While
small in terms of casualties the Westerly shooting of December 19, 2019 had an
impact bigger than people realize.
What happened was a man of mixed Latin
heritage began shooting wildly at the manager of Babcock Village apartments in
a crowd, killing the manager and wounding two others before running off. What happened next was a bunch of obvious
government fuckups. First the local
police repeatedly kicked in the wrong apartment doors, in some cases throwing
disabled people onto the floor, before
the RI State police took charge, ordering the apartment raids to stop as a
video of the shooter was obtained, and the perimeter was secured. The ATF soon took over and sent in their
robot to take out the shooter. The
question remains did the shooter kill himself or did the robot. Once the shooter was neutralized no effort
was made to get medical treatment for those wrongly raided, and no attempt was
made to let the families of those tenants know if their family members were
safe.
I was one person warning that such a
shooting could happen for a decade as one of those tenants was my stepdad, who
was responsible for scamming my father’s family out of our fortune between the
1970’s and 1990’s. He did this with the
help of lenihan law, who’s office had moved close to babcock village weeks
before the shooting happened, and the shooter may have acted out of a paranoid
ideation. Additionally, the local police
force, which had been acting like an out of control goon squad in the years
leading up to the shooting, may have raided those apartments thinking that
those tenants were sitting on a hoard of money and valuables and used the
shooting to loot those tenants. Overall
the police did not do a spectacular job.
Even more telling was the timing of
the shooting. The date of the shooting
was on the anniversary of the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, an important date
to the indigenous peoples, and the date may have been chosen to send a message.
Additionally, it occurred during the 350th anniversary of the town’s
founding, which few took note of.
Overall, a shooting which was mishandled, setting a bad tone for america
and the World.