Folks are cracking under the pressure and taking people with them.

Officers Shocked By Grisly Slayings
Brother Kills Two Sisters, Attacks Third, Police Say

Samantha Revelus, 17, was stabbed to death by her brother, according to Milton police.

POSTED: 7:56 pm EDT March 29, 2009

MILTON, Mass. -- Four Milton police officers were treated for shock and trauma on Saturday after a man stabbed one of his sisters to death and decapitated another as officers stormed into his house to save the girl, according to police.

NewsCenter 5’s Lynn Jolicoeur reported that Kerby Revelus, 23, was shot and killed by police officers while he stabbed a third sister with a kitchen knife, according to police. Saraphina Revelus, 9, was transported to the hospital following the grisly incident. She is expected to survive.

According to police, Samantha Revelus, 17, telephoned 911 on Saturday afternoon and told dispatchers she had been wounded by her brother and that she was dying. Police believe that Kerby Revelus then fatally stabbed her with the knife while officers were traveling to the house.

Moments later, the first officer reached the home, located at 7 Belvoir Road, and kicked in the door. Revelus reportedly grabbed 5-year-old sister Bianca Revelus by the neck and immediately severed her head, according to police.

The officer radioed for backup and followed Revelus to the second floor of the home, where Revelus was shot dead as he allegedly attempted to kill his third sister, 9-year-old Saraphina. Police said Saraphina had taken the phone from her sister, Samantha, after she was killed and continued to speak with 911 dispatchers.

Milton Police Chief Richard Wells said Revelus was still clutching the knife as he fell dead in the second-story bedroom where he allegedly killed his 17-year-old sister.

“Clearly, we feel that his intent was to kill every person in the house,” said Wells.

Police believe Revelus’ rampage was related to a fist fight that occurred between himself and a neighbor on Friday evening, although it is unclear what the connection between the incidents may be.

Revelus had recently been released from prison following a gun charge in 2007. Police also responded to the home in 2004 after Revelus reportedly punched a woman living there, according to police.

Investigators believe Bianca Revelus had turned 5 years old the day before she was killed. Officers found a birthday cake with candles sitting on a table inside the home.

Two sisters were killed and a third was wounded when their brother, 23, attacked them with a kitchen knife, police said.

Police said the children’s mother, who works at a Boston hospital, was at work when the attacks occurred. A grandmother who lives at the home was reportedly doing laundry in the basement during the incident.

Milton school leaders offered grief counseling for students and instructional seminars for parents to help their children interpret the gruesome incident.

“We hope to leave here today with a really concrete action plan for how to support the children of the families of the Tucker school, as well as Saraphina’s family,” said principal Drew Echelson. Echelson said the school community will “rise to the occasion” to support Saraphina, who is known in school as the “Mayor.”

“She’s a very resilient young lady,” said Echelson. “I know that she’s going to overcome this and we’re going to be as supportive as we can as a school and as a school community.”

Eight killed in North Carolina nursing home rampage

(CNN) -- A man shot and killed seven patients and a nurse at a Carthage, North Carolina, nursing home Sunday before being wounded during a shootout with a police officer, authorities said.

The shooting happened at about 10 a.m. Sunday in Carthage, North Carolina, authorities said.


Three other people, including the police officer and a visitor to the nursing home, were wounded in the attack, Carthage Police Chief Chris McKenzie said. The police officer was treated and released, McKenzie said.

The slain patients ranged in age from 78 to 98, Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger said. The man accused of carrying out the attack, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was in custody, and his condition was unknown Sunday night, McKenzie said.

Stewart was not an employee of the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center, and he did not appear to have been related to any of the patients, she said.

"There is still more to be uncovered as far as his purpose in being there," she said.

A witness told CNN affiliate WRAL-TV that Stewart was armed with a rifle, a shotgun and other weapons. The officer who stopped him, Justin Garner, "acted in nothing short of a heroic manner" and probably stopped the carnage from being worse, Krueger said.

Jerry Avant Sr. told WRAL that his son, Jerry Avant, a 39-year-old registered nurse, was the employee who was killed in the shooting. He said a doctor told him that his son had been shot more than two dozen times.

The doctor "said he undoubtedly saved a lot of lives," Avant Sr. said, speaking of his son.

Stewart faces eight counts of first-degree murder and one count of felony assault on a police officer, and other charges are pending, she said.

Carthage is about 60 miles southwest of Raleigh.

