Chapter 7

External Violence

Abstract

External threats to any organization generally fall into two categories: (1) those who have made their threat known, and (2) those who have not. In both cases these people will give off warning signals prior to acts of violence. If an organization recognizes what risk they have by the virtue of the nature of their business or significance to certain groups, they can take steps to mitigate the risks from all external sources. Many organizations see this and take proper security measures anticipating such a threat. Additionally they should develop threat assessment and management programs to help determine if external threats are moving toward violence. Several recent cases of such external threat violence have highlighted the need for a combination of sound security practices and assessment skills.

Keywords

escalated behavior
external threat
grievance
Holocaust Museum
manifesto
mass violence
rampage shooters
revenge
social withdrawal
suicidal ideation
targeted organization
violence
warning flag

“Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.”

—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

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In the realm of violence from external sources we generally see two types of threats. Those coming from individuals who have made their grievance and/or their threats of revenge known to their targeted organization and those who seemingly fly under the radar. Both types certainly do exhibit warning signs but, in the latter type, those signs will usually not be exhibited to their target(s). Let’s start with those who make their grievance and threats know to the organization.
The warning behaviors for individuals making external threats are similar to those listed in Chapter 6, “Associate Violence.” Although the behaviors are listed here, please refer to Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of their descriptions:
• Revenge
• Withdrawal from social connections
• Negative changes in appearance and hygiene
• Belief that the targeted organization is responsible for all of his or her problems
• Addiction
• Easily angered
• Violent and/or suicidal ideation
• Contextually inappropriate interest in firearms and/or explosives and recent acquisition of multiple weapons
• Contextually inappropriate fascination of prior acts of mass violence
• Extreme recklessness with own personal life with no regard to the potential consequences
• Preparation of a manifesto
Let’s now review an example of how these warning signs can manifest themselves.
The concerning behaviors will be printed in bold as they occur in the following case study.
James J. Lee was a man with a cause. Lee had long been an environmentalist, but after watching Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, he felt that the world as he knew it was teetering on the brink of extinction. So Lee contacted the corporate headquarters of the Discovery Channel located in a suburb near Washington, D.C. Lee tried to convince the broadcaster to produce more programming dedicated to showing how humans were destroying the planet and the necessity of strict environmental and population controls. He even pitched them a Save the Planet reality game show. His pitches fell on deaf ears. This was his grievance.
Lee continued to send the Discovery Channel letters, wrote emails, and even put up a website dedicated to his cause where he stated: “If their ‘environmental’ shows are actually working, then why is the news about the environment getting worse? It should be getting better if they were doing their job and we should be seeing that reflected on the nightly news. But NO! The Discovery Channel is actually not about saving the planet; they are just another ‘green’ corporation whose real interests lie in MONEY! Products! Junk! Trash!” Thus, his manifesto became public.
When these pursuits failed, Lee escalated his behavior by traveling to the Discovery Channel headquarters, where he began daily protest outside of their offices. Many people at the Discovery Channel failed to see any potential danger in Lee’s escalated actions. Nathaniel Harrington, a former Discovery employee, told MSNBC’s Peter Alexander, “He was seen as something of a joke.” Harrington went on, “I hate to say it, but at the time we kind of half-joked about it because he could come back shooting. Nobody took it very seriously.”[1] Even though the organization saw no danger in Lee, he was eventually arrested as his behavior escalated and turned reckless, showing no regard for the potential consequences, when he began throwing thousands of dollars in the air, which attracted a crowd that quickly became unruly as they scrambled for the cash. He was sentenced to six months of supervised probation for this disturbance and ordered to stay away from the Discovery Channel’s offices.
All of this culminated in Lee’s final act of revenge on September 1, 2010, when he entered the building with what turned out to be starter pistols and several explosive devices. When Lee entered the building, he fired one of the starter pistols into the air. As would be expected, confusion reigned because the company was not prepared for an act of violence on their premises. “Someone over the P.A. said there’s a situation in the lobby, go back to your desks,” Melissa Shepard, a Discovery employee, told MSNBC TV. “So we all went to offices and crammed into offices and shut the lights off and listened to the news. Then someone knocked on the door and said we need to evacuate.” Shepard described initial confusion over the evacuation plan. “The scariest was when they were telling us to go upstairs, then downstairs, then upstairs. I don’t know if it was safe,” she said. “The thing is we were hearing there were two people, then explosives, then hostages, then that people were shot. We kept hearing different stories. It was one thing after another.”[1]
