Posted on 10/08/2007 2:30:03 AM PDT by Clear Rivers
CRANDON, Wis. - The residents Tyler Peterson was hired to protect and serve can't understand how the 20-year-old who shot six of their young people and critically injured another could have passed a background check to become a sheriff's deputy.
Peterson was shot to death after opening fire early Sunday on a group of students and recent graduates who had gathered for pizza and movies on their high school's homecoming weekend. Peterson was off-duty from his full-time job as a Forest County deputy sheriff; he also was a part-time Crandon police officer.
David Franz, 36, who lives with his wife two houses from the duplex where the shooting occurred, said it was hard to accept that someone in law enforcement was the gunman.
"The first statement we said to each other was, how did he get through the system?" Franz said. "How do they know somebody's background, especially that young? It is disturbing, to say the least.
Sheriff Keith Van Cleve said he would meet with state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen on Monday morning to discuss the case.
Crandon Police Chief John Dennee said it would be handled by the state Department of Criminal Investigation because the suspect was a deputy and officer.
Peterson was killed Sunday afternoon, eight miles north of Crandon in the rural town of Argonne, Dennee said.
Crandon mayor Gary Bradley said Sunday that a sniper killed the suspect, but Van Cleve would not confirm that officers shot him.
The gunman's motive was unclear, but the mother of a 14-year-old victim, Lindsey Stahl, said the suspect may have been a jealous boyfriend.
"I'm waiting for somebody to wake me up right now. This is a bad, bad dream," said Jenny Stahl. "All I heard it was a jealous boyfriend and he went berserk. He took them all out."
Dennee declined comment on whether Peterson had a romantic relationship with any of the victims.
The white, two-story duplex was about a block from downtown Crandon, a town of about 2,000 located 225 miles north of Milwaukee in an area known for logging and outdoor activities. The victims had gathered for what Dennee described as "a pizza and movie party."
Three of the victims were Crandon High School students, said school Superintendent Richard Peters, and the other three had graduated within the past three years.
"There is probably nobody in Crandon who is not affected by this," Peters said, adding that students "are going to wake up in shock and disbelief and a lot of pain."
Peters did not know whether Peterson had graduated from the 300-student school. But Crandon resident Karly Johnson, 16, said that she knew the gunman and that he had helped her in a tech education class.
"He graduated with my brother," she said. "He was nice. He was an average guy. Normal. You wouldn't think he could do that."
The Crandon School District called off classes Monday.
One victim, 20-year-old Bradley Schultz, was a third-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who was home to visit his friends, said his aunt, Sharon Pisarek.
"We still don't have many details, but from what they've told us, there was a girl next to him and he was covering her, protecting her," she said, sobbing. "He was loved by everybody. He was everybody's son. Senseless."
David Franz's wife, Marci, said she was awakened by the gunshots.
"I heard probably five or six shots, a short pause and then five or six more," she said. "I wasn't sure if it was gunfire initially. I thought some kids were messing around and hitting a nearby metal building."
Then she heard eight louder shots and tires squealing, she said.
"I was just about to get up and call it in, and I heard sirens," she said. "There's never been a tragedy like this here. There's been individual incidents, but nothing of this magnitude."
___
Associated Press writer Dinesh Ramde in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
Been quite a year.
There is more wrong than this (these murders) when a mother of a 14 year old girl allows her daughter to date at that age, and date 20 year olds. The majority of pregnancies amongst the younger teen girls are with 20 year olds and above. Where are the parents these days?
Where did you get the idea that the 14 year old was dating the 20 year old shooter? I missed that.....
Thanks for the clarification. That’s more in line with what I had gathered when reading various news stories about this.
3 a.m. and no mention of parents or any adults present.
Would you allow a 14 year old to be at an unsupervised party at 3 in the morning?
I would be so grief stricken that my child had been killed, that any television crew that showed up at my door, would be sent packing.
Scandinavians are notably more phlegmatic than nearly all other Americans. This is especially true of us Finns.
This is why only the police should have guns. </sarcasm>
1
Praying for the families left behind with hope of being reunited again with those kids.
for later reading
This is a sad thing.. I do not think it reflects on Law Enforcement as an entity whatsoever..
Having said that there is something I believe always worth repeating.
No one should become a Peace Officer before they are 31...
Thirty one. They need to live in the world without any special privilege or responsibilities. They need to be hired, fired unjustly.. Have their Girlfriend dump them.. They need to have 8 bucks in their pocket with payday a week away. They need to get a ticket for doing something wrong and they need to get a ticket for doing nothing at all.
They need to get the a$$ kicked at least once and to be able to explain why they deserved it..
In other words they need to live their lives as young people..Enjoy a little bit, gain some experience and aspects of maturity which can only come from age.
My prayers are for the Young Officer, The Persons Murdered and all the families..
No recriminations against anyone.
Just great sadness for everyone involved.
W
In older, wiser times people understood what emotions are stirred when passions are played without thought. They gave room and developed highly refined rituals of courtship and marriage to contain and channel these passions. Now that these containers have been discarded for “freedom” we begin to discover what dams these rituals and customs were to the human psyche, holding back the destructive forces as they focused the powers into dynamos of creativity, and construction.
What happened was not “right.” But it is not unexpected. Our prissy shock denies what is truly human.
Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he had a short fuse that scared her.
Don’t blame the victim when you have no idea about the situation. This isn’t the first or last passion killing. They have occurred since the beginning of time
Indeed. This sort of idea struck me during the Mel Gibson contretemps. It stuck me as bizarre that people would think it necessarily racist or evil that a man, angry, drunk would lash out and say the most hurtful thing that he could think of (consider what siblings and spouses say to one another because they KNOW it will wound terribly). Most people believed that “if he said it it MUST be the way he really feels.” That most saw no other possibility for Gibsons rant suggested to me that our culture is losing touch with the reality of Human Nature.
In a book (I know the difference between books and real life BTW) by RAH “Starship Troopers” had posited a society where only veterans could hold certain jobs.
Further, only *combat vets* were allowed to hold police positions. Why? Well, RAH saw it as necessary - after all they know exactly what happens when you pull the trigger.....
Wisconsin is one of only two states that do not allow for any form of concealed carry permit. CCW legislation was vetoed twice by governor Doyle, who then twisted arms and was able to prevent veto override by one vote each time.
What weaklings to have somebody's slurs cause a meltdown. Actions, however, are another story. Remember Pam Waechter? She was killed in Seattle by Naveed Afzal Haq because she was Jewish. Guess which story received greater media coverage, her brutal murder or Mel's drunken rant?
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