We learned early this morning that an 11 year old boy was killed during a shooting around 6 1/2 Street early this morning.
If you recall, there have been what seems like a lot of shootings recently. There will be a Noon press release with more details.
Update #1: 10:50AM Press Release from the City
This morning around 12:15 Charlottesville Police responded to reports of shots fired in the 300 block of 6 and a Half Street SW. Officers located Rueben Lewis III, 23(yoa), who had suffered a gunshot wound. Lewis directed police to an adjacent house where they found an 11 year old in the kitchen with a fatal gunshot wound. Aziz Damar Booth was declared deceased at the scene. Booth is a former 6th grade student at Walker Upper Elementary School. School officials have implemented their crisis control plan to afford more counseling resources for students and staff.
The 23 year old victim was transported to UVa Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries. Police believe that robbery was a motive in this incident but continue to investigate the circumstances.
Later that morning at Police Headquarters, Waverly “Eddie” Whitlock, 27 year old from the 300 block of 6 and a Half Street, reported to the police department in connection with this case. He is being held without bond at the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail. A preliminary hearing has is scheduled for June 25th in Charlottesville General District Court. Whitlock has been charged with capital murder (F), robbery (F), malicious wounding (F) and other related charges.
Picture of Waverly Eddie Whitlock after the break….
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Tagged as: child, death, shooting
I’m not at a google machine, where is 6 1/2 st?
off of Dice Street- now go call and get a back appointment.
I heard about this about 6 am this morning–I just didn’t have the ability to actually type it out. This is just awful.
Things like this make me lose my faith in humanity. I updated with the most recent news from the City.
Why? Why do people shoot people? Why do people shoot themselves? I hate guns.
people don’t kill people. idiots kill people.
Ah man. Reuben is a former student of mine. I haven’t seen him in a long time but hoped he was doing well. He was a good kid with some challenges ahead of him; hopefully he was an innocent bystander in this tragedy.
How horrible. The guy in custody lives on the same block as the victims, so I imagine he knew them. Terrible.
@5 Drugs and/or money usually.
@9: That’s a smug assumption.
@10 I’d rather be smug than naive.
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/crime/index.html
Oh snap! Ethan brought a Fact Sheet.
I don’t know whether I am smug about my naivete, or naive about my smugness… I need a fact sheet.
@5 and @9 shootings happen when there are guns. Hows that for facts bitches! Not to make light of it, but the police wear armor designed to stop their own ammo. Guns are dangerous and odds are, you’ll be shot with your own weapon. Not kidding, and not trying to hurt anyones feelings.
@11: Oh, you’ve got Google! Congrats. It’s still a smug assumption/generalization about why people use guns to hurt themselves/others. I think it’s actually more about our gun culture.
@15 What is “our” gun culture? Because there are several different gun cultures. One is predominately urban and the other is predominately rural. Guess which one commits most of the violent gun crime in the country?
@14 I’d seriously like to know what the odds are of being shot by your own weapon. How many self-inflicted wounds are there per year on the United States versus the total rounds of ammunition expended?
@16: There’s also the gun culture where guns are legal versus the anti-gun culture where guns are illegal.
@16: I’m referring to the way we were raised to think about guns. I.e. using them to take things, or resolve fights, or take our own life.
@16 If you want to know about stats regarding gun shot wounds then go look it up, Im not gonna do busy work for free.
I think it’s actually more about our gun culture.
I think its more about our culture of insecurity, powerlessness and disenfranchisement than whatever tool is used to express those feelings, but what do I know, I have already been outed as a whackjob.
Yeah, but if the only tools we have lying around are swear words, it’s a lot safer for all.
Am totally pissing my 11-year-old off tonight with too much yucky hugging…
@16 I did your busy work Ethan, and it came up as the #4 link under “percentage of handgun owners, suicide”. I know. Crazy search, right? You obviously weren’t looking very hard:
http://www.afsp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewpage&page_id=050fea9f-b064-4092-b1135c3a70de1fda
Firearms and Suicide
* Although most gun owners reportedly keep a firearm in their home for “protection” or “self defense,” 83 percent of gun-related deaths in these homes are the result of a suicide, often by someone other than the gun owner.
* Firearms are used in more suicides than homicides.
* Death by firearms is the fastest growing method of suicide.
* Firearms account for 52 percent of all suicides.
@18: I’d guess that most of “us” were not raised to think that way about guns. I’d guess that most of us were raised to think of guns as either a) unecessary or b) a way to procure food and/or protect ourselves or our property. Neither of which, IMnsHO, is a bad way of looking at it.
If you were raised to think about guns in the ways you described, i.e. “using them to take things, or resolve fights, or take our own life,” then those raising you failed you in that regard.
