Daycare massacre in Thailand
Another horrific massacre of young children and some adults, this time in Thailand. Here are a few things I want to point out.
The first is that Thailand has a fair number of guns, legal and illegal, and its rate of gun ownership is especially high for an Asian country (see this for some statistics). And yet in this case there was no armed Good Guy with Gun to intervene and prevent further deaths. I’m not sure why that was the case, but it was the case. Perhaps it was due to the venue – a daycare center – although afterwards the perp went out into the community and continued to shoot people and also hit them with a vehicle.
The second is that these murders were accomplished with a combination of weapons, and it appears that most of the children were knifed to death while they were napping, after several adults had been shot and killed. The horror of such as act is extreme, but it also demonstrates that knives (or in this case, what is described as a cleaver) can kill as well.
The third is that drugs were involved, in this case probably meth and perhaps even some others. The perp (who later killed his own family and himself) was a former policeman who’d been suspended from the force for drug use and had attended a hearing about that earlier on the day of the massacre.
Here’s some of his history:
Former colleagues say he had frequent mood swings and was often shunned at work.
According to The Nation Thailand, he once drew his pistol at a bank manager who had complained after finding the officer asleep in a police car parked outside the bank when he was meant to be on guard while banknotes were being stocked.
Last year, he also had heated arguments with his wife over his alleged affair with a karaoke worker whose ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer.
The officer also verbally and physically assaulted a neighbour who confronted him about his noisy house parties.
This is a familiar type of profile often found with people who become mass killers. And yet it’s only a tiny tiny fraction of people like this who do go on to kill, and who they might be is difficult if not impossible to predict. In this case, I think drugs were a necessary although not sufficient part of the crime, and I also think it probably had copycat aspects.
RIP to all the victims.
So a psychologically damaged meth head decides to kill. He is drawn to a daycare instead of something else. Just random? Easy targets? Greater psychological horror?
Hard to think practically anyplace with vulnerable people needs an armed guard, but….
Knives seem to be increasingly popular among the deranged: earlier today, a guy who claimed he is a chef stabbed several tourists and Las Vegas showgirls who were having their pictures taken with the tourists. Two of the women have died, and three other victims are in critical condition. A violent stabbing attack left two peole [sic] dead and at least six others injured in Las Vegas Thursday. Some of the victims were showgirls taking pictures with tourists, bystanders told Fox 5. Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters on the scene there had been eight victims; two who had died and three who were in critical condition in hospital. He added a suspect was in custody and a kitchen knife had been recovered from the scene.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/1-dead-multiple-injured-in-las-vegas-stabbing-attack-near-casinos/
No word so far about drugs being involved but it’s a developing story.
Utterly evil, and horrifying to say the least. And I still have to wonder why.
It is particularly bad when this type of crime is perpetrated by someone with law enforcement training. Omar Mateen has some such training. By “bad” I primarily mean that they can be much more deadly.
That’s very sad news, and here is the first place I’ve heard of it! It didn’t come up on my apple news stories or on my social media… not yet, at least, but usually stories like this are like wildfire.
In some ways LE people fear knives more than guns because they often create much-less-survivable wounds. God bless these little children, and erase their horrors.
Tommy Jay says, “It is particularly bad when this type of crime is perpetrated by someone with law enforcement training.”
That reminded me of Joseph James DeAngelo, aka the Golden State Killer. He started out in 1974 as a house burglar who was nicknamed the Visalia Ransacker. He then committed at least 50 rapes between 1976 and 1979, and was called the East Area Rapist, or EAR. DeAngelo was employed as a police officer with two different departments from 1973 to 1979, when he was fired for shoplifting. He had earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in 1971 from Sacramento State University. The dates of his early crimes indicate that he was committing burglaries and rapes while working as a cop for his “day job.”
After being fired as a police officer, DeAngelo began a series of murders in southern California between 1979 and 1986 that earned him the nickname of the Original Night Stalker or ONS. After DNA testing began to be widely used in California after 2001, the EAR cases and the ONS were linked to a single perp, who was then called EARONS. After the FBI announced a reward and new information about the criminal renamed the Golden State Killer in 2016, DeAngelo was caught by the use of forensic genetic genealogy in 2018.
Detectives had long suspected that the man they were seeking had police training of some sort because he clearly knew surveillance techniques in selecting his victims as well scouting out escape routes before he struck.