Pennsylvania psychiatric clinic shooting

Uh oh, more Feds involved, which is always a red flag for a covert op:

www.cnn.com...
Steven Bartholomew, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that his agency is "working with Pittsburgh police and other authorities in the investigation."

Originally posted by starviego
It doesn't sound like just one gunman to me.

From a news reporter on scene as it was happening:

www.wpxi.com...
"Yeah Peggy, multiple police sources are now telling us this has turned into a hostage situation. My sources are telling me--my police sources are telling me--that they have received three phone calls from people inside Western Psych claiming that they are now being held hostage by two men with guns. ... But again, the very latest information is that this has now evolved into a hostage situation. .... We understand from our police sources that they have received three phone calls from people inside Western Psych claiming at this moment that they are being held hostage by two men armed with guns. ..... Now we are hearing the possibility that there may be two to three shooters involved in this incident. ...Again we are getting all this information from our police sources. ... "

edit on 8-3-2012 by starviego because: (no reason given)

More evidence of other shooters:

www.wpxi.com...
Reporter:
"I was standing next to a police officer who was standing next to two FBI agents with bullet proof vests on and I said to him 'What are you hearing about a second shooter?' And he looked at me and said 'I'll just tell you this much: I wouldn't be standing here without a bullet proof vest on if I were you.' "

www.cnn.com...
At one point Thursday, the University of Pittsburgh's official Twitter account had a message that suggested a "possible 2nd actor" was involved and called for a lockdown.

www.cnn.com...
from comments section:
--"There are 3 shooters. One is dead. One is on the run. One is holding a hostage"
--"Last I heard, one shooter was dead and another had a woman hostage at nearby UPMC Presby."

Last count on which source you see is either 9 injured or 7 and differently 2 dead..

I was in Oakland today when this went down.. They said on KDKA news that the reports of the hostage incident is completely not true and that there was a definite 1 shooter.. The did a room to room at western psych and and stated that he went in and exchanged gunfire with a pit police officer.. I am assuming this was on the street because it is very very impossible to get access to the main building of western psych because of the how they have it set up.. but who knows..

Anyway this is the latest..

There were definitely alot of police down there.. It was insane.. the sirens were going off for like 15 mins straight.. I was down at McGee woman's hospital from about 1 to 4 and heard alot of things going on and so on so forth.. alot of the schools and hospitals were locked down as a precaution so the supposed other shooters were not getting access to other buildings..

It is an interesting note however... Central Catholic school in Oakland was not releasing kids to thier parents as this incident was going on.. I find this interesting to say the least.. A parent who has a kid in this situation can not come and pick thier kid up.. I find odd..

Anyway, I think thats it for now.. I am sure in a few days things will come out but for now... thats what I know for sure... Yes i am a local here in Pgh.. and was in the area.. My wife had a baby girl on the 7th at 11:38pm...

congrats

Originally posted by starviego
Uh oh, more Feds involved, which is always a red flag for a covert op:

www.cnn.com...
Steven Bartholomew, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said that his agency is "working with Pittsburgh police and other authorities in the investigation."

They just want to find out where he got the guns from. If it was out of state, it's a federal matter.

Sheesh. Do we have to turn everything into a conspiracy theory? People are dead!

About 10 or so years ago we had a shooting rampage in that part of town as well--the guy targeted as many minorities as he could find. He had a history of mental illness and his parents still bought him weapons.

www.thefullwiki.org...

And back in '09 some neoNazi wingnut opened fire on three police officers who were responding to his mother's 911 call:

www.post-gazette.com...

forum.davidicke.com...

looks like a false flag considering how little of a motive they are giving.

