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Eight hours after a gunman opened fire in an Atlanta, GA, medical building police caught their suspect. He is 24-year-old Deion Patterson, who after shooting five women stole a pickup truck and fled into nearby Cobb County.
But after a massive manhunt, police took Patterson into custody, and the people of Atlanta were able to exhale.
Atlanta shooter Deion Patterson caught in Cobb County pic.twitter.com/D7GDLulnLw
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 4, 2023
On Wednesday, around noon, Patterson was in a waiting room at a Northside Hospital Medical Midtown clinic on the 11th floor. Suddenly he pulled out a revolver and began firing. He injured four women and killed one: 38-year-old Amy St. Pierre, an employee with the CDC.
Screenshot: Twitter/@ajc.
The four as-yet unnamed injured women, who are in the hospital, range in age from 25 to 71 years old.
That’s what everyone wants to know every time something like this happens, right? In this case, Patterson’s mother, Minyone Patterson, blamed the Veterans’ Administration for administering “messed up medication” to her son:
The damn VA gave him some messed up medication, and all he wanted was an Ativan [medication for seizures].
Ms. Patterson castigated the VA in a phone interview with the Daily Beast, whereupon she abruptly hung up the phone on their reporter. However, she was a bit more discreet in an interview with Zac Summers at Atlanta News First:
Minyone Patterson, mother of Deion Patterson, the alleged Northside Medical Midtown Atlanta shooter, in phone call with @ATLNewsFirst following the arrest of her son: pic.twitter.com/9zbUKmhJF5
— Zac Summers (@ZacOnTV) May 4, 2023
Meanwhile, Deion Patterson’s sister, Whitney Code, told the New York Times that her brother was “not mentally stable” since leaving the Coast Guard earlier this year. She also added that he had been struggling to perform basic tasks, and had gone to the medical clinic on Wednesday to “get help:”
He was joyful, funny. But after he came home, he stopped talking to others, stopped eating, interacting with people.
However, she could offer no more insight. “I know as much as you know,” she said.
They seem to do that, don’t they? If a mass shooting incident departs from their preferred narrative — white man with an AR-15 rifle — the story often disappears. In Atlanta the shooter was black, the dead victim was a white woman, and the weapon was a pistol. This is not the type of story the media love to flog.
Oh, perish the thought, tweeted Matt Yglesias of Bloomberg. We journalists really don’t have a specific formula for which stories we cover:
Too many violent in the United States for each one to be a national news story but we don’t really have a clear or principled basis for deciding which ones get that coverage.
However, Wilfred Reilly, associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, pushed back:
Statistically, white on Black violent crime or police on Black violent crime gets 10+x the coverage of anything else. There really is a very simple and clear pattern.
And, shortly before Atlanta police announced the arrest of Patterson, Leland Vittert at News Nation reported on media bias surrounding the Texas shooter as an example:
So for the AP, it was more important to report that Oropesa slaughtered five people with an AR-15, not that he had been deported four times. And on Wednesday evening, the New York Times followed up their coverage of the Atlanta shooting with five feature stories on “Gun Violence in America.” One of them was entitled “A Partial List of US Mass Shootings in 2023.”
Citing the Gun Violence Archive, the NYT claimed over 188 mass shootings in the US this year. Of the 14 mass shootings the Times cited, only one of them — the shooting of a family in Goshen, CA — was at the hands of a drug cartel gang. The only school shooting they mentioned was the Covenant School incident in Nashville, TN. However, even there the NYT failed to mention the shooter was a trans man with a grudge. Narrative, you know.
But the Times never mentioned that in Chicago, for example, 56 people died in the month of April, often from gang violence. The Windy City butcher’s bill includes 48 blacks, five Hispanics, and three whites or “others.” Ten of the dead were teenagers, along with one child under 12. Not only that, but it’s estimated that a person is shot in Chicago approximately every three hours. So where’s the media? Always AWOL on urban gang violence, of course. These are not the Droids you are looking for.
So to recap the tragedy in Atlanta: the shooter was black, the weapon was a pistol, and the dead victim is a white woman. Let’s see if the media decide to sweep this one under their newsroom rug.
Featured image: UNclimatechange/flickr/cropped/CC BY 2.0.
Cameron says: The Narrative must be protected at all costs. If it’s one of their approved victim groups committing the crime, the story must die.
steve walsh says: They want to take guns away from law abiding citizens to eliminate any threats to those in positions of government power. This will make the citizenry more easily controlled and manipulated. Thus the only gun stories that matter are those that help, in their minds, make the argument against private gun ownership. As you say, these are not the droids you are looking for.
GWB says: for administering “messed up medication” to her son
More is coming out (sorta). It seems he was asking for a particular medication for anxiety, which seems to be more addiction-prone than opiates are (in general). So, given the “war on opiates” the gov’t has been conducting the last several years, I can see doctors being reluctant to give someone exhibiting bad (probably violent) behaviors this drug. When he didn’t receive this drug he went over the edge.
BTW, it is possible the VA (or a doc during active duty) gave him that drug. And he then became addicted (to some degree). Once he was on his own – or at some point the VA decided to get him on a different drug – he demanded that drug because (to him) it worked.
But after he came home
A sure sign of someone in need of mental help or drug addiction.
we don’t really have a clear or principled basis
Well, we know that. Modern journalists have no clarity or principles. (That’s also a horribly written sentence. I wouldn’t honestly expect a writer nowadays to be able to write clear English.)
There really is a very simple and clear pattern.
Simple, yes. But not principled. (At least the sorts of principles we all think of.)
This incident is a tragedy, possibly. But it’s more of an indictment of a society which seems to require so many drugs to go about normal daily lives, rather than one which is responsibly armed.
If people in that waiting room had been armed, there might have only been two people shot, and no need for a manhunt.
(BTW, waiting room shootings make me twitchy. My then-pregnant wife was supposed to be in the Fairchild AFB hospital the morning a gunman shot it up, getting her pre-natal vitamins refilled. She decided it wasn’t worth the trouble that day and stayed home. 6 months later my healthy son was born.)
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