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Is is just me, or does he bear some resemblence to the Ft. Hood killer. Story, of course, the same. Ignore the talk of jihad, they were just mentally compromised.
Posted on 11/09/2009 5:54:56 AM PST by SJackson
Taking the 911 operators' questions, Naveed Haq's answers were brisk and obscene.
Attentive and nearly conversational in his responses, the shooter explains why he'd come to the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on July 28, 2006. He offers nothing of the woman he'd executed during the shooting spree, and little of the five others he'd left mutilated by gunfire.
"I'm just trying to make a point," Haq tells the dispatcher, holding a pistol to the head of a pregnant woman as she bled from a gunshot wound he'd delivered moments before.
Listening to his own words played by his attorney for a King County jury Wednesday, Haq stared at the table and offered no sign of pleasure or regret at hearing them again. Slumped and paunchy in his sweater vest, the accused killer held himself with a stillness in stark contrast to the man caught on security video racing around the Belltown Jewish center.
Facing a jury for the second time, attorneys' opening statements Wednesday morning followed the course charted in the June 2008 trial. That effort ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict.
Haq, now 34, had suffered from mental illness for a decade before he drove from his Kennewick apartment to the federation building on Seattle's Third Avenue. At issue for jurors is whether, as his attorneys claim, that infirmity drove him to commit the slaying.
Addressing jurors, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz recounted the pains to which Haq went to plan the killing. He bought two guns days before, penned a prayer and an essay on perceived wrongs done to Muslims by Israel and the United States, then searched the Internet for a target.
"The state concedes that Mr. Haq has a history of mental illness," Raz said. "Naveed Haq's mental illness didn't cause him to attack the Jewish Federation. His anger did. His political views did."
Then as now, the facts of the crime are not seriously questioned by either side.
Arriving at the center's reception desk, according to police statements, Haq opened fire on workers there. Haq allegedly chased down Pam Waechter, already injured in the initial shooting, and shot her in the head as she tried to flee. Then, holding a gun to the head of another injured woman who was 17 weeks pregnant at the time, Haq gave his demands to a 911 operator.
Offering his name and Social Security number, Haq went on to demand that the United States military leave Iraq, complained that Muslims in the Middle East were "getting pushed around" by Israel and asked to be connected with CNN.
When the operator told him she couldn't make that happen, he agreed to surrender to police. Following the shooting, Haq made numerous anti-Semitic comments to investigators.
In addition to an aggravated murder charge which would carry a mandatory life sentence and several attempted murder charges, King County prosecutors have charged Haq under the state hate crime statute.
Speaking to the jury, defense attorney John Carpenter allowed that, if not for his mental illness, the shooting could only be seen "as a cold-blooded killing." But, Carpenter argued, that events set in motion months before the shooting damned Haq and his victims.
Haq, the attorney said, had long been known to experience psychotic episodes during which he believed he could read minds or hear inanimate objects speaking to him. He was diagnosed while in college in Pennsylvania and had been medicated since.
Despite his illness, Carpenter said, Haq had never had significant problems with the law. He was able to complete two bachelor's degrees, though his paranoia kept him from steady employment.
A change came in July 2005, when Haq's medication was changed and he was moved off of the lithium that had kept his psychosis under control for years, Carpenter said. With the change, he became increasing prone to incoherent violence -- he sparked a bar fight with a man who danced better than he did and got in two road-rage incidents -- and started taking long-distance road trips for no discernible reason.
That slide into madness, Haq's attorneys urged jurors to believe, ended in tragedy at the Jewish Federation building.
"Ultimately, his brain failed him, and Pam Waechter is dead as a result," Carpenter said.
Anticipating the defense argument, Raz noted in his opening statement that a Seattle police officer who, minutes before the shooting, pulled Haq over blocks away from the center found him to be calm and rational. After describing the shooting in detail, Raz submitted to jurors that Haq's statements following the shooting condemn him.
"He'd been thinking about this and decided this was what he needed to do," Raz said. "Haq's political statement got out, but at a high price."
Haq's trial is expected to stretch into late November. Haq remains confined at King County Jail; in addition to aggravated first-degree murder, he has been charged with five counts of attempted first-degree murder, unlawful imprisonment and malicious harassment, the state's hate crime statute.
By LEVI PULKKINEN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/411871_haq04.html
Naveed Haq was, by his own admission, in a very good mood in the weeks after the killing.
On suicide watch in King County Jail in the days following the July 28, 2006, shooting spree, Haq had gunned down Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle worker Pam Waechter and seriously injured five other women after opening fire in the Belltown center.
Calling his parents' Pasco home over a monitored jail phone, Haq in essence bragged about the shooting and told his mother and a family friend that he was a "jihadi" and hoped to become a martyr. Told to pray for forgiveness, Haq is heard saying he felt he needed none on recordings of the jail phone calls played for a King County jury hearing the case against him.
"They deserved it," Haq told his mother. "She was an Israeli collaborator."
Hearing her son's hateful words, Haq's mother defended Waechter -- "She was a good woman," Nahida Haq told her son, describing a woman she only began to know in death -- and urged the mentally ill man to ignore the voices that had troubled his mind since his youth.
"Remember the voices in your head, you just have to neglect them," Nahida Haq told her son. "Those are not true things. Those are evil thinking."
Prosecutors leveling the aggravated murder case against Haq played the tapes for the jury Wednesday. The recordings mark the most significant addition to the case against the 34-year-old Haq, which was tried in 2008 but ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict.
