Not the Onion: Amy Bishop charged in 2002 IHOP assault
Sometimes I think I should have an entire category entitled: “Not the Onion.
This would fit right in:
In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.
Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.
When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”
Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.
The woman, identified in court documents as Michelle Gjika, declined to comment, saying only “It’s not something I want to relive.”
Little did Gjika know she got off easy.
Amy Bishop was a walking time bomb, and no one connected the dots.
[Hat tip: Gabriel Malor at Ace.]
[ADDENDUM: More. Much more. (Hat tip: PA Cat.)]
Wow. Sounds like Dr. Amy Bishop is the odds-on favorite for Peace Czar.
You mean if you have a Ph.D. you get to punch people in the head? And you’re only telling me this now?? Damn.
I’ve already commented on another blog, but I think this bears repeating: this is the kind of behavior Americans have come to expect from Senators, Representatives, and their spouces. Is Bishop suffering delusions of grandeur or something? Acting like an elected elite? F
Occam’s Beard: remember, Ms. Bishop had already most likely gotten away (literally) with murder. Punching someone in the head at IHOP must have seemed like small potatoes.
The Massachusetts legal system failed. But it’s the people in that room at the U of A who paid the price.
neo, yeah, yeah, but who knew Ph.D. stood for Punch in HeaD? I’ve restrained the urge to do that any number of times over the last few decades. If I’d only known…
Love the comments over at Ace, especially the ones about digging up her backyard! No way you’d get anyone to check the crawlspace under her house.
Piled Higher and Deeper. What is, the corpses?
Over at Q and O one day, I think a bunch of us commentors put our heads together and came up with “Onion Ringer” for a real story that sounds like the Onion.
More Not-the-Onion material.
When they lived in Ipswich, MA, it seems Dr. Amy Bishop had the local police on speed dial. She harrassed and reported the neighborhood kids for making noise after school.
She even managed to scare off the ice cream truck.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/02/ipswich_neighbo.html
I think she’s on the ASD. Read the comments from Zorean here
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?entry_id=57209&o=3>a=commentslistpos#commentslistpos
She had no idea how others think or feel, and thus, has no empathy. And no idea of how she’s coming off.
Maybe we will come to a catchphrase like “Going postal!” but instead it will be “Going Harvard!”
We have the Harvard-educated Amy Bishop, the Harvard JD’ed and MCL’ed Barack Obama, the Harvard Pension Fund, and just to show we’re equal opportunity, George W. Bush, MBA.
Well, I still have an ex-hippie’s fondness for Havard faculty members, Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass.
From CT’s link:
Typical liberal thinking. “If my kids can’t have ice cream, then nobody’s kids should have it.” That’s ‘fair.’
huxley:
Not to mention Ted Kaczynski.
Definitely not one of the finer exports of the Commonwealth.
When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”
Holy wow. What a wretched bitch.
(Try that on my wife: oh, that’s not boysenberry syrup spilled everywhere….)
Solomonia posted some reminiscences of Amy Bishop from a good friend of his who used to live next door to the Bishops when they were in Ipswich:
They were there for 4 or 5 years and then moved to Alabama. When they left we all said “Those poor folks in Alabama”…
…She was such a trouble maker. I disengaged from them early on. I literally did not have any conversation or interaction with either her or her husband (also a nutball) for over 3 years. Nothing…
…She made a big stink about the kids playing basketball in the neighborhood. On the day they first moved into the house they drove their moving truck into the basketball post that was situated between our two driveways and under the streetlight. For years all the neighborhood kids played ball there (and so did some of the Dads). When they ran the post down we thought it was just a dumb-ass accident. We soon found out that they did it on purpose.
One of the other neighbors put up a new hoop on his property and she complained about the kids. It was a protracted fight that involved multiple calls to the police. The end result was that the kids in the neighborhood couldn’t play ball after 7pm at night. She also complained about street hockey, skate boarding, tag, etc., etc…
Why move into a neighborhood if you don’t want to hear kids playing??? That’s the whole point of living in a neighborhood so kids have others to play with.
What pissed me off was the loony venom and fury that accompanied her attacks. She alleged that the basketball players were smoking pot at night and causing other trouble. Totally untrue. Look at the newspaper, the Ipswich Police were in the Globe today calling her a “regular customer”. She complained about everything.
She nearly got into a fistfight one night with one of the Moms who was defending her son’s right to play.
She complained so much the ice cream truck stopped driving through our street. If the kids wanted ice cream they had to go over to the next street and stop the truck.
Just this past Sunday morning as we were watching the news my son said, “Remember how she wouldn’t let us have ice cream?” He was about 8 at the time and thought that it really sucked. All the kids knew that she was the cause.
There were a couple of neighborhood block parties in the last 2 years that she and her family weren’t invited to because she had caused too many issues with people there. I remember there were probably 100 people at one party and they were the only ones not there. Everybody hated them. At one point someone let the air out of her tires.
The day they moved out I was getting home as their moving van pulled away and went up the street. I got out of my car and a bunch of the neighbors were outside and I yelled “Ding Dong the witch is dead!” and a cheer went up all around. Soon after the new people showed up to clean the house and move some things in and the whole street celebrated with a pizza party. We welcomed the new folks with open arms. It was like the sun finally came out again.
http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2010/02/my-brush-with-the-alabama-shooters-psych/index.shtml
Holy crap! This woman has gotten away with being a murdering terrorist her entire life. And once she gets her army of lawyers, we’re all going to be subjected to her pathetic story of how she’s either “the real victim” or else “Ia victim, too.” And somehow, some way, she’s going to get off. And then she’ll appear on Oprah. Because that is what ALWAYS happens.
