A school shooting incident transpired on April 20 at Forest High School in Ocala Florida. The shooter was identified as Sky Bouche, 19 years old. Bouche reportedly smuggled a sawed off shotgun into the school nestled in a guitar case while passing himself off as a Forest High attendee. The shooting resulted in one injury to a 17 year old student’s ankle after Bouche fired a single round of shotgun pellets at the bottom of a classroom door. He was apprehended shortly thereafter by the school’s resource officer.
Marion County Sheriff’s Detectives John Lightle, left, and Dan Pinder, right, escort a handcuffed and shackled Sky Bouche, 19, center, to a waiting patrol car, Friday, April 20, 2018, in Ocala, Fla. Bouche is the suspect in a shooting that occurred at Forest High School Friday morning. (Doug Engle/Ocala Star-Banner via AP)
A gunman who carried a shotgun in a guitar case and opened fire at a Florida high school has been denied bond during his first court appearance. A handcuffed Sky Bouche appeared Saturday before Judge Willard Pope via video conference at the Marion County Jail. The Ocala Star-Banner reports a second court date was set for next month.
Bouche told the newspaper he felt an adrenaline rush before Friday’s shooting that quickly wore off, and he was unable to continue with his plan.
Bouche faces charges including terrorism, aggravated assault with a firearm and possession of a firearm on school property.
The shooting at Forest High School in Ocala happened on a day planned for a national classroom walkout to protest gun violence and left one person injured. The school went on lockdown after the 19-year-old suspect, who was not a student, shot and injured a 17-year-old male student. His injury is not life threatening.
Reporters who were given unusual access to the shooter after his arrest for an interview where Bouche told them he was often alone and experienced moods of “depression” and “rage.” He obtained a 1930 shotgun “‘so there’s no papers on it,'” the suspect said. The purchase was made “in a private sale arranged through an online service about a week after the Parkland shooting so he could get it before [the law moved the age to] 21,” the Ocala Star Bannerreports. The gunman says he got ideas on purchasing the gun by watching a segment of ViceNews.
Bouche stated that at age 14 he was examined because of mental health concerns under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows for a three day involuntary psychiatric observation in the event authorities deem an individual a threat to themselves or others. He further tells reporters he has “a lot of bipolar [and] schizophrenic people in my family,” and that he has “always been around mental illness my whole life.”
Police obtained a “Temporary Risk Protection Order” to confiscate Bouche’s firearm. The Risk Protection Orders have been provided to Florida law enforcement under the new Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. The order prevents the subject from possessing or purchasing firearms for the duration of the court order.
There’s something very strange taking place in the aftermath of this event. This specifically involves apparent violations of the suspect’s right to due process. According to reports Bouche faces numerous charges, including terrorism, aggravated assault, carrying a concealed firearm, firearm possession, armed trespassing on school property and possession of a short-barrelled shotgun.
Given this array of such serious potential offenses, how is it that reporters have been given such unlimited access to the suspect wherein he repeatedly incriminates himself before any arraignment or trial?Where is his defense counsel, and why are they not objecting to such questioning and testimony? We are reminded of the odd access given to reporters following the San Bernardino and Pulse Nightclub shootings.
Hall on the campus of the University of Lethbridge shortly after learning of his suspension.
Over his long and impressive academic career, Professor Anthony Hall has helped us all better understand how crises can be manufactured to manipulate public perception of narratives that serve the interests of established power.
Now, he is the victim of one of those contrived crises.
In the latest of a growing list of glaring assaults on academic freedom, Hall has been suspended without pay from his tenured teaching position at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada where he has taught for 26 years. As the result of an obviously faked and planted Facebook post, he has become the focus of a smear campaign by the Jewish lobby group B’nai Brith Canada, which is accusing him of being an “anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.”
[The following is an excellent commentary on the characteristic high-handedness of US higher education oversight. University management today has much in common with the corporate sector, complete with the obligatory mealy-mouth (but underlying contempt) toward free speech. Further, college administrators tend to propagate by finding new positions and pay raises for each other with wild abandon. In this instance an adjunct faculty member teaching media arts at a small state college criticized administrators’ policies on his personal blog. This must have been recognized as a threat to management’s ‘safe space’ because the poo-bahs began a malicious rumor campaign against the prof and issued him a ‘no trespass order ,… to protect our students, faculty and staff.’ The ACLU filed the lawsuit late last winter.-JFT]
Perhaps the most abusive employment situation in higher education is in Colorado, where the food banks specialize in helping the severely underpaid faculty. Yes, things are tough all over, but the starving faculty there know the system is exploitative, because, well, let me recycle a quote:
The culture of fear in higher education did not arise spontaneously. Quirks in our legal system give administration on campus considerable leeway when it comes to crimes, allowing them to “criminalize” perfectly legal behavior and mete out extreme punishments, via the campus kangaroo court system.
all over, but the starving faculty there know the system is exploitative, because, well, let me recycle a quote: