Killing People
"He was equipped to go to war, kill innocent people."
Police Chief Gerald Pickering, Webster, New York
"I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighbourhood I can burn down, and do what I like doing best, killing people."
William Spengler, killer
A lifetime of hate encased in one 62-year-old who, though he had murdered his paternal grandmother by hammering her to death, and served seventeen years in prison as a result, still owned a small arsenal of firearms. A convicted felon who has murdered may not by law own such weapons. He was in possession of a .233-calibre semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and a .33-calibre revolver.
It was the Bushmaster rifle - the very same make and calibre weapon used to kill 28 people in Newtown Connecticut earlier in the month - that William Spengler used to kill volunteer firefighters Michael Chiapperini and Tomasz Kaczowska, and severely wound Joseph Hofstetter and Theodore Scardino, both of whom are recovering from their wounds, while funerals were held for the other two young men.
This was a deliberate, utterly senseless crime, to lure innocent first-responders to a fire that the murderer had himself set in a house he owned and lived in with his sister whom police suspect he murdered first. The house was an "inferno" when the volunteer firefighters arrived driving a pumper when bullets smashed through the windshield, killing Mr. Chiapperini and Mr. Kaczowska at the scene.
This madman who deliberately set a trap to kill as many innocent people as he could manage, set afire a car, then the Webster home, taking up position to await the arrival of the fire crew and opening fire with the intention of murder. A Webster police officer who had gone along with the firefighters exchanged fire with Spengler who killed himself with a shot to the head.
The three-page letter found by police described his intention to 'destroy his neighbourhood' and "do what I like doing best, killing people." Social psychopaths like this deeply disturbed man are embedded in society - in all societies. How to keep them from their psychotic rages doing irremediable harm to others is a solution that has not yet been discovered.
They prowl about through their lives of disaffection and misery of social antipathy toward others, resentful and malign. But then, many neighbourhoods have their taciturn, ill-humoured loners. Most people avoid contact with them. Some are simply anti-social, hermetic, incapable of assuming normal social contact with others; internally displaced people.
While others are the product of some unfortunate combination of genetic failure and learned anti-social behaviour. Some go through life, disgruntled and full of hatred for life that has denied them satisfaction, due mostly to their own ineptitude as social beings, who will never harm another person.
And then there are those, like Adam Lanza and William Spengler who visit tragic calamity upon society when some mysterious force convinces them to act out their sinister malice.
Labels: Crime, Psychopathy, United States
posted by Pieface @ Friday, December 28, 2012
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