Fire Drill- Part 2.1 The Articles

The Articles

CNN.com/

April 20^th, 2021  Posted at 3:30pm EST

Contributor: Jacob Solens

Facts and Figures Update

It has been just three days since the worst school assault in American history, and authorities are finally starting to put together for the general public a picture of exactly how the suspects in this case, two 17-year-old students at Delta Heights High School in Deertrack, Georgia, were able to execute such a heinous event.

It began, according to authorities speaking on condition of anonymity, with numerous false alarm fire drills being conducted early in the school year. On eight separate occasions between September 18^th, 2020, and February 17^th, 2021, someone within the school activated fire alarms, sending the staff and student body out to the prearranged gathering spots around the school proper.

On the morning of April 17^th, however, when the alarms were once again sounded, students and staff of the school were met with a lethal surprise in the form of several IEDs, all of which were detonated via remote command signal once the rendezvous points were fully occupied. In the smoking, flaming aftermath of the detonations, the suspects then moved in from the woods near the south side of the school with firearms, and began strafing survivors of the blasts with gunfire.

Authorities have finally agreed to release the names of the suspects, 17-year-old seniors at the school Aaron Sitanski and Brandon Norris. Upon the arrival of police and fire rescue, Sitanski is said to have immediately disarmed and laid himself facedown on the ground to surrender, while Norris engaged in an exchange of gunfire with police. He killed three police officers and two firefighters before being fatally wounded in the exchange.

It is unknown at this time what the possible motivation could have been for the suspects to initiate this assault. At time of this writing, reports have confirmed that 228 students and 36 staff were killed at Delta Heights High School. Updates will be made available with the release of more information.

The Huffington Post/

April 21^st, 2021  Posted at 12:38pm EST

Contributor: Jeanine Rhys

Op-Ed

Headline: FURTHER PROOF THAT THE PROBLEM IS WHITE MEN WITH GUNS

The NRA is not the problem. Mental health is not the problem. Typical, all-American teenage angst is not the problem. The problem is how easy it is for young white men to get a hold of guns.

It doesn’t take a genius to look at our nation’s relatively recent history (the last 20 years or so) and see the pattern cropping up in school shootings and massacres like the one which took place just a few days ago at Delta Heights High School in Deertrack, Georgia. They almost universally have one thing in common- the assailants were young white men. From Columbine to Delta Heights, the overwhelming majority of offenders in incidents of school violence are young white men lashing out at a student body against whom they all have some kind of perceived grudge.

Some social psychologists and developmental specialists over the years have endeavored to provide insight into the motivations behind these killers’ actions. Oftentimes, they have pointed to instances of bullying and ostracisation as a key motivating factor in the events which took place. Sometimes, there were documented instances of abuse in the perpetrators’ family homes and upbringings.

For those of us who know about real, honest-to-goodness historical, systemic oppression, explanations like this are weak at best, and a slap in the face to our communities and histories at worst. These were two young, white, middle class, heterosexual cisgendered males; neither of them could possibly have understood what it’s like to grow up under the kind of bootheel that people from underrepresented and under-powered communities have throughout American history.

I fully expect that by the time the personal affects and online activity histories of these two boys is revealed, it’ll show exactly what any of us engaged in the pursuit of social justice could predict: white nationalist propaganda and paranoia, conspiracy theory materials, and/or MGTOW or similar ‘but the mens!’ pearl-clutching nonsense.

I can almost guarantee it.

The New York Times (online edition)/

April 24^th, 2021 Posted at 11:30am EST

Contributor: Samantha Cardell

Technology

Headline: It Isn’t as Easy as ‘Undo’

In the Information Age, just about everybody leaves a digital footprint. From the moment a user signs up for a mailing list, or registers with a website, they establish lines that can be traced and tracked, and patterns of behavior that can be analyzed by professionals. And if they sign themselves up for a social media account (like just about every PC and/or smartphone user in the world), they are practically inviting law enforcement to take a microscope to their lives. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are more than happy, as evidenced in the past, to hand over every scrap of data they have about users over to authorities on the flimsiest of grounds, especially if they think doing so will protect their bottom line.

But authorities seem to have hit a bit of a snag when it comes to Brandon Norris and Aaron Sitanski, the perpetrators of the Delta Heights High School Massacre in Deertrack, Georgia, one week ago. Internet activity experts and analysts have spent the time since the day after trawling through the social media accounts of students and staff at the school, sweeping through thousands of status update posts and picture uploads on Facebook, watching YouTube video uploads from students, and going over a surprisingly large volume of notes and Tweets from the staff. Despite being able to approach this look-through from various angles and using the most up-to-date filters and search algorithms, there is something that simply cannot be found on the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts of faculty and student body-

Any significant mention of the boys who would commit the atrocity.

