CO - Possible Serial Shooter Has Colorado Drivers on Edge #3

[Hatfield]

how close do you think you would have to be?... and how far do drones fly?... and how are they controlled?

They are making some Drones very advanced these days. The real expensive ones can travel 5km to 20km ranges according to googling some of the advanced ones.

They are controlled by remote control and the cheap one I have that I got on the shopping channel has a camera that has live view screen right on the remote control. So I can see right on my remote control what the Drone sees. Mine was really cheap and I haven't even tried it out yet. Mine is basically just a toy and I am amazed at the features for such a cheap one I got.

The more expensive ones are getting amazing. They can carry payloads of up to about 10 pounds or more. Those are quite expensive though.

We have already seen some crazy drone stories like the one that crashed during the US Open Tennis match. So I think people are starting to go crazy with them. LOL

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/con...ZeXjsgCFQGqaQoddbkCKg&is=REG&m=Y&A=details&Q=

 

[searchinGirl]

I think you're on the mark with this, searchinGirl, combined with Forager's spear theory, there's a chance various method get tried. Where are do they go for the kudos though, for the dumb stuff they do? Do they market the skills, compare notes, when it's not just nutty loners but groups thrill seeking?

Let's think about the online gaming community, high-tech toys, trucks, guns, man-caves, etc...

 

[ddg]

Well I figure it might help, these incidents are all so spread out but I feel like there must be some common denominator linking them.

What do you mean spear ? haha sorry I don't get it!

 

[Hatfield]

Got to thinking about Drones more and a criminal would not necessarily have to hover it either. A perp could fly it to a certain spot and land it and still activate things on the drone while it is stationary in a landed position.

Like a Perp could fly to the top of a building or top of an Overpass or a Bridge and land the Drone. The perp would still be able to activate things on the Drone while it is up there and when they are done then they could take off and fly the Drone back to whereever they are to retrieve it.

 

[searchinGirl]

Well I figure it might help, these incidents are all so spread out but I feel like there must be some common denominator linking them.

What do you mean spear ? haha sorry I don't get it!

upstream Forager said this...

"All of these random shooters are copying one another back thru history to the one, original father of it all, some dufus with a spear, sitting on a log somewhere, scratching his *advertiser censored* and watching someone go by on a horse when the moment of seminal genius struck and he thought to himself "Yup. Bet I could hit 'em. That'd sure get 'em talking back at the cave. Yup."

 

[Forager]

Got to thinking about Drones more and a criminal would not necessarily have to hover it either. A perp could fly it to a certain spot and land it and still activate things on the drone while it is stationary in a landed position.

Like a Perp could fly to the top of a building or top of an Overpass or a Bridge and land the Drone. The perp would still be able to activate things on the Drone while it is up there and when they are done then they could take off and fly the Drone back to whereever they are to retrieve it.

What a chilling thought. I hope for civalization's sake that someone will be able come up with a post demonstrating that that's a dumb idea. But it will have to be someone smarter than I am.

 

[SugarQueen]

Check out this rc plane with An air soft gun. [video=youtu;K0_KRKm_r-k]http://youtu.be/K0_KRKm_r-k[/video]

 

[FindHG]

Well I figure it might help, these incidents are all so spread out but I feel like there must be some common denominator linking them.

What do you mean spear ? haha sorry I don't get it!

Thank you again and sorry about the spear. It has been explained.

Let's think about the online gaming community, high-tech toys, trucks, guns, man-caves, etc...

Going off your post, searchinGirl, in 'the donald's' terms, it's seem to me 'huge,' as diverse as you can get, the gaming community, bots, drones, and man caves aficionados... Whittling it down to those in the areas of the shooting who would go from virtual to reality games, to laser tag, paintball, remote control devices, bots, drones, gun or wrist-slingshot hobbyists, and even more precisely, it still would leave all kinds of gaps. One thing that may help is to reach out to those communities for tips maybe and to keep an eye out for signs of people who may do that kind of thing?


for magz



Topical:

http://www.c-ville.com/cheers-fears-locals-weigh-drones/#.VgNwzSgViko

 

[Forager]

ABC 8 WRIC Newsroom,
Published: September 23, 2015, 12:30 pm Updated: September 23, 2015, 9:17 pm
State Police investigating after trooper’s vehicle shot on I-95 overnight

Virginia State Trooper.

It happened to a Virginia State Trooper early Wednesday morning on I-95 near the Bell’s Road exit at around 1:15 a.m.

“He heard a loud pop the next thing he knew he had a large crack in his windshield,”... .

