I was going to write a huge post on this issue today, but I got busy with other things and decided to postpone it till tomorrow.
But here’s a piece of information (hat tip: commenter “Kate”) that was revealed today that demonstrates one point I was going to make in that post: that the “fog of war” is still heavily operating. Even facts which we think we know for sure about the incident turn out to have been wrong. And there probably will be more revisions and then more revisions before a full report comes out.
Some people will consider these changes CYA lying. And perhaps there is some of that – if so, it wouldn’t be unheard of. But my guess is that a lot of it is simply that piecing together the truth, from hundreds and perhaps even thousands of interviews and videos and recordings, takes time and there are many reversals along the way as more information gets uncovered.
Case in point: the teacher who left the school door propped open. That story, which was reported just about everywhere quite early and didn’t waver (till now), turns out to be only half true, according to recently reviewed video:
Investigators initially said the teacher had propped the door open before Salvador Ramos, 18, entered the school in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24. Investigators have now determined that the teacher, who has not been identified, propped the door open with a rock, but then removed the rock and closed the door when she realized there was a shooter on campus, said Travis Considine, chief communications officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety. But, Considine said, the door did not lock.
Investigators confirmed the detail through additional video footage reviewed since the Friday news conference when it was first stated the door had been left propped open. Authorities did not state at that time what had been used to prop open the door.
Now the question is: why didn’t that door lock? It’s apparently supposed to lock automatically. It’s probably just one of those awful situations in which maintenance wasn’t completely on the ball, or someone had unlocked it at some time in the past, and then in a crisis the error is revealed.
Horrible. But at least the teacher needn’t feel quite the level of guilt that I was previously imagining she (I’d heard it was a she, but who knows at this point?) would be feeling. However, she’s probably feeling very guilty about not having double-checked to see whether the door actually locked behind her. My guess is that she was probably shaking with fear and in a mental state of panic, however, eager to get inside as fast as possible, and that she just made what she thought was a valid assumption about that door lock.
Ever hear of it? I hadn’t heard of this case until today when commenter “j e” wrote a comment about the verdict in the second degree murder case, which was an acquittal.
The facts of the case are both disturbing and of the type that one would think would mean that the case would get very widespread sensationalist coverage in the media. The fact that – at least as far as I know – it’s gotten mostly local coverage is interesting. And yet it’s got racial angles and sexual angles, and the story slightly resembles the plot of the movie “The Crying Game” gone even more horribly, horrifically wrong.
A jury found former Virginia Tech football player Isimemen “Isi” Etute not guilty of second-degree murder Friday in the death of Blacksburg resident Jerry Paul Smith.
The verdict was rendered after a three-day trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court that occurred almost a year after the beating death of Smith, 40, who posed as a woman named “Angie Renee” and matched with Etute on Tinder. Etute’s attorneys argued self-defense after an altercation between the two in Smith’s apartment when he was revealed to be a man…
Etute and Smith had an initial sexual encounter in April 2021 in Smith’s downtown Blacksburg apartment during which he, presenting as Angie, performed oral sex on Etute, who was a freshman linebacker at the time. After discovering upon a second meeting with Angie on May 31 last year that it was not a woman but Smith, a man, Etute said he struck Smith several times and kicked him as he left Smith’s apartment.
Upon questioning from Jensen, forensic pathology specialist Dr. Amy Tharp described a brutal beating that left nearly every bone in Smith’s face broken, his brain swollen and teeth knocked out. Jensen noted the size difference between Etute, who is 6 feet 2 ½ and over 200 pounds, and the 153-pound Smith.
“Only two people know what happened in that room and one of them is dead,” Jensen said during his closing argument.
[Etute’s defense lawyer] Turk also said Smith was “controlling the entire environment and the entire episode.” He added that Smith had “demanded that it be dark” and had hidden a knife under his mattress “in case there was something awry.”…
Turk also argued that [Etute didn’t initially mention to police that he thought Smith was reaching for a knife or that he had fear of Smith because] police didn’t ask Etute essential questions about Smith’s knife or Etute’s fear while in the apartment, two questions whose answers could have shown whether Etute was afraid for his life and acting in self-defense.
In taking the stand earlier in the week, Etute had testified that he felt “violated” when he discovered that the Tinder match he believed to be a woman was actually a man.
