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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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What's peculiar to me is that he ended up in Altoona PA, of all places.

For those of you who aren't familiar with central PA, there's a big-ass mountain range that runs diagonally across the state. Large portions of it are taken up by state and national forests, and even the parts that aren't tend to be sparsely populated without much in the way of paved roads.

There isn't really a good way to get from NYC to Altoona. You either have to drive 45-60 minutes north from the turnpike, drive 45-60 minutes south from interstate 80, or you have to wind your way through miles and miles of land so rustic and bleak that it has been used more than once as a shooting location for post apocalyptic horror movies.

I've stopped at that McDonald's on my way North before. It's not bad so far as fast food goes, but not worth going to jail over it. Why stop and eat inside, rather than hitting the drive through or even carry out? Why hold on to the fake ID? Why hold on to the murder weapon? Why hold on to the silencer? Why carry a manifesto on your person? It almost seems like getting caught was a personal choice.

But if getting caught was a choice, why Altoona? Why not Bellefonte or Bedford? Why keep driving to Altoona? It's very odd.

If he’s caught he’s caught. Doesn’t matter if he has the ID and gun on him or not. Probability that an officer will go through his bags yet not arrest him is super low. Likely he kept the gun in case he decides to off himself rather than life in prison.

I agree with @Rov_Scam below. You find this guy and he's only his own ID, no manifesto, no gun, no silencer, he can just brazen it out. Even if he'd kept the gun (and different ammo) he might have gotten away with the murder (the ballistics wouldn't match without the silencer, I don't think), but the silencer and IDs point right to it and the manifesto seals the deal.

"Ballistics" means how fast the bullet is moving, in what direction. Most silencers have negligible effects on ballistics; they change point-of-impact and can increase velocity slightly due to freebore boost, but nothing that would be forensically relevant. What would really get him would be the rifling pattern on the fired bullets, which would match the barrel of his gun and which the suppressor has no effect on.

Otherwise, much agreed. ditching the gun seems like such an obviously good idea that I can't understand his not doing it.

I've read that rifling pattern analysis is voodoo akin to polygraph tests. Here's a substack about that: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/devil-in-the-grooves-the-case-against

motherFUCKER. I've written a number of times about how forensic science isn't actually science, about how bite-mark analysis, burn pattern analysis, criminal profiling and lie detectors are all examples of pseudoscience, but I thought stuff like rifling pattern analysis would have been "one of the good ones".

However much I hate our knowledge production apparatus, it never seems to be enough.

[EDIT] - ...In fairness, though, the police can say "we caught him with a gun that matches the make and caliber used by the assassin". They just can't say "we caught him with the specific weapon used in the assassination." He's still much better not being in possession of the gun at all.

As someone who has experience in a lab, it drives me up the wall when I hear a prosecution lawyer say the chances of a DNA-related false positive being one in billion; the chance of a lab error or human bad actor being in the chain of custody are both far higher than that. This actually happened a few years ago, a lab manager went to prison for making up test results.

I always thought matching the gun was about the mark of the firing pin, not the rifling. But it’s not mentioned in the article or the case. Does that still hold up? @NickRiviera, any idea?

I'm sure that if firing pins had a unique identifying pattern on the strike surface, you could probably make something like this work. However I don't think firing pins are really different enough from each other to stake a death-penalty case prosecution on it, I think the best you'd be able to do is rule out suspects as opposed to making a definitive match. However I don't know anything, all I know is that nobody in life seems to be as competent as they want us to believe they are. Seal Team 6 couldn't even attack Osama Bin Laden without crashing their top-secret stealth helicopter, then they couldn't stop Russian/Chinese spies from documenting the crash site before they got it covered with a tarp. If that's the performance you get out of the cream-of-the-crop, then I don't know what to believe anymore. (Not even aliens seem all that competent, crashing their saucers everywhere like a bunch of rookies)

A case fired from a semi-auto is going to have a firing pin strike, extractor/ejector strikes, and possibly extraction markings on the case wall. The article gives a series of images of firing pin strikes, with the implication being that these are unreliable as well. My guess is that if rifling isn't a reliable "fingerprint", then firing pin and extractor/ejector markings aren't going to be either. If the components are in good condition, they're within a very small tolerance range across all copies of the model, and random variations of impact angle, strength, fouling, etc etc are going to swamp any signal derived from one copy to another.

