Word: murdered
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...found a freshman, Emily Hilscher ("Pixie" on her MySpace page), and her next-door neighbor, residential adviser Ryan Clark, shot to death. Students told police a gunman had been going from room to room, looking for his girlfriend. Assuming they were dealing with a lovers' quarrel, police secured the murder scene and began gathering evidence. The crime was over, the investigation begun, or so they thought...
...airtime that follow an attack like the one at Virginia Tech, mass murder is an exceedingly rare crime. The rate of killings in the U.S. involving five or more victims - one generally accepted definition of a mass killing - represented less than 1% of all homicides 25 years ago, and still does today. Among kids, the overall violence figures are actually plummeting, with the number of children under 17 who commit murder falling 65% between 1993 and 2004. Mass killing, says Diane Follingstad, a professor of clinical and forensic psychology at the University of South Carolina, "is a low baserate thing...
...Mass murder, in short, is not a random act. There are things that explain it. Psychosis, for one, can never be ruled out. Russell Weston, a 41-year-old killer who went on a shooting spree in the Capitol Building in Washington in 1998, was a paranoid schizophrenic. Brain injury in an otherwise healthy person can lead to similar violence. Damage to the frontal region of the brain, which regulates what psychologists call the observing ego, or the limbic region, which controls violence, reflection and defensive behavior, can shut down internal governors and trigger all manner of unregulated behavior. "Somebody...
...Narcissism is not the only part of the psychic stew that leads to mass murder. Among the additional risk factors experts look for is a history of other kinds of emotional turmoil, such as depression, substance abuse or some kind of childhood trauma. After the Columbine killings in 1999, the Federal Government commissioned a study of 37 incidents of school violence from 1974 to 2000 in an attempt to sketch some kind of profile of likely campus killers. In general, the investigators found that more than half of all attackers had documented cases of extreme depression...
...these factors accumulate, killers in the making remain surprisingly cool, all the while strolling toward the edge. That is what makes mass murder especially chilling. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned the Columbine assault for months, buying guns, practicing their aim, even designing their own shabby bombs that were intended to blow up the building. Cho bought the first of the two pistols he used in his killings on March 13, then bought the second just days before the murders - decorously observing the 30-day waiting period the state of Virginia requires between handgun purchases...