In his testimony Thursday, Etute had testified that Smith reached for what Etute thought was a gun. Smith did not own a gun, but police reported finding a knife between the man’s mattress and box spring.
Etute said he punched Smith five times and kicked him to gain time to escape the apartment.
Jensen had maintained that Etute had not acted in self-defense. He argued that after Etute punched Smith and Smith fell to the floor, there was “no way” Smith could have reached a weapon under his mattress.
“He could never reach a gun from there,” Jensen said.
Jensen recalled the testimony of medical examiner Dr. Amy Tharp, who Jensen said testified Smith had been the victim of a “brutal beating.”
Jensen said that while Etute was wearing flip-flops at the time of the encounter, those shoes were attached to a “big person” and a “strong person.” He compared Etute, an “elite college athlete,” to Smith, who weighed 153 pounds (just under 70 kilograms).
“That’s a big disparity,” Jensen said.
It seems odd to me that Etute wouldn’t have initially mentioned to police that he feared for his life if in fact that was the case. I don’t know enough of the details of the evidence to what I would have voted had I been on the jury, but I do wonder whether the verdict would have been the same had the races been reversed – that is, if a huge, young, strong, athletic white man had beaten to death a small somewhat older transgender black man posing as a woman.
I wonder, but I think I know that answer: the verdict would have been “guilty” or the jury would have been hung, and the case would have gotten a great deal more national publicity than it did.
I already wrote a post today on the Sussman acquittal, but I thought I’d give one subtopic its own post as well. It concerns the following, which I read in this piece (hat tip commenter “Barry Meislin”):
The jury unanimously found Sussmann not guilty.
“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” one juror told reporters.
“There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.”
There are probably “bigger things that affect the nation” than the content of any one trial. But that should never be a consideration for any juror.
“Telling a lie to the FBI was the entire basis for the prosecution. It was the jury’s job to determine the fact of such a lie and its materiality.
…Of course, this statement can be a simple criticism of the underlying charge without admitting to bias in weighing the elements. Yet, it would have prompted a challenge in the courtroom if expressed during jury selection.”
Of course it was not expressed during jury selection.
There’s also this:
TURLEY: “I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury” pic.twitter.com/RHqen6AMAc
On the facts, there was more than sufficient evidence to prove Sussmann’s guilt. Sussmann lied to then-FBI general counsel James Baker in order to get a meeting to pass the Alfa Bank hoax materials to the FBI. Sussmann lied again during the meeting – stating he was not there on behalf of a client – in order to get the FBI to open an investigation into the Trump Organization’s purported ties with Alfa Bank. Later, during testimony to Congress, Sussmann admitted he met with Baker on behalf of a client. Billing records proved he had been working on the Alfa Bank project on behalf of the Clinton Campaign…
The popular leftist narrative goes “who cares what Sussman told Baker? Everyone knew he was working for the Clinton campaign.” It’s flawed because it’s asking the wrong question.
The right question is “would Baker have passed on Sussman’s data to investigators had Sussman informed him he was there representing the Clinton campaign?” The answer is no. In fact Baker said he wouldn’t have even taken the meeting…
Sussman didn’t lie just to give himself cover. He lied so BAKER would have cover to hand the data over to Cyber Division. In fact the lie was necessary BECAUSE “everyone knew” Sussman was working for the Clinton campaign. Including Sussman.
As I said before, this verdict was expected. A guilty verdict would have been an utter shock.
The FBI’s corruption has the side-effect of rendering its co-conspirators immune from prosecution…
In other words: Sure, there was a lie here. And that lie was told by the senior leadership of the FBI. Blame them, not Sussman.
Can’t say that argument is without merit.
At some point, the system becomes so corrupt it becomes incapable of producing outcomes that are anything other than corruption. That’s where we are now.
Indeed. And we’ve been there for many years – at least since 2008 and probably earlier.
The reason this result is no surprise is because the trial was in DC. Washington DC is what you might call a company town – the company being “the Swamp” and in particular the Democratic Party. What’s more, some jury members had ties to people involved in the case (see information at the link), but I think it’s highly likely that any DC jury would have acquitted even without such ties.
The trial had the advantage of spelling out some very bad stuff on the part of Clinton, Sussman, and the FBI, but only for those inclined to pay close attention, which is only a small percentage of the American people. For those on the left, the trial’s outcome will almost undoubtedly be used to claim innocence on the part of those who orchestrated and executed Russiagate.