With a combined thirty years of experience and expertise in all things online, New York Times Technology contributor Alex Parish and myself decided to dive into the wide world of social media networks and message boards to see what we could see. Unfortunately for us, we realized quickly that even our time and knowledge might not be enough to make real headway.

First, it should be mentioned for legal reasons, if for no other reasons, that the networks and websites being mentioned here were not looked to for any reason other than the fact that they are known alternatives to services such as Facebook and Twitter. No political or cultural statement is implied by their selection or inclusion in this piece.

To get the ball rolling, Alex headed over to Minds, where he already has his own personal account and Ethereum crypto wallet. Referring to it as the ‘most functional Facebook alternative’ that he knew of, he utilized the service’s search function to look for Norris and Sitanski.

It took only a couple of minutes for him to find a personal account belonging to Brandon Norris, and to confirm that it was the young man who was slain in the gunfire exchange with authorities at the scene, thanks to the avatar photo attached to the account. However, when he tried to open the page to get a more thorough look at the profile, he was brought to a page stating that the account had been set to ‘Private’, so he had no access to the information or posts belonging to Norris.

Of Aaron Sitanski, there was no sign at all. I came to much the same results when scouring the vast digital sprawl that is Reddit, where numerous users and posts mentioned a user named BNorrisDeertrack. Here, we had a little more material to stack up; BNorrisDeertrack’s posts and comments seemed to be fairly evenly spread across a small number of subreddits.

r/NFL, r/GameofThrones, r/martialarts, r/politics, and r/socialjustice.  And then, there was one that threw alarm bells blaring for both of us- r/militarytactics.

The reason this last subreddit piqued our interests collectively was twofold. Firstly, this was not a heavily populated subreddit, and several users over the last couple of years were rumored to have been arrested based on the posts they shared on the forum. Secondly, and more telling than even this, was what at first appeared to be a glitch of some kind.

BNorrisDeertrack had a single post in the subreddit, but the body of the post just showed a picture of a black box with blocky red text that read ‘Error 402: Data Not Found’.

Requests for help to fellow Redditors yielded no results in finding out what exactly happened here, and with no information yet coming from the FBI’s forensic technicians’ direction, we are left wondering how Sitanski and Norris could have scrubbed themselves so thoroughly from the digital sphere.

Hopefully, answers will come soon.

The Guardian/ US Edition

May 7^th, 2021. Posted at 3:30pm EST

Contributor: Brendan Wells

News

Headline: NOTHING STAYS HIDDEN FOREVER

FBI computer forensic analysts and technicians, after weeks of poring over the contents of devices owned and used by Aaron Sitanski and Brandon Norris, the assailants in a school massacre in Deertrack, Georgia, have finally revealed that the surviving member of the murderous duo, Sitanski, was a hacker of almost unparalleled skill and sophistication.

Several outlets have been posing the question, since the incident, of how the pair of 17-year-old students could possibly have been so anonymous or unknown when they committed their attack on the students and staff of Delta Heights High School. In a brief report released late yesterday afternoon, FBI technician Steven Gerard stated that he discovered an ‘almost bulletproof’ scrubbing program which, when turned on, traveled from Sitanski’s laptop to the main servers of every commonly used social network and message board website, removing all traces and references to himself. An amended segment of code in the program appears to have been added to include Norris’s activity at a later time, but the code had a couple of minor imperfections, and those errors have allowed the FBI to go back and recreate/reinstate the activity of Norris.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, much to the surprise of the staff at The Guardian, were said to fully cooperate with the FBI in assisting authorities with the reinstatement of Norris’s materials, posts and uploads. The portrait they all collectively paint of the deceased assailant, however, doesn’t seem to completely line up with public expectations of the young man.

The vast majority of Norris’s unearthed Facebook account appears to tell the tale of a disillusioned young man frustrated by being consistently mocked by his peers, shunted from group activities, and being told, in no uncertain terms and more repeatedly than the average user, to just ‘shut the hell up’. Of the 217 classmates at Delta Heights with active Facebook accounts during the time he was also online, no less than 200 of them left comments on his posts saying exactly that. Approximately half of those comments pointed to his gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation/identity as reason for him to keep his mouth shut. One student, unnamed here for legal reasons, posted publicly on his wall, the following:

‘You got no reason to even be on here. People like you have been talking forever, and listened to forever, and it’s your turn to sit down, shut up, and go away. Don’t nobody need to hear from some strait white boy what on his mind, it’s all been said before, so just do us all a favor and go away.’

The comment was reported to Facebook for abuse, but members of the Community and Safety Team admit that they rejected the report and left the post up, telling Norris that he was free to delete the post from his page since it was his personal account. A recovered email message to them from Norris reads:

‘The point isn’t that it’s my page, and I can’t believe that you don’t see that. The point is that if I had said something like this, on the page of the person who posted this to mine, my account would have been at the least suspended, if not permanently terminated and my IP address noted to block future access. Your policies are not evenly enforced, and it’s tiresome that this happens all the time, and you people never own up to your obvious bias.’

