Remembering the young men killed in UCSB rampage
These men’s lives were just as valuable as the women’s lives.
In the annals of news I have personally covered, I have rarely been so embarrassed by some members of my own sex as I have been this week, in the wake of the spree killing that took the lives of six young students attending the University of California – Santa Barbara.
Among the most egregious examples of inanity offered as sophisticated opinion on this tragedy:
- Feminist activist Gloria Allred diagnosing Elliot Rodger’s mental illness as male chauvinism.
- Slate contributor Brittney Cooper, an African-American instructor who teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers, blaming “White Guy Killer Syndrome.” [Note to Cooper – Rodger had a Chinese mother].
- Feminist Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday decried Hollywood sexism as the reason for the stabbings and shootings.
These pundits would like to ignore several salient points in their mad scramble to promote their toxic worldviews. However, they seem to ignore the fact that four talented young men, guiltless of any race or gender sin these women decry, are dead.
I would like to take a moment to remember them.
Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez
[From Facebook]
Michaels-Martinez was a 20-year-old sophomore at UC Santa Barbara. His parents told the LA Times that he was planning on becoming a lawyer and would soon be going abroad to London.
As well as an avid reader, Michaels-Martinez is also remembered as an impressive athlete who played soccer, football, basketball.
Additionally, Michaels-Martinez was the only child of two attorneys. His mother is a deputy district attorney and his father, Richard Martinez, is a criminal defense attorney who is now being featured on mainstream media for his gun control advocacy.
If my son were slaughtered, my sanity would be shattered. If this is what Martinez needs to do to get through this horror, so be it.
Cheng Yuan Hong
[From ABC News Video]
When he was killed, we lost someone special.
Armin Samii, who was the teaching assistant in a class that Hong took as a high school student at the University of California at Berkeley, tells PEOPLE, “He was extremely bright. He outperformed 90 percent of his class of college undergraduates while he was still in high school (as the sole high school student in the class). He was always curious, always asking questions and always helping other students. I can only imagine what he would have achieved once he graduated.”
“James was a nice guy,” Hong’s classmate Andrew Pagan tells PEOPLE. “I remember his laugh in class and his voice was unnormally deep for his figure. He had such a rich laugh. Anyone who heard it would remember it without a doubt.”
[From Facebook]
George Chen’s parents wrote a message of love to their son using chalk outside the Capri Apartment building where he was stabbed to death last week.
George Chen, 19, was the oldest of two sons. He grew up in San Jose and got good grades. He was studying engineering. The Chens said they expected to pick him up in three weeks to take him home for summer. Now they are having a difficult time realizing he is gone.
Chen’s mother and father said the University of California Santa Barbara has set up a fund for a memorial or scholarship. They like the idea, they want to honor their son’s memory.
[From Fremont Christian School]
On Monday, Wang’s bereft parents, Jinshuang “Jane” Liu and Charlie Wang spoke exclusively to NBC Bay Area before heading to Santa Barbara to be with the parents of the other slain victims.
“He was supposed to have come home for the summer soon,” Liu said, speaking from her doorstep, her words choked with emotion, her hands often covering her heart.
Liu said that her only child – a basketball player who graduated from Fremont Christian School and who was studying computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara – had already found another apartment and planned to move with his friends next semester.
…Wang’s plan, his mother said, was to return to the Bay Area on June 12, head out on a family trip to Yellowstone National Park two days later, and celebrate his 21st birthday in July. He eventually wanted to start a business with his friends.
Wang’s mother said her son was very close with the other two young men stabbed in the apartment: 19-year-old George Chen and 20-year-old C.H., both of San Jose.
I have no doubt the two young women who died, Veronika Weiss and Katherine Breann Cooper, were equally as special in their lives as these men were.
However, the deaths of these young men is no less painful to bear and their loss is to be mourned, too.
Prayers for the spirits of all these young people and the consolation of their families.
(Featured image of Chen’s mother at memorial; Santa Barbara News Channel 3 video)
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Comments
Men are like Jews and Christians: kill them and nobody cares cuz ( add grievance du jour).
May God grant these boys rest and comfort their families.
To a degree you’re right.. In case of Christian males. But let it be Jew and that shit is cried out loud in every possible corner.
I don’t think you’re familiar with the BDS corner. Or the faculty lounge corner. And many other corners.
Time to tell the TRUTH that feminists and women WON’T TELL YOU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OdQGbVNa4
Shame on feminist activist Gloria Allred for her broad brushing and lashing out at males. Did Allred do this to gain attention? Her ‘ubiquitous appearances’ would suggest that this is so. Narcissism speaks for itself.