You can’t go to the store in Santa Fe, New Mexico without getting screamed at for something by one of these crazy ol’ bitches.
They all seem to be created in the same great factory. The same disfunctional model with the same disfunctions….
These wicked women are a fairy-tale staple. Of course fairy-tales are alegorical lessons: they really exist.
A good writer, an inspired writer, could write a wonderful, cautionary, modern fairy-tale about her; so long as she was righteously beaten to death with a dirty toilet seat by a falsely imprisoned fairy princess who marries a prince and lives happily ever after.
Hmmmmm….
Whew! Scary. We have Dr. Amy Bishops and Dr. Hasans, students like the one who killed all those other students at Virginia Tech (Dr. Hasan went to Virginia Tech, too) …..
And here we are petrified of foreign Islamic terrorists…..
Are these mass killings coincidental? Are they related to each other in that these “time bombs” see it happening elsewhere and they get the idea??? Sort of like the school killings after Columbine? Does it just seem worse because w/ Internet the news is reported instantly these days and it is echoed throughout MSM via network TV, cable, newspapers, radio, internet media, etc.?
OK, I’m not one to really advocate this route for folks but….
If she wasn’t on medication – she should have been!
I can’t prove it, but it is my belief that with the general loosening of morals, with the greater anonymity of individuals that makes the force of the public condemnation inflicted on criminals in past eras much less powerful (if indeed there is any at all–mustn’t “judge,” after all), and the parallel decrease in draconian punishments and long jail sentences or any jail at all, for that matter–there is always an excuse these days, coupled with the incitement provided by the depiction of ever more and more gruesome violence–in movies, on TV, and in video games, whose visual impact, I would argue, is much stronger than mere words on a page–people who in past decades would have been deterred from committing such crimes are now less and less deterred. The “copycat” effect is, I believe, well known to law enforcement and could well be in play here, too. That the killers in such incidents gain would wide infamy/fame via the MSM and the Internet is also a contributing factor as well. So that the cards are very heavily stacked in favor of egging such potential murderers on.
I reckon that particular IHOP now has a storage shed outside stacked to the rafters in kiddie seats, just in case the Sunday crowd gets a little too rowdy 🙂
That was before having the pancakes. Think how aggresive she would be after the IHOP sugar high?
A few more details about poor Amy and the shooting of her brother here, http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9DTVDQO0&show_article=1
As an addendum to my post above, about current day conditions that I think make such killings more likely, I suspect that in, say, Colonial times–when settlers often lived in very isolated areas–sometimes miles from the nearest neighbor and help–travel was very difficult, and when animal and Indian attacks and accidents of one sort of another claimed many more lives than today, and there was little in the way of a real police force–such a person as Amy might have just had an “accident,” thus ridding the area she lived in of a potential threat.
I also note, as several people have pointed out, that when the participants in the meeting Amy shot up didn’t subdue her but, instead, first tried to “reason” with her, and then pushed her out of the meeting room and barricaded the door, they endangered all of the students and faculty in the building, since Amy was still armed and could possibly have cleared the jammed gun and resumed her murderous rampage, shooting others in the building.
Imagine how her kids birthdays at Chuckie Cheese went 🙂
Cool.
There was a case in the northwest several years ago where a kid named Kip Kinkle started shooting his classmates. When some of them–one alreadywounded iirc–heard the pin come down on an empty chamber, they jumped his ass.
The mass shooting at the Ecole Polytechnique about ten years ago required the guy to reload at least once, if not twice.
I guess going to college makes you…what? A passive moron?
We have heard almost nothing about her husband, and zip about her 4 kids. The kids are likely festering and may explode in future. I expect her mama and her husband both are great wallflower enablers at the very least. One reads nothing about her father either.
Her shootings could not have been prevented, save perhaps by hubby taking her pistol away. But there were many opportunities for punitive intervention by the citizens; which, as Wolla notes, is no longer part of American culture. We defer to the authorities. And they are not moved to act until after a crime has been committed. Then come the grief counselors, more gun-free zones, blah blah blah.
Anna, ASD crossed my mind in considering her as well, and there certainly are things pointing to that. Amy Bishop seems to have something else going on as well, however.
I wouldn’t try too hard to connect aberrant individual behavior to societal causes. Even repeat murderers don’t kill someone 2-3 times a week, so the data set for these horrendous events will always be too small to get much info. We think such events are more common now, but there isn’t much way of knowing. We have nationwide 24/7 reporting and 100x more people than colonial times.
Her husband is very much like her but not as outwardly aggresive. Definitely her enabler and supporter. I bet he was the one who made the pipe bomb.
I feel deeply sorry for Amy Bishop’s children.
How do you bounce back from a mother like that?
God bless them, they need it.
CV- There’s no “bounce back” for the kids. They weren’t just dropped by Amy once. They were shaped by this malicious, jealous, vicious woman their entire lives. They contain the maternally-planted seeds of their own ka-boom.
Neo,
Thanks for the update on this awful creature. What’s most revealing was the quote ‘I’m Dr Amy Bishop’, as if being an academic entitles you to assault the common folk. Is it that different from John Kerry cutting in line at the DMV telling people, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Bishop carries the entitled liberal arrogance found among the academic elites of Harvard and the White House. The country is in the best of hands.
It still happens from time to time (although not often enough, in my opinion). A few miles north of here a bully named Ken McElroy was shot to death on the main street of town in broad daylight and in front of several dozen witnesses. His murder was “never solved.”