Originally posted by starviego
Interesting how all these random rage shooting incidents start out with multiple shooters before settling quickly on just one lone gunman.

www.huffingtonpost.com... 949
(University of Pittsburgh Medical Center spokesman Paul)Wood said media reports about a possible second gunman and a hostage situation at the clinic or at UPMC Presbyterian hospital were unfounded. "There was no hostage situation ever," Wood said. "There was a rumor out there that there was a second gunman. That, we believe, was never true."

twitter.com...#!/search/PittTweet
"Just got word of multiple shooters on campus at @PittTweet and various injuries."

www.wpxi.com...
Police told Channel 11's Rick Earle that initial reports indicated that a second gunman may have been holding people hostage inside of the hospital.

--------------------

Also, it seems the FBI is always on the scene for some reason:

www.post-gazette.com...
Police were called shortly before 2 p.m. Scores of city police officers arrived and were reinforced by FBI agents, sheriff's deputies, state police troopers and members of the South Hills SWAT team.

edit on 8-3-2012 by starviego because: (no reason given)

Same as the Columbine accounts for multiple shooters, in addition to Klebold and Harris. www.scribd.com... ses-to-a-Massacre-Other-Participants-In-The-Columbine-Shooting

www.wpxi.com...
Police have identified the gunman from Thursday's shooting at the Western Psychiatric Institute in Oakland as 30-year-old John Shick. .... Pittsburgh Police Cmdr. Thomas Stangrecki said both guns were traced to Texas and one of the guns is confirmed to be stolen. ... Officials said they are investigating if Shick had a motive.

coroner's photo here:
media.cmgdigital.com...

IF he had a motive??? There is NO such thing as a motiveless crime. If they can't find anything approximating a motive, you can bet we are dealing with another Manchurian Candidate.

10 to 1 this guy was in the armed forces at one time.

One source said the perp was an ex-patient there:

pittsburgh.cbslocal.com...
KDKA’s Marty Griffin reports that Shick had mental illness, an extensive mental history and that he went to Western Psych to kill his doctor. Marty Griffin also reports Shick had been treated at the hospital for an extensive period of time.

If so this would take care of the motive question, and it means he was probably not a veteran. Though earlier the media reported this:

www.post-gazette.com...
--Dr. Karl Williams said there is "tentative" but no firm identification of the gunman.
Officials said they believed the shooter had never been a patient at Western Psych.

All over the 3 pgh news channels are saying that he was a mental patient and that he was crazy.. they went to where his apartment was and was interviewing people to prove that he was mental...

They also had on KDKA a visual reenactment on how the police entered the building and took the guy down.. They show the 2nd guy who was killed in the incident next to the perp stating the police didn't shoot the 2nd guy who was killed...

Anyway this is as much local as I know... My wife said she heard some lady at McGee yesterday was at the scene as it was going down but she didn't want to be all nebby so she didn't hear alot.. She just got back from the hospital so I haven't asked her much about what that lady said.. when she does I will add it here or something...

reply to post by starviego


The
Police are not giving any indication of a motive. Not that 'crazy' is a real motive but in this day and age it is believable by the masses. So even if those sources are true, there is still no 'official' motive given. Yet, they know the guns originated from texas and so the ATFB-gun runners are now involved. Hmm. And reports of a second shooter. This issue deserves more attention.

www.infowars.com...

"camo cops" responded to the shooting. An attempt to acclimate the population to military on the streets for NDAA.

ATS did you hit the snooze button on this?

reply to post by Lord Jules


There wasn't alot of swat there.. The cops that took the guy down were Pitt University police.. I don't know where Alex Jones is getting his information but..... Only a few swat teams were there... Most where plain clothes cops a few snipers and that's about that...

Then again what do I know.. I only was there when it happened was watching live local news and so on and so forth.. But then again AJ knows it all like always.. Right?

::EDIT::

It was an employee at the clinic who went postal and killed a fellow worker and shot several others, which gave the cops an excuse to prepare for combat and march around campus in camouflage with automatic weapons as if ninja jihadists armed with AK47s and RPGs were on the loose.

