“African-American shooters tend to at least represent their statistical portion of the U.S. population and include past killers like like Omar S. Thornton, Maurice Clemmons, Charles Lee Thornton, William D. Baker, Arthur Wise, Clifton McCree, Nathan Dunlap, Colin Ferguson, and the DC Snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo,” Van Zandt told theGrio.
The most notorious members of that list include Muhammad and his then teenage protege, Malvo, who shot and killed ten people across three states along the Atlantic coast during a three-week period in October 2002; Ferguson, who opened fire on a Long Island Railroad commuter train in 1993, killing six people and injuring 19 others; and Christopher Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Naval reservist who touched off a massive manhunt after a string of shootings that killed four people, and injured three LAPD officers in February. Dorner died in a heavily wooded area in California during a standoff with police.
There have been other cases. In 2010, Omar Thornton went on a shooting rampage at a Connecticut beer distributorship, killing eight people and then himself. The 34-year-old who had worked as a driver for the company, had been called in for a disciplinary hearing and asked to resign when he opened fire. |