Shame on Slate contributor Brittney Cooper, an African-American instructor who teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers, for broad brushing and blaming white males for her own projected issues – pure unadulterated narcissism.
Shame on feminist Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday for the simplistic blaming of Hollywood ‘sexism’ as the reason for the stabbings and shootings – pure unadulterated stupidity.
Elliot Roger had a known mental illness that should have been kept in check. His handguns should have been under lock and key.
Men died, women died. Men and women were injured. Families were forever changed. Who gives a damn about self-serving blather?
Mizz All-Red has this fetish about dominating men. Maybe it’s some sexual thing but I doubt it since she seems to have no limit to her vile attitude towards males no matter what the context.
The most amazing thing about her is that she is married (or was – I don’t know). A guy would have to be really into masochism to even think about hitching himself to her, let alone actually doing it.
Married twice, but not since 1987.
Feminists are censoring the truth about their HATRED OF MEN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5OdQGbVNa4
“His handguns should have been under lock and key.”
His handguns, his knives, his car . . . .
“Did Allred do this to gain attention?”
Were a freeway covered in newborn babes between her and a TV camera, she would drive a bulldozer to get in front of it.
So I think it’s safe to say – yes.
Do you now see the poison that is Feminism? This isn’t isolated incident or “just one ‘bad’ Feminist”,, this is the whole picture of Feminism
If a female student had killed male students because men rejected her, she would get sympathy. People would not be making comments (outside of our little bubble here) about how hatred of men is a problem.
Which is not to make light of this horrific tragedy or to excuse the sociopathic murderer, but rather to point out how silly those comments from the usual suspects are.
I have yet to hear a single verifiable complaint from a woman about the inability to get laid.
That’s because women don’t suffer from an inability to get laid, they suffer from an inability to get laid by a sufficiently higher value man.
This is the first time I have read anything of substance about these young men that we have lost. Thank you.
Another measure of just what a loser this spoiled brat was. He sets out to slaughter women for some having rejected him, but his body count is mostly the young men closest in his life.
Why am I starting to suspect that his manifesto was a lie, and that there were other issues swirling in that troubled mind?
Little freak couldn’t even be honest with himself.
There are a lot of things he couldn’t do…being honest with himself is way down the line.
Some part of the human population just has bad wiring, and I’m not sure how blameworthy one is when their have a “bad brain”. This is apparently one such person.
It appears that this guy had a lot of support that a like individual with fewer resources would never see, and he still was walking the streets and passing background checks. There were people in his life that saw BIG red flags, but it never translated to action.
California law made it too difficult to get him involuntarily committed, and regardless, he was quite good at appearing normal and playing along.
Rodgers had been in and out of psych treatment since age 8 and was lately prescribed Risperidol, an anti-psychotic med typically given to schizophrenics. I have read his entire manifest, but enough to see it is shot through with paranoid ideations. Typical onset of schizophrenia is late teens, early twenties.
This isn’t about guns, knives, cars, or anything else except schizophrenia.
A secondary, overarching problem is that in a society with instant news transmission coupled with a population of over 300 million, the prevalency of these horrific rampages is dramatically overestimated. Instant media makes them seem epidemic when the frequency – factored against such a huge number of free people – is actually remarkably low. Not to make light, once is too many, but 300 million people is a huge number. Rodgers represents less than .000000003% of the US population. I’m amazed and pleased that in a free country there aren’t far more rampages like this.
I HAVEN’T read his entire manifest but enough…
Also – Rodgers refused to take his meds because of side effects, a common issue among the mentally ill. They get caught in a cycle of their own making… they exhibit illness, get committed, get put on meds till no longer a danger, get released from hospital, refuse to take meds, decompensate till they get committed again, repeat cycle, and on and on it goes till something ugly happens.
The use of an antipsychotic is not determinative for schizophrenia. Atypical antipsychotics get used in children for all sorts of conditions – refractory depression, depression with psychosis, oppositional defiant disorder, etc. They are also now mainline treatment for bipolar disorder.
Doesn’t mean he wasn’t schizophrenic, but taken alone it means almost nothing.
Beyond any particular diagnosis I find it highly informative that he stabbed his roommates to death – a most intimate, personal, and physically violent method, but chose to shoot his other victims – a more mentally and physically detached approach.