Within seconds... another driver ... pulled off. Both vehicles were hit by bullets.

“[One] struck the hood of the trooper’s patrol car and ricocheted and deflected off the windshield,”... . “The other vehicle was struck twice by two bullets.”

[There had been two earlier windshield shatterings, possibly due to road debris, on March 21st and 23rd on I-95, both near the Bells Rd exit. ]

 

[Hatfield]

ABC 8 WRIC Newsroom,
Published: September 23, 2015, 12:30 pm Updated: September 23, 2015, 9:17 pm
State Police investigating after trooper’s vehicle shot on I-95 overnight

Virginia State Trooper.

It happened to a Virginia State Trooper early Wednesday morning on I-95 near the Bell’s Road exit at around 1:15 a.m.

“He heard a loud pop the next thing he knew he had a large crack in his windshield,”... .

Within seconds... another driver ... pulled off. Both vehicles were hit by bullets.

“[One] struck the hood of the trooper’s patrol car and ricocheted and deflected off the windshield,”... . “The other vehicle was struck twice by two bullets.”

[The reporter, on the video, but not in the article, mentions that State Troopers have recently beefed up patrols in response to "other reports of shattered windshields", but didn't know if they were because of "kicked up rocks". ]

Virginia now. Oh boy. These incidents are spreading now it seems.

Canada example the other day and now VA. This is not good news. Uggggg

 

[Forager]

Yesterday's two I-95 window shatterings in South Richmond, VA are the latest in what might be a long, large series of random highway shootings.

A Richmond Times-Dispatch piece from yesterday by Brandon Shulleet mentioned "reports in recent weeks of projectiles striking vehicle windows in that area... , but none of those have actually been confirmed to be the result of a bullet."

There were another two on 3/21/15 and 3/23/15, both involving windshields (not side windows) at the same approximate location as yesterday's attacks (I-95 near the Bells Rd. exit). Source: AOL.com, 3/23/15, Mysterious object smashes family's car windshield on I-95. No clear cause for those two.

Another article from yesterday, by Brent Solomon of NBC 12, mentions other attacks that happened last year:

"Last year [Tom and Betty Doyle], spoke out after a year-long struggle of not knowing who shot their car as they drove near I-95 and Chippenham Parkway.

"It went through the driver side window and hit my husband in the back and hit me in the face. At first we had no idea what it was,” Betty Doyle said in 2014.

A shotgun blast left Betty scarred and Tom paralyzed.

Just this past July [2015], the Troffo family was left with a shattered driver side window, a blown out rear window and glass all over their car. The blast happened right after Lisa Troffo got onto 95 after fueling up."

 

[Hatfield]

Yesterday's two I-95 window shatterings in South Richmond, VA are the latest in what might be a long, large series of random highway shootings.

A Richmond Times-Dispatch piece from yesterday by Brandon Shulleet mentioned "reports in recent weeks of projectiles striking vehicle windows in that area... , but none of those have actually been confirmed to be the result of a bullet."

There were another two on 3/21/15 and 3/23/15, both involving windshields (not side windows) at the same approximate location as yesterday's attacks (I-95 near the Bells Rd. exit). Source: AOL.com, 3/23/15, Mysterious object smashes family's car windshield on I-95. No clear cause for those two.
Another article from yesterday, by Brent Solomon of NBC 12, mentions other attacks that happened last year:

"Last year [Tom and Betty Doyle], spoke out after a year-long struggle of not knowing who shot their car as they drove near I-95 and Chippenham Parkway.

"It went through the driver side window and hit my husband in the back and hit me in the face. At first we had no idea what it was,” Betty Doyle said in 2014.

A shotgun blast left Betty scarred and Tom paralyzed.

Just this past July [2015], the Troffo family was left with a shattered driver side window, a blown out rear window and glass all over their car. The blast happened right after Lisa Troffo got onto 95 after fueling up."

I don't know why news and LE is so quick to call things mysterious when yesterdays was definitely BULLETS

"Both vehicles were hit by bullets.

“[One] struck the hood of the trooper’s patrol car and ricocheted and deflected off the windshield,”... . “The other vehicle was struck twice by two bullets.”"

 

[Foxfire]

Gun belonging to freeway shooting suspect not in pawn shop during I-10 shootings
KPHO Phoenix‎ -

Records show the gun that Arizona Department of Public Safety ... been in an out of Mo Money Pawn Shop several times since July. ...

The gun in question is a High Point 9 mm semi-automatic. Investigators have forensically linked it to four of the freeway shootings.