Sunday's slayings were the latest in a series of high-profile in March, including the killings of 10 people by an Alabama man who was then killed by police. In addition, a man shot and killed a pastor in a southern Illinois church and stabbed two parishioners, and a 17-year-old in Germany killed 15 people in two small towns before dying in a shootout with police.

In Carthage, crisis counselors were setting up in the town's First Baptist Church to aid survivors of the latest killings.

"I don't know the emotion entirely has set in," McKenzie said. "This is a small community built on faith, and faith will get us through."


and this just today...


Sixth person dies in California shooting

(CNN) -- A sixth person has died after a shooting in a townhouse in Santa Clara, California, police said Monday.

Police found five people, including two children, shot to death Sunday night in the townhouse.

A sixth person died overnight from gunshot wounds, said Lt. Phil Cooke of the Santa Clara Police Department.

A female remains in the hospital Monday in critical condition with gunshot wounds, Cooke said.

Police were called to the scene after a neighbor noticed an injured person outside the home around 8:30 p.m. (11:30 p.m. ET) Sunday, Cooke said. When police arrived, other victims were found inside.

The shootings are thought to be part of a murder-suicide, with the shooter believed to be one of the dead, according to Cooke.

The names of the victims are being withheld as the investigation continues.

This isn't really anything new. America has always had a high murder rate. It's fallacious to attribute this to anything else than the fact that America can be a pretty fucked up place.

trying to pump up gdp per capita?

Milton is the town over from me. It's really fucked up, all the officers are saying they've never seen anything like it.

What I would really like to know in the Milton case, other than why "slayings" lacks the g, is why the brother was in custody of these girls. The parents are absent, right? And he already has a domestic violence and a firearms charge? Who thought it would be a good idea to put a guy with a history of domestic violence and weapons possession as the guardian of these girls?

What the hell is going on in the US???

A little thing we like to call FREEDOM, punk.

I don't believe that guy was the guardian of those kids. The story says the parents were at work.

I suppose reading the part after the picture would have explained that to me.

clearly this is the fault of marilyn manson and every other metal band

i blame the video movie games

I blame Barack Obama.

i heard about the first one yesterday; fucked up stuff

this is a good post

i saw that first story last night. good fucking grief. what the fuck.

i don't think he was in custody of the kids:

Yeah, I stopped reading at the picture, assuming it was another story.

This thread is fucking retarded.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090330/ts_csm/ashooting


Shootings, murder-suicide raise broader question: Is violence linked to recession?

Atlanta – Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood.

On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

"Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses," says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn't been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. "This is not the average situation," Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s "saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47," Mr. Levin says.

And in the midst of this downturn, one study released Monday in Florida finds a link between domestic violence and economic tragedies like job loss and foreclosures. The Sunshine State saw an almost 40 percent jump in demand for domestic-violence centers, an increase related to the state of the economy, the study says. George Sheldon, secretary of Florida's Department of Children and Families, calls the situation "the worst I've seen in years," according to the Associated Press.

The potential link between murder-suicides and the economy is an area of study for the Violence Policy Center in Washington. "We've been looking at this issue of whether there are more murder-suicides … [and] a pattern is starting to develop that may point in that direction," says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the center. "Between the Texas Tower shootings in the 1960s until the McDonald's massacre in 1984, it was extremely rare to see these types of mass shootings. Now we're seeing them much more often, and they do seem to happen in spurts."

To be sure, the gun-control debate is heating up, especially after the recent Alabama shootings where a man killed 11 people, including himself, using semiautomatic, military-style weapons. Gun-control advocates point to gun proliferation as a major cause for the loss of life, especially when families turn on themselves. That appears to be the case in the Santa Clara shootings.

"Studies have shown over and over again that a gun in the home is more likely to be used against a family member than an intruder," says Juliet Leftwich, senior counsel for Legal Community Against Violence in San Francisco.

But the root cause of the violence goes deeper than gun ownership, some argue. "Social isolation is a huge factor" in a country as large and transient as America, which places big emphasis on personal results, Levin says. "If you look at where many of these mass killings have occurred lately, they're in states that have lots of strangers, transients, and drifters, who don't have support systems to get them through tough times," he says.

In the incident in Oakland, which occurred March 21, a parolee shot two officers during a traffic stop, then shot two others during an ensuing manhunt. The parolee also died. It was the biggest single-day, gun-related loss of life for law enforcement in the US since 1993.

The shootings at the nursing home occurred Sunday. Chris McKenzie, police chief in Carthage, N.C., said the gunman, who was killed, may have targeted the home because his estranged wife works there.

That's one of those articles that asks a question and answers it with a shrug.

it does not only happen in the US....it's spreading!