There is an almost 100% correlation between psychotropic drugs and mass shooting. In some instances it appears that patients who stop taking drugs without supervision are at heighten risk.
http://www.ladailypost.com/content/brief-history-psychotropic-drugs-prescribed-mass-murderers
A Brief History of Psychotropic Drugs Prescribed to Mass Murderers
…This caused me to wonder how many of the reported mass shootings really were the result of issues other than mental illness or drugs. The more I researched this question, the more surprising the results became.
It should be noted that most of the users of psychotropic drugs do not have the potential to be mass murderers; yet all of the mass murderers listed here had been prescribed one or more psychotropic drug. However, the number of people who could potentially experience one or more adverse side effects was shocking!
As noted later, in some cases only one in 1,000 people experience adverseside effects, but if the drug were prescribed to 19 million people, literally thousands of people could experience adverse side effects.
What follows is the result of my research and question, “What psychotropic drugs where prescribed to mass murders?” At the end of this article is a list of the drugs prescribed and their most serious adverse side effects…
I’m not one for conspiracies but..
does anyone else get the feeling that Mr. Martinez is paid for?
6 days after and he already has a CATCHY SLOGAN.
How much is Bloomberg paying/backing him to demonize the NRA?
Just found out from my wife this morning that the object of this disturbed boy’s hatred in his 140-page “letter” or whatever you’d call it—the girl whose picture the NY Post published—was our daughter’s main competition on the Greek Row at USC.
My wife asked me if I’d heard about what happened in Santa Barbara. “Uh, yeah, Honey.”
I guess this girl whom Rodger cited as the girl whom he most wanted to kill since childhood, loathes our daughter.
According to my wife, she slapped our daughter’s boyfriend in public when she found out he was in love with our daughter.
And when his fraternity chose their “sweetheart” at a big, formal dinner in Las Vegas, this girl’s sorority sisters were chanting her name because they were sure it would be her. I’m told they were stunned and not too pleased when the announcement came and it was our daughter.
Meaningless trivia for the day. A few degrees of separation I thought I’d share. Just another way to procrastinate. Where are my nail clippers?
What a perverted comment. This “LukeHandCool” pitches in to say that the girl that pansy-boy hated for a decade for a comment she made when she was TEN really is a bitch, and he knows because this girl was in social competition with, what, his own little bitch? This is truly insane disgusting stuff to say, and it would seem to be fraudulent as well. What married man has a picture of a girl as his avatar?
“What a perverted comment. This ‘LukeHandCool’ pitches in to say that the girl that pansy-boy hated for a decade for a comment she made when she was TEN really is a bitch,…”
—Just trivia. Please don’t try to make it sound like I think she deserved his evil obsession.
“… and he knows because this girl was in social competition with, what, his own little bitch?”
—What a way with words. Our daughter wasn’t competing with her. But is seems she deemed our daughter to be her rival.
“This is truly insane disgusting stuff to say, …”
—Don’t get your panties all twisted about. It’s just a little water cooler talk.
“… and it would seem to be fraudulent as well.”
How would I come up with that?
“What married man has a picture of a girl as his avatar?”
The girl in the picture is my daughter. What doofus would ask such a question?
LukeHandCool (who senses that AlecRawls does not have a way with the ladies. Rather obvious)
“Please don’t try to make it sound like I think she deserved his evil obsession.”
I didn’t make it sound like you thought she deserved anything. I simply noted that you are making the case that this poor girl really is a bitch, which you absolutely are doing, and it is seriously out of place.
“The girl in the picture is my daughter. What doofus would ask such a question?”
Unbelievable. You actually leave this kind of gossip under your daughter’s picture… For her sake I’ll leave off, but you should never have started on.
Don’t let the troll get to you.
Cute kid, must take after her mother.
I don’t know the girl. She might be nice, she might be a witch, or she might be somewhere in between.
Regardless, in a Greek environment, you find a lot of mean-girl theatrics and backstabbing. Doesn’t mean the girls like that won’t outgrow it or act nicely outside of such peer-pressure dynamics. It is what it is. It’s the reason I tried to discourage our daughter from rushing in the beginning. The stories are fascinating, though.
Anyway, like most people at one time or another, this girl was overcome with jealousy. I found it interesting, of course, since she was the object of that psycho’s rage.
Now, is that too hard to understand?
@genes: Ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch.
If as a general matter you think that this is the right time to observe that “in a Greek environment, you find a lot of mean-girl theatrics and backstabbing,” that would just be poor taste. Really? You’re going to rip on the social group that this psycho targeted? But your commentary is worse than that. You introduce gossip to rip on the individual girl who the psycho fixated on for something she said when she was 10. No, the details of her personal life are not relevant, and if you personally find them “interesting,” keep it in your hat. Leave the poor girl alone.