Although Merritt said the pawn shop had the gun at the time of those shootings, both the owner of Mo Money Pawn, Eric Baker, and the general manager, Byron Vaughn, said their records show otherwise.

They said store records indicate Merritt's gun was not in their possession when those shootings occurred.

"He did several transactions with this same firearm," Vaughn said. "He did one in the beginning of July -- July 19. It [the gun] was here for several days. He picked that up on the 24th. He again pawned it on Aug. 1; picked it up again on the 22nd. So it was in his possession between Aug. 22 and Aug. the 30th."

Three of the four shootings linked to Merritt and his gun occurred on Saturday, Aug. 29. Merritt pawned the gun a third time at around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 30.

In the shooting list put out by DPS, the fourth shooting linked to Merritt took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., more than four hours after he pawned the gun at Mo Money Pawn.



Read more: http://www.kpho.com/story/30093662/...pawn-shop-during-i-10-shootings#ixzz3mg1QjdRl

 

[searchinGirl]

Gun belonging to freeway shooting suspect not in pawn shop during I-10 shootings
KPHO Phoenix‎ -

Records show the gun that Arizona Department of Public Safety ... been in an out of Mo Money Pawn Shop several times since July. ...

The gun in question is a High Point 9 mm semi-automatic. Investigators have forensically linked it to four of the freeway shootings.

Although Merritt said the pawn shop had the gun at the time of those shootings, both the owner of Mo Money Pawn, Eric Baker, and the general manager, Byron Vaughn, said their records show otherwise.

They said store records indicate Merritt's gun was not in their possession when those shootings occurred.

"He did several transactions with this same firearm," Vaughn said. "He did one in the beginning of July -- July 19. It [the gun] was here for several days. He picked that up on the 24th. He again pawned it on Aug. 1; picked it up again on the 22nd. So it was in his possession between Aug. 22 and Aug. the 30th."

Three of the four shootings linked to Merritt and his gun occurred on Saturday, Aug. 29. Merritt pawned the gun a third time at around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 30.

In the shooting list put out by DPS, the fourth shooting linked to Merritt took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., more than four hours after he pawned the gun at Mo Money Pawn.



Read more: http://www.kpho.com/story/30093662/...pawn-shop-during-i-10-shootings#ixzz3mg1QjdRl

doesn't the discrepancy between the fourth shooting and the pawn records put all of the information in doubt?... maybe it's just me...

 

[Forager]

doesn't the discrepancy between the fourth shooting and the pawn records put all of the information in doubt?... maybe it's just me...

That is confusing, but I think that the apparent discrepancy was in the writing of the article, and not in the facts of the case. The article says:

"In the shooting list put out by DPS, the fourth shooting linked to Merritt took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., more than four hours after he pawned the gun at Mo Money Pawn."

But I think that they should have said ""In the shooting list INITIALLY put out by DPS, the fourth shooting... took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. [BUT WAS SUBSEQUENTLY CORRECTED TO AUG. 27TH]"

That Aug. 30 date was really the date on which LE got the report, after the owner got back to the airport and picked up his car, and not the date on which the shooting happened. They now think that it was shot on Aug. 27, while the driver was heading to the airport. The gun wouldn't have been in hock at that point.

 

[Forager]

Here's an update of the graph of counts of highway shooting "incidents" - the numbers of vehicles in motion that were apparently shot at in the clusters of seemingly random road or highway shootings nationally. (A "cluster" is two or more seemingly related incidents. Incidents include unexplained window shatterings - a la I-25 shatterings - or window shatterings by BB or pellets). This update reflects the I-95 shootings that we learned about today and a couple of 2014 incidents in Akron that I'd missed earlier.



Here is the source spreadsheet.

 

[FindHG]

That is confusing, but I think that the apparent discrepancy was in the writing of the article, and not in the facts of the case. The article says:

"In the shooting list put out by DPS, the fourth shooting linked to Merritt took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., more than four hours after he pawned the gun at Mo Money Pawn."

But I think that they should have said ""In the shooting list INITIALLY put out by DPS, the fourth shooting... took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. [BUT WAS SUBSEQUENTLY CORRECTED TO AUG. 27TH]"

That Aug. 30 date was really the date on which LE got the report, after the owner got back to the airport and picked up his car, and not the date on which the shooting happened. They now think that it was shot on Aug. 27, while the driver was heading to the airport. The gun wouldn't have been in hock at that point.

Thank you, Forager, this is amazing work. How do the VA shootings differ from NOCO and AZ, in specifics, do they seem, as they do to me, just as layered, with various shooters with different weapons and degrees of seriousness?

