I was actually in Morgantown yesterday when this was going down:
Jody Lee Hunt, the West Virginia man suspected of killing four people in Monongalia County before taking his own life, didn’t appear to randomly select his victims, authorities say.
“Mr. Hunt did know each of these victims and we do have some key pieces of evidence that do point to him as being the suspect, including his social media traffic as well,” Lt. Michael Baylous with West Virginia State Police told CNN Pittsburgh affiliate WTAE. “We have an idea why this may have occurred, but we’re not in a position where we’re ready to release this as of yet.”
Police found Hunt’s body in the woods of northeast West Virginia late Monday following a daylong manhunt. It appears he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“They did discover a truck that matched the truck’s description that we were looking for, and inside they found a white male who matched the description of Mr. Hunt,” Baylous said.
Authorities identified three of the victims as Doug Brady, Sharon Berkshire and Michael Frum, WTAE reported. Brady was shot outside his auto shop, Doug’s Towing, in Westover. Berkshire and Frum both were killed at a home east of Morgantown.
Family members told WTAE that Berkshire was Hunt’s onetime girlfriend.
Family members of the fourth victim identified him as 43-year-old Jody Taylor, a cousin of the suspect, according to the affiliate. The two had operated a towing business together called J&J Towing, according to the victim’s mother, Cassandra Taylor.
Actually, the police know a lot more than that about Hunt and his motives:
New details released Tuesday in a quadruple homicide and subsequent suicide indicate that Jody Hunt, 39, of Westover, was upset with his ex-girlfriend, two men she was believed to have relationships with, and the owner of a rival tow truck company.
A 12-hour manhunt came to an end Monday night when Hunt was found with a self-inflicted 9mm gunshot wound to his head in Everettville, near the border of Monongalia County and Marion County, off US Route 19.
While the bodies of Sharon Kay Berkshire, 39, of Westover and Michael David Frum, 28, of Maidsville, were first found by a nearby landlord in Cheat Lake, law enforcement was dispatched to a reported shooting at 7:42 a.m. At Doug’s Towing in Westover, where owner Doug Brady was gunned down by Hunt. After traveling to Cheat Lake and killing Berkshire and Frum, Hunt shot and killed his cousin and business partner, Jody Taylor, 43, at his home on Sweet Pea Lane.
Berkshire filed a domestic protection order against Hunt, a convicted felon, in 2013 and again in early 2014, said Monongalia County Sheriff Al Kisner. Berkshire later dismissed the protective orders and continued her relationship with Hunt, said Kisner. Berkshire and Frum were in a relatively new romantic relationship, said Kisner. Criminal records indicate that Hunt was convicted in January 1999 in Virginia on kidnapping and abduction charges. Hunt also faced firearm and wanton endangerment charges in West Virginia and spent five years in Huttonsville Correctional Facility. It’s likely that Hunt obtained a firearm by falsifying documents or purchasing it from a person who did not require documents, said Kisner.
If a convicted felon and certified lunatic can obtain a gun by simply “falsifying” documents or picking one up at a gun show or from someone else, it is beyond time to revisit how easy it is to buy guns. Of course, it’s been beyond that time for a long, long time.
raven
I was thinking maybe you were there when I posted the story yesterday.
ShadeTail
Three posts in a row? You need to pace yourself, Mr. Cole, or you’ll strain something. ^_^
scav
But but but, this could be the very exact purpose the holy 2nd was put into place to enforce! Protection aginst uppity wimmiz and business rivals (Ffrreeeeeeeeee Marrrrrrrrkettttttzzzz!!!!) and govt over-reach by oppressin’ manly pale xian menfolk with ‘felon’ status ‘n’ all as a means of subjecting them to a unique reign of servitude unmatched in all of recorded history. or something.
Goblue72
Only gonna happen as we reduce the number of white people in this country.
White people are just crazy.
Woodrowfan
clearly we need stricter voter-id laws or something…
…
Woodrowfan
alas, none are about Lily or Rosie!
Shakezula
Dear God, batten down the hatches and standby for 500 hours of slut shaming.
Is it wrong to wish these assholes would just reverse the order of their fatal tantrums? We promise to all feel really, really sorry at the funeral.
Belafon
But if criminals can’t have guns, then eventually no one else will be allowed to have them!
// (I like the sarcasm identifier that LGF uses)
Liberty60
OK, here I go again.
Why is there a right to own a gun?
Why can’t it be a privilege like a car?
I think its time to ask this question of all Americans, to get people to say this question out loud, to re-examine what we have always just casually assumed without thinking.