Several hours into the standoff Lee was shot and killed by the police.
The Discovery Channel was lucky that no employees were physically injured. Undoubtedly there were psychological injuries, some of which are probably still being treated.
We are sure that the Discovery Channel, like most broadcasters, receives a multitude of letters amounting to unsolicited pitches for programming. It is probably not feasible to respond to them. However, Lee’s appearance at the company’s headquarters and daily picketing should have been a huge red warning flag. An appropriate course of action would have been to increase security while bringing in threat assessment and management professionals to begin an investigation into Lee’s background (which would have discovered his online manifesto), gather his prior correspondence for analysis, note his continued and escalating behaviors, develop an intervention plan, and make sure Discovery had taken all possible precautions to include the training of their employees on what to do if an act of violence occurred in the building or on the premises.
The Discovery Channel incident is an example of a situation where warning signs were present but ignored, allowing the disturbing behaviors of one individual to escalate into physical violence putting the lives of people within the organization at risk. There are also times when warning signs are there, but not visible to people within the organization. Let’s look at one such example and see how the events unfolded.
Paul Ciancia was raised in New Jersey. He was considered a loner, and there are some who report that he was bullied while in school. Ciancia trained to be a motorcycle mechanic and was being groomed by his father to one-day take over the family body shop. However, Ciancia decided to move to Los Angeles. At some time during his tenure in Los Angeles, he became dissatisfied with the federal government as he felt the government was becoming too complicit to the “New World Order,” a notion held by some conspiracy theorists that a one-world government is emerging.
In late October 2013, he began telling his roommates that he might need a ride to the airport as his father was ailing. On November 1, he sent a text message to his brother and sister stating that he intended to harm himself. They contacted their local police department who, in turn, notified the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The LAPD dispatched officers to conduct a wellness check only to find that one of Ciancia’s roommates had just taken him to the airport, as Ciancia had stated that he wanted to fly back to New Jersey to visit his father.
At 9:30 a.m., Ciancia entered terminal 3 at Los Angeles International Airport with a bag containing a rifle and several hundred rounds of ammunition. He approached the first Transportation Security Administration (TSA) passenger identification post at the bottom of an escalator whereupon he took the rifle out of the bag and shot TSA Officer Gerardo Hernandez in the chest. Hernandez later succumbed to his wounds before he could be taken to the hospital. Ciancia then proceeded up the escalator, where passengers and airport personnel were fleeing and finding places to hide. He casually walked down the unsecured concourse, occasionally stopping to ask people if they were with the TSA. During this time, Ciancia shot and wounded two more TSA officers and one other person before airport police officers shot him four times.[2], [3]
These murders were almost prevented. If only a few minutes could have been shaved off of the time it took to communicate his suicidal text messages to law enforcement and if a few more minutes could have been shaved off the police response time, they might have been able to stop him before he left for the airport; they might have had time to look in his bag and taken him in for mental counseling. One of the denials we sometimes face in an organization is the mistaken notion that these events cannot be prevented. Nothing could be further from the truth. Part of this thinking is because violence that is prevented usually does not make the news media. In the rare instance when it is reported, it is given one mention, then disappears, as violence that did not occur is just not as newsworthy as a mass homicide. Violence, however, is prevented all the time as depicted in the following scenarios:
• Sisters and brother notice that a sibling has become withdrawn and depressed while also abusing drugs and alcohol. They intervene, thus saving the life of someone spiraling toward suicide.
• A partner or spouse sees that her significant other’s anger is boiling over and erupting in outbursts of rage. She seeks refuge in a women’s shelter, and the potential violence and possible death to her and/or her children is averted.
• Employees report escalating disruptive behavior of a coworker to an employer who intervenes and gets the disruptive employee into counseling, thereby preventing possible workplace violence.
• Neighbors report suspicious behavior on the part of some men in the neighborhood. A police investigation is conducted, and a cell of terrorists preparing for a mass murder is thwarted.

