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Sometimes a suicide is just a suicide

Author:   Matt Deatherage  
Posted: 10/7/05; 3:13:07 PM
Topic: Sometimes a suicide is just a suicide
Msg #: 1432 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 1431/1433
Reads: 10891

I was hoping that I wouldn't have to write anything about the incident outside last Saturday's OU-Kansas State game, where a 21-year-old kid, Joel Henry Hinrichs III, blew himself up across the street from Memorial Stadium. It's bad enough that the kid blew himself up. I had a strong suspicion from the start that the right-wing crazies would turn this into all kinds of conspiracy theories, but I didn't expect progressive sites like AMERICAblog to bite so hard on it.

Let's take a look at things I've read in comments on various blogs and compare them to, you know, reality.

  1. They should have evacuated the stadium immediately.

    Anyone saying that OU officials were negligent by not evacuating Memorial Stadium after the explosion has either never been there or didn't pay attention at the time. It seats more than 84,000 people now (and attendance on October 1 was over 84,000), but it's on a college campus.

    Here's a satellite photo of the stadium and the surrounding area. The open space just south of the stadium are athletic practice fields (what looks like a big shadow just south of Owen Field proper is actually the south stands). During games, the OU Athletic Department (OUAD) parks cars on those fields. The brownish area to the east of the stadium is also parking. The area north and west is the OU campus. The kid blew himself up just across the street running west of the stadium (Asp Avenue).

    Where would 84,000 people have gone?

    When there's been an explosion outside, but not inside, a venue seating tens of thousands of people, how much sense does it make to have 42,000 of them exit within 50 feet of where it happened, particularly before you know what's going on? What they did instead made the most sense - they closed off the west gates, they refused halftime "pass-outs" (passes that let people leave the stadium for halftime and come back in later), and they started searching the new attached parking garage and the stadium for more explosives. They found one suspicious package and detonated it, but despite the first reports that are still on the Web, it wasn't a bomb. As the student newspaper, the Oklahoma Daily, reported:

    There was a second explosion that could be heard in the stadium at 9 p.m. It was the police detonating a backpack suspected to be associated with the first bomb.

    "The second detonation was the bomb squad making sure there was not a second device," Boren said in a statement released Sunday afternoon.

    By the way, that report also says that someone who was 20-30 yards away from the explosion when it happened was unhurt, and could see a body and knew the guy was dead. I think some people are vastly overestimating how powerful the explosion was. It was enough to kill him, but not much else. I was in the stadium, near the east sideline, and I did not hear it. People sitting near me did, but they wondered if it was thunder or not. We were looking out for rain.

    Reports here in Oklahoma this week said that Hinrichs tried to get into the stadium during the game, but was denied entry because he would not allow gate security to search his backpack. Today, the news says that security tapes do not show any evidence that he tried to get in any gate, nor can the Athletic Department find any evidence that he purchased a ticket (though, of course, he could have gotten one from a scalper on the street corner).

    This, by the way, is exactly how security is supposed to work. You don't take knee-jerk actions that send people into what may be harm's way when you don't have any evidence that they're unsafe where they are. The fact that a bomb exploded outside the stadium is strong evidence that even a malicious actor could not get inside the stadium with it. Streaming thousands of people right past the explosion site moments after it happened would have been just plain stupid, and potentially disastrous if other bad actors had been waiting outside the stadium.

    Does anyone think panicking 84,000 people would have been a better outcome?

  2. The kid had a Pakistani roommate! OU is a hotbed of Islamic activity!

    Honestly, if you believe all this, you're wasting your bandwidth reading any kind of facts instead of LGF or Michelle Malkin or the other unreconstructed racists.

    Hinrichs was an engineering student at OU. Engineering colleges at most universities have lots of foreign students. If you're one of those who thinks that the presence of Muslims in the United States is a security threat, well, just stop reading. Facts simply will not overcome that kind of fear and hatred.

    Everyone else, please keep in mind that OU is in Norman, part of the greater Oklahoma City area. We have some experience with domestic terrorism. We also have experience with quick-to-spread rumors that it's a middle-eastern conspiracy, and with finding out whether that's true or not. The local, state, and national police detained Hinrichs's roommate and a couple of friends immediately after the explosion, checked them out six ways to Sunday as everyone admits must be done in such situations (just like the police always investigate the spouse of a murder victim), and cleared them by Sunday night.