We know the number of gun owners is declining, even as the gun owners themselves amass ever more weapons, and even as they become more and more fanatical and off-putting to the general non-crazy population.
Rather than trying to find a vanished middle ground between crazy people and the rest of us, maybe its better to isolate the crazy people and overwhelm them.
Meaning, socially ostracizing the open carry fanatics, by questioning the very foundation of the 2nd Amendment.
the Conster
Then there was also the guy who shot his neighbor in PA for some imaginary grievance, and the nutjob in Austin last weekend. Every day this shit goes on. When are we as a nation going to start assuming that every middle aged white guy has an arsenal and is an imminent threat to public safety, i.e., thugs? Because I already do. I spend a lot of time in public spaces and I keep my eyes on older white guys, because they’ve bought all the guns and are ready to use them to settle their imaginary grievances. They’re a bigger threat than ISIS or ebola or anything else.
dedc79
One of the disconnects here is that a reasonable person looks at stories like this and thinks “we need to figure out how to get guns out of the hands of people like this”, but the gun rights nuts look at this and think “if only the victims had been armed…”
The answer for the gun nuts is always to arm more people. The prevalence of guns in the civilian population is used as an excuse for the militarization (and aggressiveness) of police forces and the militarization of police forces is used as an excuse for expanding civilian access to guns.
BGinCHI
When I was younger tow truck drivers were famous for being reckless, bullying assholes.
Given that this is WV it doesn’t surprise me. And with easy access to guns? I’m surprised it’s not more common.
I’m starting to think we isn’t evolving.
rreay
A couple weeks ago my wife and I were about to head out for an anniversary dinner when her whole family showed up at our door. They they had been kicked out of their house because the guy behind them started shooting at police officers responding to a domestic disturbance call.
The police cordoned off a good radius and eventually got him out without anyone getting hurt. But yeah, craziness.
raven
@BGinCHI: Danny Glover was cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PI8VXaQiWs
sponson
@Liberty60: I agree and have been making a similar argument for years, using smoking in public as an analogy. It was once a given that the “right” to smoke anywhere and everywhere was totally indestructible and would never be changed. However, once a certain critical mass became non-smokers, for better (or worse depending on your point of view) the concept of this “inalienable right” just disappeared, and the majority, now large enough to do so, squashed this “right” almost everywhere out of sheer power. Something similar is inevitably going to happen with guns as the percentage of non-gun-owners climbs.
Shakezula
@the Conster: Don’t forget the Brave PAtriot who shot two police officers, killed one and evaded capture for ages.
raven
@BGinCHI: And, yes, here is the horrible person singing the theme song.
“They say love conquers all you can’t start it like a car you can’t stop it with a gun “
karen
Once we show how easily NI-Clang can get guns it’ll suddenly become a problem.
boatboy_srq
@the Conster: One presumes all these incidents comprise the Blood of Patriots with which the Tree of Liberty must be periodically watered.
/snark
trollhattan
In Texas it’s evidently not only SOP to carry yer guun with you in public, but also, too, driver licenses are simple oppression because you shouldn’t need one to drive on the road you done already paid for.
trollhattan
@boatboy_srq:
That goddamn tree is drowned by now.
Botsplainer
OT, but I’m beyond enraged about a work issue involving a client’s dispute with tmobile. It’s the kind of stupid shit that makes me want to go violent.
Long story short – a client and her husband are estranged. She’s military, posted about 60 miles from her home. He’s former army, and an asshole. They have a medically fragile infant that requires significant, watchful, medically centered care around the clock, and there are frequent visits from home health nurses.
The cellphone account is in her name, and she pays for it (it used to be his, but tmobile transferred it into her name, and she was supposed to be the sole controlling customer on it). He turned it off a day or so ago, so she contacted tmobile, which supposedly transferred everything into a new account number and fixed it so that she was the sole control.
Since then, he’s turned it off twice. After many phone calls where she tried to figure out how to get them to fix it, she’d never escalated beyond the initial level of customer service and was blown off every time. I ended up doing a three way call where I explained, patiently, that she is at risk for domestic violence and that she has a special needs child and immediate communications were mandatory – she’d already missed some provider calls.
That is the worst customer service reaction I’ve ever seen. The rep tried brushing me off until a supervisor picked up, berated me on “professionalism” as I expressed exasperation over the notion that they don’t discuss customer privacy issues over a three way call and that since I was involved, all matters would have to be dealt with by correspondence with the legal department. I wondered aloud what the customer reaction would be if a viral campaign went about talking about how tmobile makes things worse for people in danger by not being cooperative with the legitimate requests of their customers – as in “not turning off service”; I was sneerily informed that it would be slanderous. After another bit of discussion, she advised that she was terminating the call.
