The incident at Sutherland Springs: who is responsible?

The jury has come back in at FBEL, and the decision is that the shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas, November 5th, 2017, isn’t right. The author has now seen two versions† of how Ryland Ward was discovered at, or extracted from the scene of the crime. Call it old fashioned if you want, but the author thinks that an actual fact only has one version. Then there is the story, offered by survivors (via CNN), about how the gunman stalked up and down the aisle of the church hunting for hidden prey between the pews. Never had so much depended on not making a noise to attract unwanted attention since Anne Frank had the Nazis prowling about on the other side of the walls. But, ladies and gentlemen, consider the tiny size of the church. Now, look at the image on the right (click on it to enlarge). The fluorescent green dots are physical markers, and are supposed to indicate where bullets were fired into the church’s front door by the shooter. For whose benefit does the reader really think that these day-glo spots have been attached in this way? We are quite ready to stand corrected if anyone wants to tell us that this method is something to do with modern crime scene investigation, but it looks more like a show for stupid people. When a bullet hits wood, it doesn’t always just leave a nice round dent as if a worm munched it out – it tends to splinter the surrounding material. Is there anything actually in this picture that shows that the door was hit by gunfire?

As is usually the case, this evidence is far from clinching. The author was more interested in the way that he found himself having a big problem with the backstory of the shooter, Devin Kelley. Something kept nagging: how was it that he could have been serving in the US Air Force, and at the same time, be confined in a facility for the mentally ill? If the reader doesn’t know, this is referring to the period in 2012 that Kelley spent as a patient at Peak Behavioral Health Services (PBHS) at Santa Teresa, New Mexico. We should note that during this sojourn at the “asylum”, Kelley decided that he’d had enough, and he wandered into the nearest town for to get a bus out of there. This has been portrayed in the corporate-media as the dangerous fugitive at large, Clint Eastwood breaking out of Alcatraz wouldn’t have been such a villain. Kelley was soon brought back to custody by police – who were offered no resistance. So, let the fact register that Kelley couldn’t have been imprisoned at this facility for the emotionally unwell and psychologically disturbed. Or put it another way, he couldn’t have been guarded.

Now we have to reconcile that the following point of fact: while at the mental health facility, Kelley was supposedly awaiting trial for an apparently long-running case of “domestic violence” against his wife and stepson. This idea was the cause of much head-scratching at this end of the internet because if you proceed to the website of PBHS, you will discover what it is that this company does for troubled servicemen. In particular, and by gauging the one thing about Kelley’s condition that PBHS, citing concerns for patient confidentiality, has allowed into the public domain (that he was considered a danger to himself and others), we can find what the alleged Sutherland shooter might have been at the facility for: “crisis stabilization”. Here is what the site says about this service:

This track is designed for those service members who are in need of short-term crisis stabilization who are in immediate danger of harming themselves or someone else. Our goal is to return them to duty quickly with the coping skills necessary to lead and promote a healthy life that reinforces positive relationships and independence.

This course of treatment seems to be all about preventing a descent into self-destruction, but if at this time Kelley was battering his wife and baby stepson, wasn’t he already way past this consideration? Which brings us to this: if Kelley was awaiting trial for various instances of assault and battery, why was he not in the lock-up on the Air Force base?

It makes the author wonder if Kelley’s history is actually true, and if it hasn’t been invented, or tweaked, to suit newly emerged requirements. After all, it is a fact acknowledged by all that the FBI did not receive any information that made Kelley a villain on their books – which would have rendered him unable to purchase firearms. We don’t know, as a matter of fact, why the USAF thought fit to put Kelley in a mental hospital. Could it have had anything to do with the ill-feeling he bore towards his commanding officers? In some quarters of the internet, it is actually implied that he was in the care of mental health practitioners precisely because he tried to sneak weapons on to his base with which to attack superiors. Is it fake news, or is it just untouched by corporate-media. If it is even remotely true, what was it all about?

We keep hearing about Kelley’s bad conduct discharge; his rather tattered military service record – but has anyone actually seen it? From what the author can gather, there is one source of Kelley’s historic circumstances, and that is retired Air Force Colonel Don Christensen. He was the chief prosecutor of the USAF, but his career ended in September 2012. Kelley was convicted in the following November. Of course, there must have been overlap because the process against Kelley would surely have been lengthy, but one has to ask – how much interest does the Chief Prosecutor of the whole USAF, who was also very much involved in a high profile sexual assault case that same year leading up to his retirement, have in the cases of grunts who can’t leave the aggressiveness at work? Consider also where this Christensen fellow is delivering his information. All the mentions in corporate-media that the author has found regarding specifics of Kelley’s domestic violence during his service career refer to Christensen talking to the New York Times (this appears to be the source).  Additionally, there was an appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show.

The author is quite happy to stand corrected in all this – God forbid he doesn’t want to be misunderstood as making excuses for the worst kind of cretinous fellow – but he is also not going to blindly believe what the corporate-media and high ranking ex-US military personnel tell the world either. All of a sudden, are the New York Times and CNN bastions of truth? All of a sudden, are the people who finally won a war – in a manner of speaking – when they killed woman and children at Waco (yes, the US military was involved) even somehow remotely honourable?  If someone can deny that these parties aren’t scientifically peddling the exact kind of information needed to be disseminated in order to achieve a psychological outcome in their audiences, then the author will concede that everything that emanates from them must be the gospel truth. But actually, isn’t it just possible that, after all, what we have got ourselves here is a case of a man who was wound up by his military service precisely in order to enter civilian-street and appear capable of committing mass murder, or to be party (knowing or, more likely, unknowing) to the mere presentation of such an event for political ends. But we won’t ever focus on that menace if we’re always looking at the disinformation that comes from the very people who create the missions for and the required psychological disturbances in their operatives. Although the patsies will come and go, and the faces of the culprits will be forever changing, the menace will never cease.

† Here they are:

Ward ran out of the house barefoot, got in his car and sped to the church, Leslie and Michael behind him. They saw Ryland, 5, outside as first responders began the hell of assessing the human toll.

(Source).

At least 26 were killed in this small town of just more than 600 people, and dozens more were wounded. One was Ryland. Michael carried his nephew out of the church that morning, just minutes after the shooting stopped.

(Source).