In court, prosecutors have argued that the recordings show Haq targeted the center to because he was angry at the Jewish people over perceived wrongs done to Muslims in the Middle East. Haq can be heard repeating his claim that he is a jihadist, meaning, in his view, a Muslim holy warrior.
Arguing that the tapes should not be played at trial, Haq's attorneys contended that the recordings show little except the outlandish claims produced by an ill mind. They asserted that Haq has not repeated his claims of jihad since jail staff put him back on lithium, an anti-psychotic drug they argue had allowed Haq to manage his mental illness for years until his medication was changed months before the shooting.
That division in opinion -- whether Haq's actions at the center were driven by hate or mental illness, with which Haq has been repeatedly diagnosed -- remains the core issue on trial. If convicted on the most serious count against him, aggravated murder, Haq faces a mandatory life sentence; his attorneys contend that a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict would keep Haq confined at an institution for the rest of his life.
On tapes recorded days after the shooting, Haq can be heard bragging about the killing to a family friend, who did not share his apparent glee.
Asked if he was feeling better, Haq said he couldn't possibly be.
"I'm not better, I'm feeling great," Haq said. "I just want to tell you the reason I did it is because I wanted to be a martyr. That's the reason I did it." "You need to do a lot of praying on a lot of things," the woman responded, "because Allah doesn't tell you anywhere in the Koran that you need to kill people to go to heaven. …
"You're not a jihadi. I saw you two months ago with a cross on your chest. … I know you're not a jihadi. I know you're someone who is not mentally stable."
Haq had converted to Christianity some time in the year before the shooting, according to court records, but had returned to his parents' Muslim faith.
The trial is expected to continue through late November. Haq remains confined at King County Jail; in addition to aggravated first-degree murder, he has been charged with five counts of attempted first-degree murder, unlawful imprisonment and malicious harassment, the state's hate crime statute.
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Is is just me, or does he bear some resemblence to the Ft. Hood killer. Story, of course, the same. Ignore the talk of jihad, they were just mentally compromised.
I think they need one of those people who read the bumps on a persons head to get to the bottom of this.
Many Muslims are taught to hate everyone else. Many blacks are taught to hate whitey and America. Some women are taught to hate men, gays hate non-gays, etc. Additionally, the most effective antidote to hate is Christianity and it is banned in many places, especially schools.
Who wants us to be divided along the lines of "diversity?" Why?
The International Communist movement has been fomenting this discord for over seventy years in this country in order to destabilize our society and make central government control easier. They incite the Muslims to the same end.
We must resist political correctness, hate crimes, efforts to remove Christianity from the public square, and all other things which restrict our freedom because it might hurt someone's feelings. We have been too nice too long and as a result have become sheep. No more!
Diminished capacity defenses are pure crap.
As I recall, the Muslim who drove a borrowed Ford Explorer through the pedestrians in the brickyard of the UNC campus was also, ‘trying to make a point’.
He’s evil.
Didn’t you read the article? He DID convert to Christianity. It didn’t do any good. The voice in his head was islam.
Fry the little coward.
its terrism not insanity
Jihad drove this guy! He went to the Jewish Federation to do his mission and not the Safeway store. He knew where he was going to do his evil work. This guy is a terrorist.
Yep, I read it but I was answering another question and got off onto a separate rant. Perhaps if Muhammad had lithium we would never have had Islam. Islam seems contradictory and psychotic in and of itself.
Was that a true change of heart, or an “Obama” style conversion? I suspect it was tragically the latter, but I don’t know the man’s heart except to say it’s still ruled by evil.
I tend to agree he was merely a jihadi.
That said:
1. The people who do the attacks are usually screwed up somehow. In Israel, the arabs use the mentally and physically retarded for the attacks -— both because they fall for it easier, and because they have little hope.
2. It is a simple fact that mental illness is very common in the arab world, largely because of inbreeding. It’s an unspoken fact.
I agree, and there are other things I have been contemplating as well. For the life of me, I could not understand why anyone reared in a free and civilized society would willingly convert to islam. But the more I look at it, the more I believe that these “converts” were already mentally unstable and alienated from normal society.
islam allows them to act out their most perverse fantasies which include rape, female AND male mutilation, murder, pedophilia, homosexuality among the believers,(not the act up extroverted kind,) bloodsport,sadism, masochism, even cannibalism to a certain extent, polygamy, slavery, brutality, and torture. All in the name of a god that smiles down upon them for their devotion.
They are surrounded by madness and their perversions are justified in their irrational minds.
I cannot think of ANY other reason for anyone to join this deathcult except they were already that insane to begin with.
You left off hatred of whitey, the primary reason behind conversion in the USA.
Say WA? Evergreen State ping Well, in a way, Muslims are.
Trying to be authentically Muslim in a Western society results in cognitive dissonance, leading to the disastrous results of last Thursday.
It is for this reason that Islam itself prohibited Muslims from living ourside the Umma. They could not be authentic Muslims otherwise if they did not live in the Caliphate.
There is a crisis of monumental proportions building, both here and in Europe.
We have more room to manuever, but Europe is headed for violence on the scale of the 1970s at minimum, when the Reds on the Continent waged a terrorist war with the nation-states there.
When it was over, there were some extra-judicial killings in the German Penal system: they were so fed up with the violence of the Leftists and the weakness of the Judiciary, they determined to eliminate the problem.
Islam = Ishmael still trying to be Isaac.
That will tell you the real force behind Islam over the Millenia.
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