How Much Security Is Appropriate?

One of the reasons that the body count attained by Paul Ciancia was mitigated is because of the Los Angeles Airport has its own on-site police force that is trained for these kinds of situations. For more than five decades, airports have known that they are targets for hijackers, terrorists, and others with criminal intent. Most large airports all over the world are protected by highly trained and armed police officers or military detachments. This protection is expensive and out of the reach of many businesses. Fortunately, this level of security is not needed at most places.
Most organizations will only experience a short-term security threat, such as occurred at the Discovery Channel headquarters. If the warning signs are recognized, then intervention plans can be built to prevent violence, and security can be enhanced to mitigate the violence or thwart it from occurring. To do this effectively, there are four steps that must be executed:
1. The associates must be trained in what behaviors should be reported.
2. They must be provided and trained to use the organization’s reporting process.
3. The organization must be trained to assess threating behavior and build intervention and security plans.
4. The organization must have prearranged security options that can be put in place within an hour or two of notice. Waiting until someone has threatened to come shoot a company executive is the wrong time to begin negotiating with a security company.
Early recognition and intervention are your best friends. Denial, rationalization, and apathy are your enemies. An expanded view of a comprehensive workplace violence program begins in the next chapter.
Conversely, there are organizations that are frequently targeted by the lone, mass murderer, such as Paul Ciancia, or by organized cells of terrorists. The goal of the domestic rampage shooter or a foreign terrorist organization is to produce a large body count and strike fear into the population. Frequently, the rampage shootings and terrorist attacks are conducted in the hope of sparking social or political change.
The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to knock out our ability to be a military power in the Pacific and therein cause us to end economic sanctions against Japan. From that standpoint, it failed.
Revolution was the desired result of the assassination of two Las Vegas police officers in June 2014. Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda shot and killed the two police officers who were having lunch at a pizza parlor, placing a note on one of them that stated, “The revolution has begun.” The revolution ended a short while later when they exchanged gunfire with police inside the rear of Walmart. Amanda, apparently realizing that they were cornered, shot her husband twice before taking her own life.
Charles Manson directed the heinous Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969, believing it would spark a race war. This was also the intention of Dylann Roof when he went on his murder rampage at the church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Neither Manson nor Roof’s murders initiated a race war.
One of the intentions of the September 11, 2001 attacks was to convince the U.S. population and leaders to stay out of the Middle East. Obviously that goal was not achieved. It is a shame that these perpetrators do not pay attention to past history, because history tells us that whenever the country or segments of the population are attacked, it does not cause division or withdrawal, but brings unity and strengthens resolve.
Following is a list of some of the targets terrorists choose along with the goals they expect to achieve. In most instances the perpetrator(s) select targets that will help them attain several of their goals. Organizations falling into these categories require a heightened awareness and enhanced security measures.
• Symbolic targets. It was no coincidence that the September 11 attackers chose to hijack American and United Airlines planes, crashing them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They wanted the people of the United States to know that this was an attack on us, our government, and military, and the center of our capitalist society.
• Body count. Body count is important beyond the perpetrator’s lust for murder. Perpetrators also lust for infamy and the higher the body count, the more media attention will be garnered on them, and their place in history will be secure. This is why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold chose Columbine High School, where they killed 15 and injured 24 people on April 20, 1999. This is one of the reasons why the September 11 attackers chose the World Trade Center, where they killed 2,996 people and injured another 6,000 on September 11, 2001. This one of the reasons Seung-Hui Cho chose Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he killed 33 people and injured 28 on April 16, 2007. This is why James Holmes chose the packed midnight preview showing of the latest Batman movie, when he killed 12 and injured 70 moviegoers at the Aurora, Colorado, Century movie theatre on July 20, 2012. This is the reason that Adam Lanza chose the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he killed 28 students and teachers and injured 2 more on December 14, 2012. It is also the reason that Dylann Roof selected the Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015 where he killed nine church members and injured one.