I think she hung up before I got out the F in “Fuck You”. My frustration did serve a purpose – I think my client got a chuckle out of that little frustrated display.
I next tried the “executive response team”. Tried explaining to the admin that my client is in transit, fairly simple, and requested that they reach out to her. She demanded to know where I came up with the number I had (425-378-4000 for any frustrated tmobile customers you want to share that with). She said they don’t do the reaching – the customer has to – and in response to my continued attempts to advise the difficult position their misfeasance put my client in said – “here, I’ll give you to customer care”, then transferred me out.
If I was a tmobile customer, I’d find a store and heave my phone through a window. I’m tempted to do it with my Verizon phone, out of a sense of solidarity.
the Conster
@Shakezula:
“capture” – there’s your white privilege right there. Most of these articles about these fucking murderous gun humping assholes show them being led away, or being talked to, or being surrounded until they surrender, like they’re good guys having a bad day. Because they’re always always always victims of something because you know, those poor oppressed heavily armed white males.
OzarkHillbilly
@Goblue72:
Repeated for emphasis.
BGinCHI
@raven: Exception, for sure.
KG
@Liberty60: there are a lot of historical reasons. Most importantly, at the time of ratification, we had no standing army. The militia was defined as any able bodied man aged 21 or older, and they were expected to have a rifle in the event they were called by the governor or president. (As a side note, the current federal definition of te militia is still all able bodies men above the age 18)
In the preindustrial world, having a rifle or flint lock or saber was kind of necessary for a lot of reasons: hunting, self defense, etc. In truth the difference between the world at the height of the Roman Empire and 1780 wasn’t much.
And of course, who has been entitled to the right to keep and bear arms in our history is as “complicated” as who has been entitled to civil rights. Following reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, African Americans often couldn’t own guns, which of course made the KKK’s endeavors easier.
Now, obviously, the world we live in today is completely different. And the question you ask is legitimate. I wouldn’t go so far as to ban guns completely, but there should be much stronger regulation. And of course, if someone wants to do harm to another person, they will find a way.
kindness
There you go John…Using Reason and Logic.
Don’t you know the NRA has no use for either of these? The NRA uses fear. Fear and the ignorance of those who listen to these lunatics (and Fox News) is all the motivation they need.
Sadly it seems to work much better than liberals trying to get the poor/middle class to vote for their own self interests.
boatboy_srq
@trollhattan: I sometimes think that was the plan all along.
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: Should have toed him with their shiny boots and said, “Bootstraps, motherfucker.”
Liberty60
@karen:
I wish it were true that black people carrying guns would change peoples minds, even if for racist reasons.
But it will never happen.
We have already seen that white people can stalk around a school or grocery store with a gun and not be harmed, while a black man can be shot to death for holding a toy gun, or none at all.
No, there will be no repeat of Panthers carrying guns and provoking gun control laws.
Liberty60
@KG:
When I talk to people and ask them what would be wrong with registering and controlling guns like cars, most think it is perfectly reasonable. I suspect more Americans believe this than we are lead to think.
raven
@Liberty60: Except for the Huey p Newton Gun Club
Tree With Water
“It’s a pleasure selling a firearm to a Christian fellow like yourself”, said the owner to the customer with a crucifix carved into his forehead. “Here’s your receipt, Mr Manson. Please come again”.
OzarkHillbilly
@Liberty60: Most Americans don’t own guns and a not insignificant # of those who do have no problem with it.
Mnemosyne
@Liberty60:
Because it’s written into the Constitution.
A better way to start the conversation might be, Should owning a gun be a Constitutional right? You’ll get fewer pat answers that way.
boatboy_srq
@KG:
Perhaps it’s time the US returned to this particular condition. I expect a lot of these Gun-Totin’ Patriots™ would think at least one more time about owning firearms if their possession put them on the short list for military service.
aimai
@trollhattan: I can’t even. Thanks for posting that.
kindness
@Mnemosyne: Forgetting the ‘Well Regulated’ part of the Second Amendment are we?
andy
Yep. Every week I read in my local paper of some felon who somehow obtained a gun- and we’re just a community of 13,000.