And as @16 suggested, it’s erroneous to see American gun culture as homogeneous. There’s the rural, NRA type of gun nuts, and the urban gangland-type. The NRA may be full of crazies, but it’s not them, or their guns, that I fear.
That guns are used to shoot people is incidental. Property crime happens largely as a result either poverty or drug addiction. Rampant hypermaterialism is shoved down the throats of the urban poor, many of them youth looking for meaning. When material wealth is the meaning of life, and so many are stuck without the means or education to achieve it, explosive results happen. The ever widening gap of rich/poor only exacerbate the problem. The problem is there regardless of guns being the picture or not. Having a gun only makes the taking easier.
Blaming the problem on guns is naive and overly simplistic.
/ oh and this
//back to the basement
@23.. translation, guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
Although not as immediate, many of you have access to things that kill you and you knowingly administer them.. how about fast food for one. Obesity is the #1 killer in the US and it kills A LOT more people than guns, so why aren’t things that contribute to quicker obesity banned?
/perspective.
23: That guns are used to shoot people is incidental.
hahahahahahahahaha.
I mean, yeah, crime and poverty are linked regardless of the weapon, but to say guns are merely “incidental” in a thread about a shooting is a bit ridiculous. almost as ridiculous as Thor in 24 saying gun violence and french fries are equal.
When I got jacked by the hamburgler, he put a french fry gun to my dome, yo!
I understand what you are getting at, Thor, I even agree with you, but that argument is specious.
Rampant hypermaterialism is shoved down the throats of the urban poor, many of them youth looking for meaning. When material wealth is the meaning of life, and so many are stuck without the means or education to achieve it, explosive results happen. The ever widening gap of rich/poor only exacerbate the problem. The problem is there regardless of guns being the picture or not. Having a gun only makes the taking easier.
Repeated for emphasis. That’s it right there. A hungry man is an angry man, and we aint just talking about belly hungry, dig?
@25: hahahahahahaha
Crime and poverty are linked, but they are also linked with countless other facets of society. That is to say, a crime rate (especially murder rate) is not proportionally linked to poverty. If that were true, West Virginia would have one of the highest murder rates in the nation. West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the country, yet the murder rate for the last 10 years has hovered around 4 per 100,000. The murder rate in Baltimore, a notoriously poor city, is more than 10 times that in West Virginia. For the record, 60% of West Virginians have at least one gun in the household, but God knows that the firearm per household ratio really is.
And @24
I’ll tell you why. Because Congress has a lot of fatasses.
Security at the expense of liberty…bad idea.
@28 liberty at the expense of security = good idea?
Crazy people are crazy people - regardless of where they live. Killing yourself slowly with cigarettes and fastfood is one thing - getting a little too drunk and depressed one night and finding your roommates loaded .357 with hollowpoints in a drawer is quite another. I wouldnt be at all surprised to discover that the same people are profiting off fast food, cigarettes, firearms, and the war on drugs.
How about the car culture. 42,642 motor vehicle related fatalities in 2006. I blame the crazies who like to drive automobiles. Let’s go back to the horse and have a nanny government tuck us in at night so we don’t have to think. Ban the auto I say. Nutty people who drive cars (are they all rednecks and should we write letters to their moms? And talk about things we don’t know a f#ing thing about because we are full of our pseudo intellectual babble selves) /not living in a bubble. Well maybe a tiny bubble.
Could someone please tell my nanny government that I like to have a binky when I get tucked in?
kthxbai
32: Shhh! No politics!
/woo! Obamania tonight, folks.
@33 Democratic nomination clinched. Obama-Hilarity ensues
/is that politics? Oh right. I mean left
34: On reflection, this isn’t at all an appropriate thread for this chatter. I feel terrible for the young life that has been taken, and I don’t want to cheapen any discussion of that. It’s a real tragedy, and one to be talked about—not politicized.
Meet me (and anyone) over in the most recent free for all thread if you want to talk election results, etc.
Yeah, I know you can’t blame the guns, anti-gun-control fans, but it’s still a fact that there are people in our community being irresponsible with guns and it’s because they have guns and guns make it easier to kill things. Having guns being shot in our community doesn’t make me fear the people shooting them, it makes me fear the bullets.
Dear Jareth, that’s lovely that you use your guns for useful things but a lot of people use them for the wrong things. And even being raised to respect them doesn’t always mean that person is only ever going to use that gun for hunting, self defense, etc. My uncle carried a pistol everyday for years on him for protection of his land and family and was a fullblooded NRA supporter. Then one day he used it to blow his brains out. Simple as this: guns make the world a little safer, but they also make it a little scarier too.
@24
What’s up with comparing obesity to guns? Fatassedness never purposefully kills others. “Purposefully” is there because nothing is out of the realm of possibility in this world.
@37: Thor was having a retard moment. He is usually better than that.