I guess it was too hard to understand.
Look up the phrase “complete drag.”
An involuntary psychiatric committal in California is also known as a 5150 for the section of the law in which it is found. The criteria for use are listed below.
‘The criteria for writing requires probable cause. These include danger to self; danger to others together with some indication, prior to the administering of the hold, of symptoms of a mental disorder; and/or grave disability, as noted below. The conditions must exist within the context of a mental illness.
Danger to self: The person must be an immediate threat to him/herself due to mental disorder. Being a threat to oneself is not limited to being suicidal; this criterion can be met in other ways. For example, the intention to respond to the delusion that there is a computer chip embedded under one’s skin by digging it out with a knife meets the criterion.
Danger to others: The person must be an immediate threat to someone else’s safety due to mental disorder.
Gravely disabled:
Adult (patients over 18 years of age): The “objective finding that the person, due to mental disorder, is incapacitated or rendered unable to carry out the transactions necessary for survival or otherwise provide for her basic needs of food, clothing, or shelter.” “Bizarre or eccentric behavior, even if it interferes with a person’s normal intercourse with society, does not” meet this criterion, unless “where such behavior renders the individual helpless to fend for herself or destroys her ability to meet those basic needs for survival.” [3] In theory, a mentally disordered person who is receiving sufficient care to survive disqualifies the individual from meeting the grave disability criterion.
Minor (patients under 18 years of age): Is the same criterion as for an adult, with the additional condition that even if a caregiver is offering sufficient assistance for the minor to survive, if the minor is unable to make appropriate use of food, clothing, and/or shelter, then the minor meets this criterion. For example, a psychotic adolescent refusing to eat because he/she believes his/her parents are poisoning the food they are in fact providing meets this criterion.”
A reasonable person would think that making specific threats regarding mass murder would qualify as a ‘danger to others’. The law didn’t make it too difficult admit the killer involuntarily, the killer could have been committed had either his psychologist or the police asked for the committal based on the specific threats in the that his parents found in his video rants.
oops, this was meant as a reply to Sian.
Seems to me the Asian-Americans have a better reason to decry this fellow than women do. Or maybe we all just come together and agree it would have been better if he’d just started at the end of his list.
Women are a tragedy, men are a statistic. 300 women get sold into Islamic sex slavery = headline news. Thousands of men murdered to advance the hegemony of Islam = no news.
Found in my FB newsfeed. Makes more sense than anything else I’ve read on the subject. Long article.
http://markmanson.net/school-shootings
“In 1998, a high school junior named Eric Harris from Colorado wanted to put on a performance, something for the world to remember him by. A little more than a year later, Eric and his best friend Dylan Klebold would place bombs all over their school — bombs large enough to collapse large chunks of the building and to kill the majority of the 2,000 students inside — and then wait outside with semi-automatic weapons to gun down any survivors before ending their own lives.
“It’ll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together,” Eric wrote in his journal. “Maybe we will even start a little rebellion or revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.”
Eric was a psychopath, but he was also smart.
Despite what media outlets would later claim, Eric Harris was not the victim of bullying any more than other students, he was not a goth or a member of the “Trench Coat Mafia.” Eric was a straight-A student. He read Nietzsche and Hemingway for fun. He had friends and girlfriends. He was charming and funny and had a disarming smile.
But Eric also understood people. And because he understood people, he changed everything.
By 1999, there had already been a series of school shootings across the United States. But Eric wasn’t interested in those. They were small-time jobs, amateur hour. Eric was far more interested in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 and injured 600. Eric wanted to top that. But he didn’t just want to top the body count, he wanted to top the notoriety, the fame, the horror. He wanted to terrorize people and he understood that his best weapon was not the guns he secretly purchased or the bombs he built in his basement — it was television. He would not kill jocks or preps, he would kill indiscriminately, because that’s what caused the most fear and got the most attention. He wouldn’t just blow up the school, but he’d blow up the parking lot, the police cars and the firefighters and the journalists who rushed to the scene. He would, quite literally, go out with a bang, the shockwaves of which, carried by mass media and the internet, would reverberate through the world for decades.”
So, by this reasoning, Frazier Glenn Cross shouldn’t be charged with hate crime since he didn’t manage to kill any Jews? Who in their right mind can not see that the Christians he killed died because of his anti-Semitism? I find it somewhat humorous (I’m easily amused) that there are people who are so bigoted that they can’t connect the dots here.