The thing your gunfondler knows bone deep, and will never under any circumstances admit, is that private transactions are completely unregulated. I could back my car up to a pawn shop and fill my trunk with guns, and turn them around to anybody I want- if something bad happened and by some wild chance the cops actually contacted me, I could always say something like, “well, the feller seemed okay.”
Belafon
@kindness: The part the Supreme Court tossed out?
trollhattan
@kindness:
To my recollection “gun” or “rifle” aren’t in there, either.
Amir Khalid
I never cease to be amazed by some Americans’ irrational love of guns, or to be saddened by how often the tragic consequences occur. Like you all, I wish that guns were much harder to come by in America and easier to remove from the possession of the careless and the unhinged.
In the meantime, there’s sad news for music fans: saxophonist Bobby Keys, a long-time Rolling Stones sideman (that’s his solo on Brown Sugar) has died at the age of 70. Keys had been doing poorly of late, and had missed the Stones’ tour of Australia and New Zealand on doctor’s orders.
SatanicPanic
@sponson: this is why I’m essentially optimistic on this issue. Plus the fact that while any of these incidents is too many, there are less than there used to be.
raven
@Amir Khalid: Oh man, it’s amazing he lived this long but the dude could blow.
SatanicPanic
@Amir Khalid: Aww bummer
Mike E
I don’t know if anybody saw the video of a reporter interviewing a woman in WVa when they heard gunshots, with one round in particular sailing by within range of the mic…our local teevee news played the footage, and you could hear that ‘sound.’
Now, I’ve never served in harm’s way, never went hunting, nor have I actually operated a firearm, but I know what a round sounds like going overhead; when driving through Va horse country a couple of decades ago, a hunter’s shot whizzed by over the top of our car. It had the effect of loosening certain ‘parts’ momentarily, and I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to hear that phenomenon again.
Redshift
@Woodrowfan:
Stricter gun laws would only hurt law-abiding people, because criminals would just ignore the laws.
However, we can stop all the people we’re sure are committing voter fraud by requiring ID.
Consistency has never been an obstacle when wingnuts know the outcome they want.
piratedan
I think we need a new tree of Liberty, one that doesn’t require constant blood to enhance its growth.
raven
Here’s Brown Sugar with Bobby.
NotMax
@piratedan
Walmart may sell a made-in-China plastic one, but it’s not fireproof.
Redshift
@SatanicPanic: Me, too, though I don’t know if it will come in my lifetime. I tried to make this point to a friend who’s gotten steadily more gun-nutty as time goes by. (He’s still a friend because he’s a good guy except on this one issue.)
There are steadily fewer people owning more and more guns and being more and more strident. For now, they can get what they want because the gun nuts are single-issue voters, and the opponents are not. But eventually the trend is going to reach a tipping point electorally, and if he wants to keep his toys, he’d do much better to figure out what reasonable restrictions he can live with, instead of insisting on the slippery-slope argument until the backlash builds to the point that there are hell of a lot more restrictions.
NotMax
OT:
Bravo, Shane!
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Very sorry to hear that. I’ll listen to Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” tonight and toast him for his fine, fine work.
Liberty60
@Mnemosyne:
That’s really what I am aiming at, is to get people to question the moral foundation of a “right” to own a gun.
Even we liberals often surrender that ground at the outset, and strive instead for the most mild of regulation.
I’m thinking of the success of the anti-abortion lobby, and their tactics:
1. Win the moral battle by making gun ownership something unpleasant and shameful; Picket gun stores and shows; make it unpleasant and difficult for non-crazy, non-determined people to attend.
2. Socially ostracize those who own them by pointing out how they are nuts and fanatics;
3. Draw the web of regulation tighter and tighter; e.g.- Why should gun stores be allowed within X distance of schools? Why should minors be allowed to handle a deadly weapon, even when supervised by an adult? (We don’t let that be true for cars); Why can’t demand that private gun sales be regulated and licensed, again, like we do with cars? And so on.
4. Litigate litigate, litigate- constantly probe for weak points, putting gun manufacturers and dealers on the defensive. Every dollar they spend on defense is one less to spend on offense.
The gun fanatics have succeeded because they made it a priority. We can win by doing the same.
Tripod
@KG:
1780?
Even America 1960 was far more rural and way less populated than today. The disconnect being in someone my dad’s age, that the rural farm they grew up on is now buried under suburban sprawl, and the ramifications of those changes, it just isn’t something that is considered.
Far too many of them will see change as a sign of moral decay rather than a point of reflection on gun laws (or anything else).