    I've read complaints that they couldn't possibly have exonerated them that fast, but the reasoning all boils down to:

    • They're Pakistani, or

    • "The Feds" are covering up a massive Islamic terrorist conspiracy at exactly the moment the Bush administration could really use such news to distract the nation from the adminstration's own corruption.

    If you believe the first is reason enough not to clear someone near an explosion after investigation, you're a racist. If you believe the second, well, again, I don't think facts can help you. I'm certainly under no illusion that the FBI is telling us everything it knows, but neither am I under the delusion that the same government that's gone to the US Supreme Court three times to keep "terrorist suspects" in jail permanently without charges or trial would let these guys go if they had any suspicions.

  3. But…but OU is a hotbed of Islamic activity! It's where Zacarias Moussaoui learned to fly! Nick Berg met him there, and his beheading was staged! It's easy to get in there!

    Islam is the world's second largest religion. Any serious-sized university has a sizable population of Muslims. If that alone makes you fearful, take the escape hatch now.

    Zacarias Moussaoui did take flight lessons at a Norman flight school. It was that school, unlike any of the others where those who are believed to have flown planes on September 11 studied, that reported him to the FBI. That's why Moussaoui was in jail on September 11, 2001, and not flying a jet that wasn't his to fly. As it was, the FBI didn't put the pieces together. Without the diligence of the Norman folks watching out for terrorist activity, they might not have had that most important piece.

    I know the wingnuts are all a-twitter over the known fact that Moussaoui once used Nick Berg's E-mail passwords. On a bus in Norman to the north campus, where the airport and flight school are, Berg let a guy he know use his computer, and told him his password so that he could. That guy memorized Berg's password, which Berg foolishly did not change afterward, and shared it with Moussaoui. No one has any evidence Berg ever met Moussaoui, much less gave him a password.

    And call me rational, but it doesn't surprise me that a man like Nick Berg, who had connections in the Middle East and went there to build his fortune, would not be shy about letting someone he knew with Middle Eastern connections use his computer, especially before September 11, 2001. Today is a different world.

    OU's admission criteria for non-Oklahoma residents require at least a 3.5 GPA and a rank in the top 25% of the high school graduating class, or an ACT score of 26 or higher, or an SAT score of 1170 or higher and finishing in the top half of your high school class. According to the College Board, those ACT and SAT scores are roughly equivalent, and require the test taker to have scored in at least the 75th percentile. In other words, be among the top 25% of all ACT or SAT test-takers for that year.

    These are not super-elite requirements, and they're slightly lower for Oklahoma residents, but this is what you expect from a state-sponsored public university. Nonetheless, as University president and former(?) politician David Boren points out at the drop of a hat, "The University of Oklahoma is #1 per capita among public universities in the number of freshman National Merit Scholars enrolled, and in the top 10 of all public and private institutions in the entire country. OU is home to nearly 700 currently enrolled National Merit Scholars." That's not bad.

  4. Hinrichs was seen at the Islamic Student Center! He had a Muslim-style beard!

    I can point you to about two dozen gay guys in Oklahoma City with the same scraggly-ass beard, and I promise you not one of them would think of as much as crossing the street in the name of Allah. College students dress funny. Get over it.

    I've only seen wingnut references that Hinrichs was at OU's Islamic Student Center, but since he had a Pakistani roommate and other Muslim friends, that's not too shocking. Sometimes non-Baptists enter the Baptist Student Union, too. It's pretty tricked out, except not having a dance floor and all. I'll bet people saw him at Braum's from time to time, but that doesn't mean he worshiped dairy cows.

    By the way, the president of OU's Islamic Student Association says Hinrichs was not a Muslim, and does not believe he ever visited any local mosques.

  5. But he tried to buy ammonium nitrate! He wanted to drive a truck bomb into the stadium!

    Both a feed store owner and an off-duty Norman police officer say Hinrichs tried to buy a large quantity of ammonium nitrate on September 28, three days before the game and his death. Guess what? He didn't get to buy the stuff. After April 19, 1995, feed store owners around here are kind of cautious about who they'll sell that stuff to. All the store owner did was ask Hinrichs why he wanted it, and when he didn't have an answer, the store owner refused to sell it to him. The Norman PD officer even took down Hinrichs's auto tag number, but in one of those areas that needs improvement, Norman PD was not going to report it to the FBI until Monday, two days after the game.