 

[Matic]

Wow. A high point 9mm? Really?
High points are a running joke to anyone in the firearms community. You would have to be pretty close to your target to be able to hit anything with one, if you can get it to fire that is.
I'm also a bit curious about the 9mm penetrating windshields at longer distances.
Plenty of stories out there about the 9mm bouncing off of them.
If 8m not mistaken, that's one of the many reasons police depts switched to the .40 caliber. Lack of penetration.

Quoted from CSI don't think so.

.

What about windshields? This is an area of great variability. Because windshields are slanted and made of a tough combination of glass and plastic, it’s difficult to predict what will happen upon bullet impact. The result depends on the caliber of bullet, bullet shape and composition, what type of gun fired the bullet, and where the gun was fired in relation to the car. Numerous police accounts document handgun bullets ricocheting off windshields.

Head on, the slant of a windshield could very well cause a .38 caliber or 9mm slug to ricochet. Many law-enforcement officers use hollow-point bullets. However, hollow-points have less mass than a full metal jacket round and are more likely to ricochet, partly because some of the bullet’s energy is absorbed by the deformation of the hollow cavity during impact. Just as cars have crush zones to absorb impact during a crash, the hollow-point bullet has a built-in crush zone that may sometimes make it ineffective against a windshield.

here's a video on how unreliable these firearms are. In this video they are doing destructive testing. Finding out the breaking point of the hi point.
As you can see, the guy wearing the steel plated outfit that he is well prepared in case the firearm explodes.

https://youtu.be/2FoWpog5KU4

 

[Hatfield]

Gun belonging to freeway shooting suspect not in pawn shop during I-10 shootings
KPHO Phoenix‎ -

Records show the gun that Arizona Department of Public Safety ... been in an out of Mo Money Pawn Shop several times since July. ...

The gun in question is a High Point 9 mm semi-automatic. Investigators have forensically linked it to four of the freeway shootings.

Although Merritt said the pawn shop had the gun at the time of those shootings, both the owner of Mo Money Pawn, Eric Baker, and the general manager, Byron Vaughn, said their records show otherwise.

They said store records indicate Merritt's gun was not in their possession when those shootings occurred.

"He did several transactions with this same firearm," Vaughn said. "He did one in the beginning of July -- July 19. It [the gun] was here for several days. He picked that up on the 24th. He again pawned it on Aug. 1; picked it up again on the 22nd. So it was in his possession between Aug. 22 and Aug. the 30th."

Three of the four shootings linked to Merritt and his gun occurred on Saturday, Aug. 29. Merritt pawned the gun a third time at around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 30.

In the shooting list put out by DPS, the fourth shooting linked to Merritt took place on Aug. 30 between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., more than four hours after he pawned the gun at Mo Money Pawn.



Read more: http://www.kpho.com/story/30093662/...pawn-shop-during-i-10-shootings#ixzz3mg1QjdRl

The guy seems avid that he wasn't the shooter but LE thinks he is. Perhaps he was thinking the pawn shop would just have the initial start date and maybe he thought by taking it in and out of pawn he was hiding the fact he had it some of the time. Its pretty confusing why he kept pawing it back and forth.

If I read the last one correctly then it seems the gun was in the pawn shop during that last shooting time.

I suppose he could have had other guns too.

Its surprising there are not more witnesses to suspecting a vehicle description. I suppose a lot of drivers are not looking at other cars when they drive. I guess we as drivers get immune to the cars around us and we don't pay a lot of attention to other vehicles other than we know they are there but we don't really care what kind of vehicle is there.

 

[Hatfield]

Check out this rc plane with An air soft gun. [video=youtu;K0_KRKm_r-k]http://youtu.be/K0_KRKm_r-k[/video]

Wow.

Even though that was basically a toy air soft , we can see the potential for a criminal to setup some rig like this with a drone.

That's just the sort of thing that is going to get dangerous with drones. Notice he was able to control the shooting mechanism while the plane was stationary. Same thing with a Drone that someone could land the drone in a stationary spot that is out of sight and nobody would be the wiser.

This is scary stuff if some criminal ever used a more serious weaponized drone.

The good deterrent LE has is arrest and jail time if some criminal ever did that.

I noticed one of the more advanced Drones that used GPS has a HOME feature that allowed the operator to push 1 button and the drone would automatically fly back to its HOME destination. The operator marks the HOME location when he first takes off with the drone.

They are getting real amazing with the expensive ones.