This is wrong also.. it was an ex mental patient..

reply to post by ThichHeaded


How many is not as important as the fact they were there, and they were there because of reports of a second shooter. Now they are saying those reports are false, but they were obviously serious enough to warrant some swat. The ATF was also there. We all know how incompetent they are.

I was (un)lucky enough to be in Western Psych at the time of the shooting.
Since it IS a psych hospital and the question will arise when reading this, I was there for 72 hours because of a suspected prescription drug overdose which was proven to not be the case and the 302 was immediately appealed once all the labs came back, and the hospital was no longer on lockdown.
This whole incident better make the people at WPI reevaluate their current security measure and emergency plans. If the University Of Pittsburgh Campus Police had not been right there because of the Convention Center, there would have been many more deaths before anyone could have come to help.
By 1:45pm we all heard things, and everyone was glued to the windows trying to figure out what was going on. Soon the whole hospital was on alarm and everyone was ordered into their rooms, and the lockdown of all patient floors was complete by 2pm. We were being told random excuses for what was going on - it wasn't until some people turned on their radio and heard the news that they finally started telling us what was going on. It wasn't until 4pm or so that we got told anything official - but by then we had heard news, and snuck in a few phone calls to hear what was being said.
We were on "stay in your room, you're sh*t out of luck if you need meds, food or the bathroom" lockdown for 2-3 hours. Eventually they let us out of our rooms, but every single non-patient-room door was still locked. I was on the 11th floor in the East Wing, and there are doors sectioning the patient areas into 3 parts - West & East Wing, and in the middle is the staff offices and nurse/medical supplies/treatment rooms. Those 2 doors were locked until nearly 6pm - each wing of the floor was pretty much completely locked in until 5pm, at which time they let the staff go in and out of the office areas so they could start getting meds for the patients.
I do not know what the news claims or what the official word was, but they did not let the staff start leaving until 10 or 11pm. The lower floors, the ones without patients, were cleared early on - which meant that the kitchen and pharmacy staff were long gone. They left a hospital full of psych patients without any way to get food and meds for hours - while these stressed-out and already disturbed patients were watching swat teams, bomb squads, listening to alarms and bells with flashing lights all around. Umm... way to make a bad situation even worse!
Around 6pm (give or take since I was a little too preoccupied to watch the clock) the swat team finally made it around to our floor. We were all rushed into a TV rec room - 20 or so patients from the East wing and then 6-8 staff that were at our wing at the moment. A bunch of psych patients locked in a room with a big glass window while a swat team tightly gripping their triggers starred us down while search room to room. Then they ordered a staff member out and explain they needed to do a search of each patient, one by one. At this point... the more disturbed members of our group started to lose it. They did not want to get pat down by a swat team, or even leave the room.
The staff just listened to orders - but some patients were deaf to the situation and not about to play it straight. Survival instinct kicked in, and I told the most disturbed and violent patient a few jokes... told them to pick the cutest swat team member, and go to him for the patdown - wisecracked something like "You can get felt up by the cute one... maybe even get a phone number!"... that worked. I was the last patient to leave the room, and some staff and other patients thanked me for helping that patient in that manner (staff is not allowed to be crude or use a patients' sexuality as I did, but I know that sometimes being horny is the best way to get someone to ignore being pissed).
Anyway - after the swat was done, the doors on the floor were back to normal - although the hospital was still locked. Nobody in or out unless you were part of the outside world. The staff was able to get us boxed lunches at 9pm or so - which pissed everyone off (they were horrible). The staff was allowed to leave by 11pm and about that time is when things "went back to normal".
They had NO plan for an extended lockdown emergency such as that. No plan to keep medical care and psychiatric safety measures still active, no way to keep people fed or calm in any manner - they made a bad situation so much worse. And the fact that the hospital had NO part in ending the violence is a outrage - psych patients can get violent, and with sh*tty security any one of them can come back in to seek revenge. Have some armed guards stored away in the basement or on the roof - somewhere away from patients but within reach of actually helping!