Mnemosyne
@kindness:
The United States Supreme Court has decided that passage is irrelevant. You can take it up with a future Supreme Court, if you like, but right now we have to live with the current court’s interpretation of the Constitution.
Tripod
@Mnemosyne:
Illinois was the last to go concealed carry, when the court rammed it down their maw.
There is your daily bit of dimes worth of difference.
Nader 2000!
NotMax
@Tripod
Hawaii technically has concealed carry, but my more gun savvy friends (who unanimously loathe the NRA, by the way) tell me that in practice there are so many hoops to jump through that permits are almost never approved – somewhere on the order of well under 1%.
Kryptik, A Man Without A Country
@karen:
@Liberty60:
The most that would happen is that black people would have their gun rights restricted, in specific.
Because, you know, they’re all so notoriously and naturally criminal, it’s for their own good, yeah? Not to mention they already have their hulkish demonically powered bodies as weapons, why would they need guns in the first place?
Citizen_X
@trollhattan: Great. There’s your poster child, gun humpers: a loudmouth, sub-literate asshole incapable of the slightest personal reflection.
Playing just for you, here is the world’s tiniest violin.
p.a.
@Liberty60: time for black cops to kill unruly, unarmed white men they feel threatened by. Laws will change then.
gogol's wife
@Liberty60:
I agree with you totally. I have tried this on people and they always think it makes sense.
Mnemosyne
@Liberty60:
Leaving aside my moral qualms about imitating the tactics of forced birth advocates, there is this tiny snag in your plan:
You seem to be conveniently downplaying the role of legislation and lawmakers in your formula. Laws didn’t suddenly become more anti-abortion because forced birthers demanded it from the outside — the laws became more anti-abortion because forced birther candidates ran for office and won. Over and over again. They started on city councils and worked their way up to state legislatures and Congress, or they got themselves elected/appointed to judgeships.
The smartest thing conservatives ever did was take over all of the levers of legislative power, because what they knew and liberals didn’t is that if legislators don’t want to pass the laws you want, you can’t do shit. And if conservative judges don’t want to find in favor of your lawsuit, you’re up shit creek.
Agitating and advocating is nice, but if you can’t get any legislators to vote the way you want, you may as well stay home and jerk off in private instead of making a spectacle of yourself in public.
Liberty60
@Mnemosyne:
Oh, I agree with you totally.
Judges and legislators and mayors and governors swim in the same cultural soup as the rest of us.
They follow the same logic and worldviews- when we elect enough of them who consider guns to be a frivolous and dangerous thing that needs restriction, we will win.
It all hangs together in a virtuous cycle- we change the culture enough to elect, then legislate and litigate and this changes the culture even more; you can compare it to smoking if you don’t like the antiabortion model.
ETA- those who don’t mind making a spectacle of themselves are the ones who win. I remember everyone laughing at the gay pride parade marchers, but goddamn if they didn’t get the last laugh.
merrinc
@John Cole: I am originally from Fairmont, in Marion County. I still have family and friends there and in Mon County and was following this closely on Facebook yesterday, via them and also WDTV’s and WBOY ‘s pages. The shooting spree itself was horrifying – one friend teaches at a middle school in Morgantown, another has a kid in high school there – and I knew they were in lockdown, just as a precaution. There was talk of canceling the Christmas parade in Fairmont at one point.
But what really broke my heart is what happened after the shooter was found dead: people started defending the sonofabitch. I kid you not. “She cheated on him.” “There’s only so much a person can take.” “Play with fire, you get burned.” This wasn’t just victim blaming to the nth degree, it was fucking insanity. Have all the years of fossil fuel pollution fucked everyone up to the point that their moral compasses are hopelessly out of whack?
I didn’t sleep last night. It’s been my dream to go home before when I retire and now…I don’t think I want to do that. I miss the hills so much I ache and the friends I’ve made over the last few decades here will never know me as well as those I grew up with but goddamn. What’s happened to West Virginia that people will defend a monster? I realize every-fucking-body has been walking around armed for quite awhile now but have we really progressed to where it’s okay to hunt people down and shoot them when they piss you off? Because it sure seems like it.
Sherparick
@kindness: And don’t forget the Muslim Usurper Kenyan “Blah” President who is planning to send his Black and Brown stormtroopers provided by the UN to take away all your guns. Biggest NRA selling point since November 2008.
Epicurus
For any future psychopaths considering this story as inspirational; as always, he did it backwards. Shoot yourself FIRST and then go after your victims. And the world is a better place without people like Jody Lee “Let’s forget this asshole ever lived” Hunt.