The law ordinarily cannot save a system so corrupted.
It also occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the only reason the Watergate conspirators were convicted was that they were on the Republican side. In addition, although many had formerly been in the CIA (or in Liddy’s case the FBI), they weren’t working on behalf of those agencies when they perpetrated Watergate. Last but not least, they were guilty of more obvious crimes of the conventional type, and that’s what their convictions were about: burglary, wiretapping, and conspiracy around those things.
The Russiagate conspiracy was far wider, involved members of government agencies working supposedly on behalf of those agencies, was perpetrated by Democrats and others who didn’t like Trump, and didn’t involve the same sort of obvious crimes as Watergate even though Russiagate was far worse and far more dangerous, in my opinion.
ADDENDUM: On today’s open thread I noticed the following from John Tyler in the comments, referring to the Sussman acquittal:
Is it because it is not illegal to create a fictional narrative to slander and destroy a political opponent?
Or is it because, the conspirators are all so versed in the law, they know how and what to do and not be in violation of any laws?
That’s what I was getting at in this post when I compared the Russiagate perps to the Watergate perps. Russiagate was incredibly widespread, sophisticated, and coordinated exercise in which many of the perps were lawyers and knew exactly what they were doing. They never expected to be caught. But in the off chance that they were caught, they knew they almost certainly were safe from conviction for a host of reasons.]
If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you
So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home…
The first time I ever heard the song I got the chills as the lyrics unfolded and I realized what it was about, and then again and again as the heartstrings were jerked harder and harder as the song went on.
Most of us do, or should, feel a very strong gratitude to the men and women who sacrificed their lives to defend liberty here and abroad, and a very strong sorrow that it was necessary. On Memorial Day, we thank them.
You’ve probably already heard of one fourth-grader in Uvalde who smeared herself with the blood of her dead friend, intending to pretend to be dead herself if the shooter returned to her classroom from the adjoining room where he was at the time.
I consider this an impressive display of resourcefulness and composure in one so young. From where did she get the idea? Movies? Pretend play? She was incredibly brave – and she also is the girl who took her dead teacher’s cellphone from the body and made many 911 calls describing the situation and asking for help.
This girl and her surviving classmates have witnessed and experienced an encounter with the deepest evil, and that is difficult for anyone much less a child of her age. She is understandably traumatized and will need to learn how to see herself as a heroine – which she is – rather than as a victim. It will take time, but I hope she makes it.
The interview with this girl is hard to even hear about. She is neither shown nor heard in the video, except for a still photo from the past; what she said in the interview is described by the interviewer, but that’s bad enough.
The killing of her teacher is one of the most chilling parts of the story the girl tells, and once again it illustrates what I consider to be the psychological sadism of the killer. It reminds me of some of the things the Columbine killers said to their victims, grim cinema-like “jokes” as though playing a role in a violent movie. It bolsters my previous belief that Ramos was a psychopath, although “psychopath” is merely a descriptive word that tells us little to nothing about how a person becomes one.
A couple of things this girl’s interview makes clear is that the school went on lockdown very early. You will see when you watch it that the murdered teacher was just about to lock the door when she encountered the killer. Another thing that is made clear is that the girl made the 911 calls while the murderer was in an adjacent room; that might explain why he didn’t hear her and come back to kill her, which I had wondered about earlier. The effectiveness of her act of smearing blood on herself in order to effectively play dead was never tested because apparently the perp never returned to her room.
[NOTE: By the way, why are there so many girls among the dead? Did the perp especially target girls? Or was it just by chance? Five boys and fourteen girls died. I don’t know the breakdown of boys and girls among the wounded.]
I’ve noticed, also, that many people who are following the story – be they newscasters or pundits or commenters on blogs – keep getting the details mixed up and either inferring things that weren’t said or hearing incorrectly what was said. Granted, a lot of it doesn’t seem to make sense and a lot is missing, which indicates either a coverup or simply the fact that the relevant information hasn’t been learned yet by the authorities themselves. Creating a coherent story of a violent attack – a coherent story that isn’t fiction, that is – requires a lot of research, interviews, and phone calls and surveillance videos to watch and analyze.