WPI lost my respect a long time ago, but this has made me lose all faith in the place.

www.usatoday.com...

the cops trained for this exact event in a virginia tech training, no doubt this will be used to justify the militarization of police.

He was a gifted student with little to no criminal record, so may be a patsy for the shooting, still unclear on motive.

The psych ward wont say if he was a patient becaus it would violate his privacy rights even though hes dead.

This is just an update and will post more news when it comes in.

reply to post by PittKitty


Wow thanks for the eyewitness story. It really is strange they would hide the truth for over two hours even though the news was reporting on it. Maybe the hostage situation was true. Looks like you got a first hand experience in the saying 'were here from the government were here to help' and they couldnt help themselves from groping mental patients. If your story is true and it sounds like you are sincer you should call the alex jones show and tell them your story.

Some questions:

How did police identify the body?

He wasn't carrying any ID, and a search of fingerprints yielded no results. Yet he had been arrested in Oregon in December 2009, at which time fingerprints should have been taken. Then they claimed they made the ID from a name they found on or near the body:

www.boston.com...
-- Stangrecki declined to say specifically how police identified Shick, who was carrying no identification, and police had moments before released an autopsy photo in the hopes the public could assist in that regard. Stangrecki said only that Shick's name was confirmed through a database from a name written either on something the gunman possessed or was wearing.

Yet it was only a first name found:

www.post-gazette.com...
--Mr. Shick was wearing a ... but nothing with which to positively identify him. His first name was written somewhere on his belongings...

So they ID'ed the body based only on a first name 'John?' Hmmm.....


--------------


Was or was not Shick an ex-patient at Western Psych?

There are indications he was suffering not only from mental problems but also from a serious physical ailment:

www.post-gazette.com...
--Mr. Shick sometimes left yellow Post-Its on his door that said, "Now cleaning up vomit from pancreatitis. Please do not disturb." The room, which few people ever entered, often smelled like cleaning products, the pair said. ....That changed this week, they said, when Mr. Shick acted strangely one night before asking someone in the building to call ambulance and then vomited in the lobby.

www.post-gazette.com...
--Detectives searched the apartment Friday night and found a number of doctor's notes suggesting he was in ailing health. They also found hand-written notes and a 30-pound bag of medication, though it was not immediately clear what kinds.

Looking at the Timeline of the suspect's life after graduating high school in 1999:


www.pittsburghlive.com...
Shick graduated in 2004 from a dual-degree, five-year program at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. and Columbia University in New York. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Carleton and an engineering degree from Columbia, said Carleton spokesman Eric Sieger. He attended Carleton from 1999 to 2002, and Columbia from 2002 to 2004.

www.pittsburghlive.com...
From June 2004 through 2008, online records show Shick appeared to live in New York....

www.post-gazette.com...
--The Oregonian newspaper reported on Friday that he lived in Portland from September 2008 until August 2011. In April 2009, he petitioned to change his name to either William Huhnpere Schols Kan or Willim Hahnpere Scolskan ---- it appears two different ways in court documents ---- and then changed it back again a year later, the paper reported. In December 2009, Port of Portland police charged a Willim H. Scolskan with resisting arrest and assaulting a peace officer .... Medics took him to the hospital for a mental evaluation.

www.pittsburghlive.com...
Shick enrolled in Duquesne's(Pittsburgh) graduate program in the Department of Biological Sciences, began taking classes in August(2011) and supervised two freshman labs a week until late October(2011)....
The school removed Shick from his position as a teacher's assistant on Oct. 21(for sexual harassment).

www.pittsburghlive.com...
Neighbors(at his last residence in Pittsburgh) said Shick kept to himself; ... he did not appear to leave regularly for a job.

---------------

Other than a short stint as a teaching assistant, it appears Shick did not have any kind of a job or career. Who was paying the bills? What was he doing from 2004 to 2011? I continue to suspect that this guy was ex-military. Maybe that accounts for the missing gap in the record.