Free Republic

Are these two people the same ??

A man wielding an ax apologized after the owner of a business he was trying to rob got out a handgun, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said. Early Wednesday morning, deputies were called to Rusty’s Grill on Pineview Drive because of an attempted armed robbery. The sheriff’s office said a man with an ax had walked into the restaurant and demanded money. When the business owner produced a handgun and challenged the man, he apologized, said he was on drugs and fled the scene, according to investigators.

Torrence Brown Jr., one of the Aurora movie shooting survivors, is planning on suing the theater, confirmed his family's publicist on Wednesday. "We're going to make sure whoever is accountable is going to take responsibility for this tragedy," Cassandra Williams of Wet PR said. She said that Brown, who was friends with 18-year-old AJ Boik, one of the shooting victims, is handling the criticism his suit has sparked. "We know it goes with the territory, so he's fine," Williams said. She added that Brown, 18, is seeking therapy and is emotionally distraught after the shooting.

MSNBC reports that public records show Holmes lived with two roommates at the apartment, which is reserved for students, faculty and staff from the medical campus.

James Holmes, accused of killing a dozen people at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” wants to know how the film ended. “Did you see the movie?” a creepy-sounding Holmes asked a stunned jail worker during a bizarre exchange Tuesday. “How does it end?” Holmes, his eyes glazed and his voice flat, repeated the question when the worker ignored him, according to another jail employee who witnessed the incident in the infirmary. Holmes, a 24-year-old ex-honor student, “was trying to look like he was sincerely curious,” the witness recounted to the Daily News. “Like he had no idea...

Batman shooter 'wants to know how film ends' AFP July 26, 2012 3:05AM THE man accused of killing a dozen people at a Colorado screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" wants to know how the film ends, a stunned jail worker reportedly told the New York Daily News. James Holmes, 24, "was trying to look like he was sincerely curious," a person who witnessed the bizarre incident in the jail's infirmary Tuesday told the paper. "Like he had no idea why there was anything wrong with what he was saying. It was sick ... I think he's trying real hard...

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper had the right idea when he refused to utter the suspected gunman's name in the Aurora multiplex theater shootings, which left 12 dead and 58 wounded. Instead of naming the alleged killer, Hickenlooper referred to him only as "Suspect A." At a prayer vigil Sunday, Hickenlooper read the names of each of the 12 people killed in the incident. After each name, the crowd repeated the refrain, "We will remember." "We want to focus on the victims, survivors and first responders," the governor's spokesman, Eric Brown, explained, "not the killer." Victim Jessica Ghawi's brother Jordan was...

AURORA, Colo. – James Holmes, the accused gunman in last Friday's midnight movie massacre in Colorado, mailed a notebook "full of details about how he was going to kill people" to a University of Colorado psychiatrist before the attack, but the parcel sat unopened in a mailroom for as long as a week before its discovery Monday, a law enforcement source told FoxNews.com.

Accused movie theater gunman James Holmes is spitting at jail officers so frequently that at one point he was made to wear a face guard, sources told ABC News. Holmes' odd behavior was first seen by the public when he appeared in court Monday looking dazed, alternately bug-eyed and nodding with his eyes closing. But ABC News has learned that his loopy court appearance was just one of several bizarre behaviors. In the hours after his arrest Friday for the massacre at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater, Holmes stared at the wall in the Arapahoe Police Headquarters with his eyebrows...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) - James Holmes, the alleged gunman in the recent theater shooting that left 12 dead in Aurora, Colo., was previously awarded a $26,000 federal grant. WNEW News reports that Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. NIH is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/07/24/james-holmes-received-26k-grant-from-bethesda-based-national-institutes-of-health/

Hanged census-taker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky fueled media speculation that he’d been killed by anti-government Tea Partiers. In fact, he’d killed himselfe. Joe Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. The media immediately suggested that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Tea Party led to the attack. In fact, Stack’s suicide note quoted the Communist Manifesto. A professor at the University of Alabama, Amy Bishop, shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting. The Tea Party came under immediate suspicion. But Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor. John Patrick Bedell shot two...

More Americans want to protect their right to own guns In the wake of the Colorado shooting, celebrities who tweeted about the need for tighter gun controls in the U.S. seem to be out of step with the majority of Americans who are more concerned with protecting their right to own guns, a trend that may be traced back to President Barack Obama’s ascension to the presidency in 2009.

Rep. Jackson Lee will seek meeting with NRA about response to Colo. shootings By Pete Kasperowicz - 07/23/12 09:23 PM ET Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said late Monday that she would seek a meeting with the National Rifle Association (NRA) to see if there are any ways to find an agreement on how to prevent tragedies like the one last week in Colorado, where one shooter killed 12 and wounded nearly 60 others in a movie theater. "I'm going to invite the National Rifle Association to one of my meetings," she said on the House floor late Monday. "I...

Who wasn't shocked and disheartened by yet another tragic mass shooting, this time in Aurora, Colo.? Like millions of Americans, my wife, Gena, and I send our heartfelt condolences and prayers to the victims of this murderous spree and their families. We, too, commend the heroes who gave their lives to save others. Truly, every victim of this reprehensible executioner is in some way heroic, for the victims were injured or died in the midst of a culture war in which even our theaters and schools have become battlegrounds. Moreover, we salute and support the Colorado peace officers, emergency...

Anyone remember a fourth-century-BC Greek named Herostratus? He's the guy whose name history has recorded solely on account of his having burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in 356 BCE -- so that history would record his name. In a 1993 paper called "Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in the Mass Media, published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Clayton Cramer explored a variation on the question my colleague Robert Wright is rightly asking now, following Roger Ebert's New York Times op-ed on Friday: Given that intense media...

The mainstream media met our level of expectation last week by immediately – and wrongly – identifying the shooter in Aurora, Colo., as a member of the Tea Party. Congratulations to ABC for living down to what we have come to expect of the MSM – bash first, ask questions later. But wasn’t the presumed shooter more right than left? Wasn’t he one of those religious fanatics? After all, his parents attend church...

As NewsBusters previously reported, ABC's Brian Ross on Friday falsely accused a Tea Party member of being the "James" Holmes that orchestrated the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado. "Jim" Holmes during an interview with the Daily Caller had some harsh words for his accuser saying, "What kind of idiot makes that kind of statement?” “Really, seriously, how do we take a journalist seriously when it’s pretty clear they really haven’t done any sort of check on their facts?” told the Caller's Alex Pappas: Holmes informed Pappas that ABC News didn’t contact him before Ross went on air. In fact,...

Please don't flame me... but something has me confused. WHY can people buy canisters of tear gas?

At Columbine, I have seen this before. But not up close. As a church pastor in Denver, I have worked as a chaplain with several police and fire departments. I was privileged to counsel parents just hours after the Littleton Columbine shootings. However, in this new tragedy at the Aurora Theater Dark Night shooting, one of the victims was a 22 year old woman from my church, Petra Anderson (pronounced Pay-tra). Petra went to the movies with two young friends who are biking across America. You and I have been inundated with news about what happened next. A joyful movie...

During the chaotic aftermath of the Colorado shooting on Friday, a particularly chilling moment came when ABC News spoke to the mother of suspect James Holmes by phone. The network reported that the woman, reached in California, "told ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, saying, 'You have the right person.'" The article also said that Holmes's mother was "apparently speaking on gut instinct" when she "immediately expressed concern her son may be involved in the shooting death of at least 12 people overnight." Today, she disputed that account, claiming her quotes were misused. If true, that would...