Facebook personnel offered no response to Norris’s follow-up. Undoubtedly, some people will read this lack of a response as the company chosing to ignore that there’s a problem, or an attempt to remain quiet so as to avoid any accusation of contributing to the problem. Given how much fire the social media giant has been under over the last couple of years, it should come as no surprise that they want to err on the side of caution.

The question authorities and experts in the tech field now have to pose is as follows: since they were finally able to crack the part of the coding that had kept Norris from being scrutinized, how much and of what nature will they find behind the surviving suspect?

The Washington Post/

July 8^th, 2021  Posted at 9:25a.m. EST

Contributor: Robert Treeburn

Courts and Law Section

Facts and Figures Presentation

Nearly three months after his arrest for his part in the Delta Heights High School Massacre, Aaron Sitanski will be appearing in a federal court in downtown Atlanta today just after noon for his initial arraignment. The federal prosecutor’s office has released only the most basic information thus far, but what we know so far is as follows:

First, Sitanski will be charged with over 200 counts of murder. Second, he will also be charged with domestic terrorism, chiefly, experts say, as a result of his and Brandon Norris’s use of improvised explosive devices on the day in question. Sitanski will also be charged with the illegal modification of a firearm.

Agents with the FBI have revealed that Sitanski’s home had been host to a number of rifles and shotguns, all perfectly legal and kept unloaded. However, the weapons that the suspects used in the assault on their classmates and school staff showed clear evidence of tampering and modification, making the single-shot AR-15 rifles capable of firing continuous bursts with the maintained pull of the trigger.

“This kind of mechanical manipulation is not simple, and is not what the rifle was ever originally intended for when it left the shop where it was machined,” said Cole Jenkins, a ballistics and firearms specialist with the Bureau. “Three-round releases are common enough for an experienced soldier or firearms aficionado to manage, even. What we are talking about here is a project which obviously took time, patience, and a touch of innovation on the part of these suspects.”

Gun rights advocates the nation over were, to quote Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, ‘suspiciously quiet’ in the aftermath of the incident in Deertrack, Georgia. Then again, so were gun control activists, according to more traditionally conservative outlets like Fox News. The citizenry of the country seemed to have seen the sheer scale of the incident as so massive and destructive, that the best course of action was to take a much more ‘wait and see’ approach than had historically been the norm.

And even in the wake of the revelation regarding Norris and Sitanski’s modification of their weaponry, the NRA only managed to put out an extremely mild response: “We do not condone or encourage the mechanical manipulation of firearms by private individuals, regardless of the purposes to which those modifications are set.”

No word has come yet from Holly Maxwell, the court-appointed attorney representing Sitanski in the case.

Update: 2:45pm EST

In what some legal experts are calling ‘The fastest plea deal ever arranged for something so heinous’, Aaron Sitanski has agreed to plead guilty to 200 counts of murder in the second degree, illegal modification of a firearm, and illegal possession of an explosive device. In exchange, federal prosecutors have agreed to drop the charges of terrorism. It was initially thought by some that Sitanski and his attorney made the arrangement in order to keep him out of a federal penitentiary. However, a source speaking on condition of anonymity stated that Sitanski had another reason, though the original assumptions weren’t far off.

“[Sitanski] wanted to make sure that he would stay here, in Georgia, where he’s lived all his life. He also was adamant about getting the charges of terrorism dropped, because according to him, what he and [Norris] did wasn’t about trying to force any kind of social or political or religious change. He said, ‘This was personal. This was about us, and nothing more’.”

The Atlantic/

September 4^th, 2021  Posted at 1:30pm EST

Contributor: Sally Perkins

Legal

Headline: A Life Sentence For Lives Taken

It has been approximately six months since the horrific events that took place at a high school in Deertrack, Georgia, and the surviving perpetrator of that crime, Aaron Sitanski, has finally been handed his sentence in court. After pleading guilty to 200 counts of second degree murder, Sitanski stood with his state-appointed attorney in court this morning and was informed that the jury selected for the sentencing phase of his trial could not come to a unanimous decision regarding whether or not to add his name to the very short list of those who have been executed in the state since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1976.

Despite the fact that Sitanski and his partner Brandon Norris, who died on the scene of the incident, clearly fulfilled two of the aggravating factors typically associated with death penalty sentencing in murder convictions by using a device capable of causing significant harm to more than one person simultaneously as well as felling responding law enforcement personnel, members of the sentencing jury simply couldn’t come to a consensus on the now-18-year-old’s fate. As a result, judge Randolph Stirns handed down a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

Despite the overwhelming amount of attention that was given to this case in the days immediately following the incident at Delta Heights High School, and the numerous requests by various journalists and networks to speak directly with Sitanski, attorney Holly Maxwell has responded to members of the media the same way in each instance.