But yesterday we got a lot more information, and much of it was shocking. Here’s the speech by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, which is followed by questions from the press and answers from McCraw. Each answer of his raises question in me, and most of the questions haven’t been answered yet:
For example, when he says at the outset that surveillance video reveals that a teacher propped open an outer door to the school at 11:27 AM (a minute before the perp’s car crash near the school, and very shortly before his entry onto school property), my first thought when I heard that was of the exquisitely painful timing of an act that the teacher probably thought innocuous and one that she might even have performed hundreds of time before without anything bad happening.
…For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The kingdom that was lost in Uvalde was nineteen innocent and precious children and two teachers who by all accounts were wonderful, and the peace of mind of the town and even so many of the rest of us. Where is the teacher who propped open the door (a woman, it’s been revealed, and not one of the teachers who was killed), and what is she thinking and feeling today? My guess is that she may be at risk for suicide herself.
But my second thought was, “why did she prop the door open”? And why did she not close it (I get the impression she re-entered the school afterwards, being aware of shots having been fired)? I think that perhaps can be explained by panic – McCraw said she called 911 in panic. Apparently she and hundreds of others have already been interviewed, and there will no doubt be a lengthy report in the fullness of time. But that doesn’t tell us much now.
The biggest question is why did the police chief [see UPDATE below] of Uvalde decide this was not an active shooter situation, and tell all the forces (including the initial Border force group) to stand down? This is outrageous and unconscionable, with children at risk and some dying as a police force of nineteen waited outside the room. You’ll have to listen to the video to get a sense of what McCraw was saying and why, but it’s clear to me that (a) he is outraged by the decision (b) he doesn’t understand it himself (3) he is constrained from fully speaking his mind; and (d) he knows it was actually an active shooter situation and they should have gone in.
Unexplained are the details, except that we are told it was the Uvalde police chief’s decision and he was in charge of the whole operation. Was he present at the site in the hallway, or was he directing this from afar? McCraw doesn’t say, although I am virtually certain he knows – but a criminal investigation is going on. Does that mean the police chief might be charged with something himself?
Here is a profile of the police chief [see UPDATE below]; I see nothing remarkable there. Apparently he only spoke very briefly to the public immediately after the shooting, and has been mum since.
Also unexplained is the reaction of the police officers waiting all that time in the corridor or wherever they were. Were they okay with being told to stand down? Were they enraged, but required to obey the orders? How much did they know at the time of what was actually happening inside the two classrooms? In particular, since one child in particular made many 911 calls during the standoff (more about that later in another post), was the content of these 911 calls conveyed to the police chief and to the forces at the school? If not, why on earth not?
Those 911 calls made it clear that in those two rooms there were many dead children and some dead teachers, many injured children as well, and some uninjured children, all continuing to be at the mercy of an armed killer. This information was so vital to the decision-making process of the police chief that it seems highly unlikely (although possible) that he didn’t know about it, and if he did know then it seems that the officers should have been told to try just about anything to get in there and subdue the killer (as McCraw himself indicates).
It didn’t happen. We don’t know why, but someday we may.
Another puzzlement for me is whether children were being shot while the officers were waiting outside the room. Many many commenters and newscasters and others have now assumed that was the case, but I don’t know. McCraw makes it clear the seven officers entered the school and had some sort of gunfire exchange with the killer early on, and then that Ramos fired many rounds after that while the seven held off. Were those rounds only at the officers, or was that when the perp was killing the teachers and the children?
[NOTE: Some of this is described in an interview with the girl who made most of the 911 calls, who turns out to be the same girl who smeared herself with a dead friend’s blood in order to effectively play dead if the killer returned to her room (he was in the adjacent room when she made the calls). I will be discussing that interview in another post.]
UPDATE:
The person identified in that linked CNN article – Arredondo – as having been in command of decisions during the shooting and its aftermath was referred to as both the Uvalde police chief (in a photo caption) as well as the school district police chief. It appears, however, that he was the school district police chief and not the Uvalde police chief, and that he was in fact present on the scene at the time. I didn’t catch that when I listened to McCraw. I may just have missed it and perhaps he said it, or perhaps the video doesn’t show the entire question-and-answer period. At any rate, School District Police Chief Arredondo was the one who was in charge at the scene and it was apparently he who made the fateful decision to hold off. It was not Uvalde Police Chief Rodriguez; at least, that’s what I get from the information available at the moment. What Rodriguez’s involvement was, and whether he had any involvement at all, is unclear.