This should be a stupidly easy thing to test as well. Fire off ten rounds each from ten different handguns. Provide a toolmark analyst all hundred cases, numbered randomly, and have him sort out which ones came from the same gun. My assumption has always been that someone actually did this in the past; if they have, I'd be interested in seeing the data.

Would these handguns be different, but identical examples of the same model (e.g. 10 Glock 19s), or completely different models altogether, united only by chambering? Or both?

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I would guess he had some perfect plan for how to destroy the gun without a trace that required him to be in a certain place.

That seems like a plausible motivation, but goddamn is it stupid. Disassemble the pistol, douse the pieces in gasoline and burn them. Take a bus somewhere near the coast, walk to the beach and chuck it into the ocean. Either of those would be more than sufficient.

I've been tossing around the idea that you can probably use a consumer drone to drop a murder weapon in a lake without much hassle at all.

use a consumer drone

He was in rural Pennsylvania. One hard overhand toss would put it in in a forest thick enough that they can't even find prosecutors.

Easier to use a boat, and less likely to attract attention.

Disagreed, in that you have to procure the boat and physically steer it out there yourself, which leaves a trail of evidence on its own.

They could in theory narrow the search down to that particular lake, at least.

Whole point of a Drone is minimal forensic trail.

Tagging @SteveKirk and @birb_cromble. Whether he has the ID and gun (and manifesto) on him absolutely matters. Remember Brian Laundrie? Every time a high profile suspect is at-large there are going to be sightings, and most of these are going to be superfluous. They aren't going to be able to hold a guy for murder based on the ID of a McDonald's employee in another state who had never seen the guy before. I don't even know how they got PC for the search, though I wouldn't rule out that he consented, and he already misidentified himself to the police, so he's not exactly making all the right moves here. But even still, had they searched him and came up empty they wouldn't have been able to arrest him; he's being held on gun charges (and also misidentification and forgery, though those alone wouldn't be enough to hold him). He hasn't been charged with murder yet, but when he is, the ballistics evidence, fake IDs, and manifesto will all be key pieces of evidence against him. Without that, right now we're looking at "this guy looks kind of like the person wearing a mask in the videos" (and one without a mask), which is a much tougher case to make.

I don't disagree with anything you said here.

My main question is still "why Altoona?"

"Second most notable city in the country for shitty pizza and industrial decay" is a weird place to stop for a burger while on the lam.

From what I've read it looks like he was riding Greyhounds around and one happened to stop there.

Yeah, I don't understand why you'd get rid of the gun. Then again, mcveigh got caught because he had an unpermitted CCW on him when he was pulled over for speeding driving without plates lmao

And why scribble three pages of nonsense to carry around with you for the police to read?

Getting a start on his memoirs? Again, if the police are going through your pockets you're probably already caught. The behaviors to avoid are driving without taillights or hopping BART turnstiles.

(I tried to find the news article about the guy who murdered his gf/hooker and fled to SF, only to get caught for evading a $3 ticket, but there were too many other articles about recent murders on BART)

There was some other shooter in Washington who killed a cop park ranger while fleeing a mass shooting, because he thought he was caught when she pulled him over for a snow tire check or something.

The important thing is not getting L.E. attention, and not triggering escalation if you do. The papers you have on you aren't a factor, but the gun might be.

I don’t have answers to most of your questions, but it’s possible he did not have a car and couldn’t use the drive thru. My guess for why he still had the gun/silencer was he wanted to keep them as a trophy. Either way, very stupid move on what was otherwise a nearly flawless assassination.

I'm guessing that getting to Altoona with no car is pretty close to impossible.

Besides the train station, there's also a grayhound terminal.

Altoona has a train stop on the Norfolk Southern Railway, which is served by Amtrak.

Oddly, that McDonald's being shown in the news articles is the one by the highway, not the two closer to the terminal.

That could be lazy reporting, but it's unusual

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