• Children. Nothing strikes fear deep in the collective hearts of a nation faster than the slaughter of the nation’s youth. Currently, we have only endured attacks on children by the singular shooter or two shooters, as was the case at Columbine High School. However, school and school bus attacks by terrorist groups occur all too frequently in the Middle East and Africa. One of the most horrific cases ever occurred in Beslan, Russia, on September 1, 2004. Chechen separatist militants selected the first day of school to storm the Beslan School, taking 1,100 hostages of which 777 were children. They held the hostages for three days, perpetrating unspeakable horrors on their captives. On the third day of the standoff, Russian forces stormed the building with the eventual death toll standing at 385 lives. For an in-depth understanding of what happened in Beslan, we recommend interested readers obtain a copy of John Giduck’s Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for American Schools. If terrorists were able to coordinate mass murders at several schools across the country on the same day, think of the effect it would have. Schools would be closed indefinitely. Children across the nation would be traumatized. Parents would stay home from work to be with their children, causing an immediate effect on the American economy. This is why schools make tempting targets for terrorists.
• Centers of government and military installations. The September 11 attackers crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon and United flight 93, which was downed by the hijackers after the passengers tried to take the plane back, was probably headed for a government building. Other examples would include the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 and injured 600, and the shooting at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas on November 11, 2009, by Army Major Nidal Hasan, which killed 13 and injured 33 people.
• Centers of business and finance. The obvious example is the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. However, there was also the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, that left 60 people dead, and in February 2015, extremist group Al Shabaab called for attacks on Minnesota’s Mall of America as well as West Edmonton Mall in Canada and the Oxford Street Shopping Area in London.[4] If terrorists attacked the Mall of America, causing a mass murder of shoppers and storekeepers, it would fulfill several of their goals:
• With the name “Mall of America,” it is certainly a symbolic target.
• With the size of the Mall of America, it is also a tourist destination and would provide the opportunity for a large body count, especially if attacked on a weekend or at a time near a holiday.
• Because of the amusement park in the center of the mall, there are frequently children on site and in numbers, meaning an attack there would strike fear in the hearts of parents across the country.
• Finally, malls across the country would close until additional security precautions could be taken. The temporary closure of the malls and the large number of employees left without an income would strike a blow to the economy. Once the malls reopened, it would take an indefinite period of time before customers would return to pre-attack levels, and parents would reevaluate their decisions to allow the mall to be their children’s social destination.
• Locations of religious or ideological significance. This was the case on June 6, 2009, when James Wenneker von Brunn went to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Von Brunn had a troubled past. In 1981, he was arrested at the Federal Reserve Building when he entered with several weapons intent on executing a citizen’s arrest of the Reserve’s board of governors.[5] Von Brunn was known to be a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. On the above-mentioned date, von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum and produced a 0.22 caliber rifle, whereupon he shot and killed security officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Von Brunn was immediately shot by two other officers before he could harm anyone else. Von Brunn died awaiting trial.[6]
The death of security officer Stephen Tyrone Johns is indeed a tragic loss. However, von Brunn’s plan of committing mass murder at this religious and ideological site was not fully realized because the Holocaust Museum knew that it could be targeted by a deranged extremist and therefore had an array of security hardware and armed security officers posted at the entry way as well as other pertinent locations throughout the premises. They took the necessary precautions, as should any organization facing a risk because of the nature of their business.
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