UPDATE 6:55 PM:
I think this is important information (if correct). See this [emphasis mine]:
An off-duty BORTAC agent was the first to arrive outside of the “quiet” classroom at 12:15 p.m. and found several local police officers in the hallway there…
The agent began concocting a tactical operation to get inside, and reinforcements from CBP arrived around 15 minutes later…
The other BORTAC agents, along with members from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, were late to get to the classroom after they were initially told by local police to wait outside the school upon arriving…
The HSI agents had been instructed to instead help retrieve children from the windows. But after roughly 30 minutes, the agents from both agencies ignored local law enforcement and entered the school, the report said.
With no battering ram on site to bust the classroom door down, agents opted to use a ballistic shield provided by a U.S. Marshal.
It was difficult to determine who had authority over the operation, the source said…
The first BORTAC agent who arrived wanted to breach the door and get to the shooter immediately with the small team assembled outside [my question is: how?]. In the meantime, CBP and other law enforcement officers evacuated students and staff from other classrooms, the source said.
Officers sent for a key to unlock the classroom, which reportedly took 40 minutes to an hour to retrieve from a janitor.
The agent said he heard no shots fired during that period of time, according to The Washington Post.
The team made their entry “within minutes” of getting the key, the official told the paper. Officials said they entered around 12:50 p.m.
The article also says that the perp was hiding in a closet when they entered and then he burst out shooting.
It sounds as though this was actually an exceptionally difficult situation, even if the other officers hadn’t been told to stand down and if they had been trying to break in. How to do it without the proper equipment? Why was it so hard to get a battering ram? How to enter without being picked off one-by-one themselves, as they entered with no ballistic shield?
It also seems exceptionally confused as far as command and control goes. But this wasn’t the Marines – it was a smallish town police department and school district police department. And yet they had rehearsed the response to a school shooter situation before.
My present theory – which might change as new information emerges – is that the problem was a combination of poor and/or incomplete information, bad communication, confusing chain of command, lack of proper equipment, and perhaps also lack of a more creative approach to a difficult situation in terms of getting into the room.
Most of us have wondered at the snail’s pace of Durham’s Russiagate probe, which was way too slow to affect the all-important 2020 election and very frustrating. Here’s Bill Barr’s explanation, for what it’s worth – and I think it’s worth at least something:
Barr told The Blaze that when he brought Durham on board, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz (D) had yet to finish his investigation of the FBI’s use of FISA court warrants against Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign. Durham wanted to see Horowitz’s report before starting his work, which was finally released in December 2019. Durham was able to access the report for just three months before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down grand juries and delayed his investigation throughout most of 2020.
“His hands were very much tied as to how far he could push things and how much pressure he could bring on people through most of 2020,” said Barr.
I’m not saying it would have changed anything in the 2020 election (and of course it depends on whether fraud was a significant factor in Biden’s win). But it might have done so.
COVID lockdowns hurt the US and the world in so many many ways.
I’m a product of New York City’s gifted and talented program in the public schools, although I think it was called something slightly different back then (if memory serves, it was “intellectually gifted children” or “IGC”; forget the “talented”). Not all that many years later I heard of the first attempts in NY and elsewhere to stop such programs, and I had no trouble imagining what a disaster that would be for the “smart” kids, who would transition from being somewhat bored (as I often was) to being unutterably bored, and who would learn less and less and less.
But some people apparently thought they should be the sacrificial lambs to the idea of “self-esteem” for the greatest number – or some such thing.
Such efforts certainly haven’t stopped in the decades since. Here’s what happened in the latest skirmish:
A New York state judge this week shot down an activist organization’s lawsuit against New York City’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) program in a single-paragraph ruling, noting that such decisions are better left to state legislatures–and ultimately, voters.
As reported by the Washington Examiner, IntegrateNYC in its lawsuit claimed the G&T program created a racial “caste system” through a school curriculum that “centers white experience.” In addition, the activists accused the City of “failing to recruit diverse staff and dismantle racism.”
The group’s lawyer said it was ““the first case in the nation to seek a constitutional right to an anti-racist education.” That’s “anti-racist” in its new meaning, not the old.
If I’m not mistaken, the NYC school system is already at the point where there aren’t many white kids left in public schools – this site says it was 15% as of 2017-2018. As far as I know, most people in NYC – white or black or Asian or of any other ethnicity – who can afford to send a child to private school there do so rather than allowing the child to enter the public school system.