“My client is not accepting requests for interviews at this time.”

Time Magazine/ November 2021 Issue

Contributor: Stan Jacobs

Article Title: Snapshot From Hell

Facts and Figures Mixed with Op-Ed

On October 25^th, 2019, a junior at Delta Heights High School was suspended for three days from school and told he had to leave the premesis for wearing a racially insensitive costume for the school’s Halloween Costume Day. The Caucasian student had dressed himself and applied an extensive amount of makeup, including latex skin moulding to illustrate the effects of aging, in order to capture the visual likeness of retired Army general Colin Powell, a man the student said he’d done an in-depth report on for school the previous year, and whom he greatly admired.

The student had been questioned by the school’s paper the following month about this incident, to which he had responded, “I saw at least two other guys dressed for Costume Day as R. Kelly. You’re telling me it’s okay to come to school pretending to be a known pedophile and creep, but I can’t come as a respectable and accomplished military leader because I’ve got the wrong color skin? That doesn’t add up for me.”

This remains, to this day, one of the only statements captured for the public record made by Aaron Sitanski, one of two students who ruthlessly slaughtered over two-hundred people at the school.

Sitanski’s father, First Sergeant Jack Sitanski, was a decorated and accomplished Marine for fifteen years when he was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2012. His son Aaron was only 9 years old at the time. This left his mother, Nancy, to raise him by herself.

This would also mark the beginning of some brutal times for the boy who would become a killer.

Injury to Insult

Upon being granted access to his medical records via Holly Maxwell, the state-appointed attorney who represented Sitanski and continues to now that he’s been sentenced to life without parole, Time dove into the young man’s history. Records indicate that just five months after his father passed away, 9-year-old Aaron was admitted to Regions Hospital just west of Deertrack proper for a broken arm. Documentation notes from admission staff indicate that Nancy Sitanski found her son howling just down the street from their home on the side of the street, his bicycle a wreck in the ditch. Aaron’s right arm was set and placed in a cast to heal.

Just three months later, Aaron was once more brought to the ER at Regions for a nasty burn on his left hand, stemming from brushing it on a stove burner while trying to serve himself a second helping at dinner. Once again, he was treated and sent home in short order.

Four months after the burn, shortly after turning 10, Aaron Sitanski was, for the third time in a year, brought to the ER. This time, his injuries were much more severe; a broken orbital bone around his left eye, broken nose, and several glass lacerations around his face and the side of his head. According to the documentation, Aaron claimed to have gotten into an altercation with several older neighborhood boys near the Atworth Theater, a small but successful three-screen movie theater in downtown Deertrack. The boys dragged Aaron out back of the business and assaulted him repeatedly, with one of the boys taking a discarded liquor bottle from a nearby dumpster and breaking it against the side of Aaron’s head.

A police report was filed for the assault, but Aaron was never able to provide an accurate enough description of his assailants to result in any arrests or charges being laid. He remained in the hospital for observation for 48 hours before finally be released to his mother’s custody once more.

Over the course of the following three years, Aaron Sitanski would be admitted to the Regions ER seven more times for injuries serious enough to require medical intervention. Nursing and physician staff have since admitted that they had suspicions about what was happening in the Sitanski family home, but without a complaining witness or reasonable suspicion, authorities were left without a course of action to help the teenager out of his situation.

No ‘Reset’ Button

Nancy Sitanski finally sought help for her alcohol abuse problem shortly after Aaron’s thirteenth birthday, making a public statement about it on, of all places, Facebook. In a lengthy post, she admitted to having been ‘less than an ideal mother to my bright and brilliantly talented son’. Tellingly, young Aaron’s periodic trips to the ER stopped after his mother’s public admission of alcoholism.

What took their place, however, seems to have been a veritable deluge of online bullying aimed at Aaron by way of his mother’s account. Classmates of Aaron’s began commenting on Nancy’s posts and page, offering blistering insults and jokes at young Aaron’s expense. Among them was the following gem: ‘Dad’s dead, and mom’s a lush. You really won the old genetic lottery, huh Aaron?’

The user posting that to Nancy Sitanski’s page had their account immediately suspended for thirty days, but eventually, they were allowed back on the social media platform. Aaron’s own account at this point appears to have gone dormant, with no posts since.

Though Sitanski was able to scrub himself almost entirely from the Internet later on, and despite his mother’s improved condition and the removal of alcohol and household violence in his day-to-day life, a damaged young man was left in the aftermath with no ‘reset’ button available to him to undo the damage that he had already lived through. This is, of course, no excuse for doing what he would do just a few years later at Delta Heights High School. But it does raise the question: could something have been done differently to prevent him and Brandon Norris from doing what they did?