note that bullying can be brutal and some kids pile on mercilessly and some snap

What surprises me is this bullying is 16-19 year olds..

When I was a kid bullying was more ages 9-13/14

I was redneck enough and big enough that anyone tried it I fought back which is without question the key

But today you’ll be punished for that I’m told

I’m father to five

I have empathy ..what can I say


93 posted on 05/22/2018 11:40:44 PM PDT by wardaddy (Reward for young runaway goes by Kanye fancies hisself a poet...if seen contact his overseer@DNC.org)
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To: editor-surveyor

Thanks.


94 posted on 05/23/2018 10:53:27 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (01/26/18 DJIA 30 stocks $26,616.71 48.794% > open 11/07/16 215.71 from 50% increase 1.2183 yrs..)
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To: wardaddy

You’re right, the age of bullying has apparently risen towards the higher grades of secondary school, in my day the worst of it seemed to end around the ninth grade. I think it’s probably the internet, can you imagine what the 1960s and early 1970s would have been like with internet, facebook, smart phones, etc (and nobody wore seat belts either), so the distracted driving thing among high school seniors would have been horrific.

I found that bullying faded away when I lost my accent, grew to adult height, and got out of a general stream of all kinds of students into an academic stream headed for higher education (fat lot of good that did most of us, but that’s another story).

Somebody tried to bully me in adult life in one isolated instance and I decked the guy which ended that. But the stuff I went through from about age eight to twelve was horrendous, sort of non-stop trauma whenever outside the home. The problem for parents can be this — before you emigrate, your kid is normal and fits into the community so you get used to that. Then suddenly you’re in a new country, perhaps because you’re among adults in a workplace, you are only mildly subjected to prejudice and you find things are improving (because you emigrated for a reason — in my parents’ case, to fill a specialized job market with no available Canadian workers). The kid meanwhile, overnight, goes from being well-integrated and normal to the outsider and subject to constant harassment and physical threats. To make it worse, I was easily the head of the class in academic terms which attracts further abuse. To pile on somewhat, my mother taught at my school and was Jewish, and the principal at the school was a German war veteran who had just emigrated to Canada a few years earlier. He hated me and my mother and refused to treat any of the bullying as anything but my own fault (I got the strap, the bullies got a second round of jollies from that).

I should sue the damned school board in my old home town for this but I am not into revenge lawsuits. Even so, it’s a wonder I reached adulthood in even marginally sane conditions.

The phyiscal abuse was considerable. I would have to try to work my way through a gathered crowd of eager fighters most of whom were two or three years older than me and hockey players who had lots of experience fighting. Their parents tended to be cretins who encouraged them (you can imagine that having English people and Jews in their midst was not a great thing — back in the 50’s the slur used was “d.p’s” which stands for displaced people. So my options were to fight or to hide out and wait for them to get tired of waiting. Memory is a bit faded now but it seems to me this went on for about two or three years on at least a weekly basis.

I also had to be wary of running into groups of these hockey bums on the streets of the small Ontario town in question. Then again, I could be beaten up. One day I got cornered and had to fight, and I bloodied one guy’s nose, but this enraged them more and I had to run for my life. It may not be a coincidence that by final grade of public school I was the school’s 100-yard dash champ and second among all the schools in the region. I guess that other kid was either a better runner or from a worse place than England.


95 posted on 05/23/2018 12:46:33 PM PDT by Peter ODonnell (Look for England to do well at the World Cup until it starts)
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