    There's no evidence Hinrichs had any kind of vehicle capable of holding the material necessary for a large ammonium nitrate explosion. And, as anyone who's been to a game in recent years can tell you, he wouldn't have been able to get even a car as close to the stadium during the game as he got walking on foot. The stadium has the same concrete anti-terrorism barrier posts that went up around most big buildings after April 19, 1995.

    I acknowledge that there's a chance that someone driving a car could crash through one of the stadium's several vehicle-sized gates, but I have real difficulty believing he could have gotten a car to that point without being stopped. Game security at major colleges is tight - you can't drive a car up to the stadium during the game. That's also why they swept the new, attached parking garage for explosives after Hinrichs's suicide - just in case they'd missed something. Again, this is just how it's supposed to work, isn't it?

  6. But another OU student was arrested in August for trying to take a bomb on a plane! It's a bomb factory down there!

    Yup. Dumb-ass rich kid makes homemade M-80s out of pipe and gunpowder, blows them up out in the country, and then forgets about them in his bag before going on the plane. Guess what? The airport security found them and arrested him. The Feds investigated and found that he's a dumb-ass rich kid who built a homemade M-80 and tried to take it on a plane. It wasn't ready to go off - it was a CO2 cartridge filled with gunpowder that "could be detonated when connected to a power source such as the batteries [he] had in his electric razor and in his cell phone, which were also in his carryon bag." He'd have been flagged for the gunpowder alone, even if it hadn't been in the CO2 cartridge. He was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay an $8000 fine.

    Tell me that in the rush before getting on a plane, you might not notice a CO2 cartridge buried in some fold of your backpack or carry-on bag. I'm not saying he was innocent, but there's no evidence it was more than a stupid mistake, and they came down pretty hard on him for it because it was a stupid mistake involving gunpowder in an airport.

    And again, guess what? That's just how it's supposed to work. I'm sure the kid got off easier than he might have, largely because his family is rich and he lived in a house owned by former OKC mayor and Republican senate candidate Kirk Humphreys, who served as his attorney. But he's a "good, white, Christian kid," so amazingly, the wingnuts didn't demand that he be held without bail forever. The progressives seemed more upset.

People seeking conspiracy from the known facts need to rejoin the world of facts. The kid's father said that he had long been depressed, and was seeking counseling. He was good at engineering but didn't like doing it, and didn't think he was good at anything else. He liked blowing things up, even as a kid. No one's contesting any of these facts, but the wingnuts are eager to dismiss them and focus on their fear of Muslims instead. This is why we generally require facts before we convict people.

(Yes, they found explosives in the kid's apartment. What a shock that someone who liked explosives, and who actually built a bomb, had the parts to build a bomb. What a shock that a suicidal student would think about building a big bomb. The bomb squad detonated those Sunday night.)

We have experience with home-grown terrorism, lessons we had to learn quickly and painfully. We know what to watch for, what's reasonable and what's not, and we know that we're all in this together. We're not prone to releasing valid terrorism suspects. For God's sake, both of our worthless senators were among the nine who voted this week in favor of torturing people detained by the US anywhere in the world.

This is not a place that looks the other way when terrorism might be involved, but neither are we prone to keeping people in jail without any evidence of complicity other than Michelle Malkin's racist ramblings. We were considering these issues while the rest of y'all were still thinking it could never happen again. We can't prevent everything, but we have a good idea what we're doing.

Of course, there may be evidence yet unreleased that shows Hinrichs had broader motives. His father doesn't think he did. His classmates don't think he did. His roommates have been released by the torture-happy US Government. Every conspiracy theory that the nutcases throw out gets refuted a day or two later by, you know, facts.

Until other facts show there's more to this than what we already know, I have real difficulty disbelieving the known facts. I'm not surprised Michelle Malkin and Free Republic prefer their fantasy world to reality, but I'm disappointed in AMERICAblog.

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