It wouldn't be the first time the police/three letters agencies lie about how they identified/located a suspect to not leak potentially illegal surveillance processes
Just because his family is wealthy does not mean that his mother was financially supported for her healthcare. It's quite possible that the family patriarch held the purse strings and deemed that health insurance was the line for their financial support.
I'm in a similar situation with a family member and we are spending around 4-5k/month in a variety of non-allopathic strategies for this family member's health care. However, the family patriarch has drawn the line where his financial support is in providing housing, so the 4-5k is picked up by other family members.
You can be a literal millionaire and bled dry by mounting health insurance claim denials. There is little anyone can do to protect themselves from this outcome, save for not getting sick or becoming a billionaire. The health system in the US is insanely broken.
Non-Allopathic in my case means we’re not dealing with the traditional US medical system. We’re not engaged in homeopathy (microdosing random molecules) at all.
Perhaps what we are doing is still considered allopathic (most strategies are informed with research a la pubmed), with an osteopathic approach (whole body).
The difference here is that we’re able to eschew traditional means (dr appointment, lab test, drug rx feedback loop) of engaging with the medical system, while engaging with non-traditional health related businesses for our own care.
For example, we’re able to validate whether genetic disorders are at play by having sequenced full DNA and matching them against known genetic mutations.
We will order our own blood tests and pay out of pocket to quest, to drive decision making. Same thing a regular doctor would do, but in a far more expedited timeline. It’s a 1-2 day process test a vit D levels to determine and adjust dosing. An average doctor might be 3 weeks out for a 15 minute appointment to write that vit D lab script, then another week out from reviewing and writing the Rx for D.
4-5k a month is the cost of what someone with profound chronic illness ends up paying if they want to do their own R&D, deal with things on their own, in a manner that ensures timeliness and the best care possible. It’s a myth that access to the brightest minds (a la an institution like Mayo Clinic equals the best care, btw)
The money is merely the average in which to access the latest tests, as quickly as possible, medical equipment normally inaccessible to the general public and test and treatment options an engaged and highly trained MD that practices something such as precision medicine might suggest at the height of their careers’ charging power.
It also helps that the patriarch is a retired MD and can let us engage with the system out of band by writing scripts for medications that would be unavailable to the average public.
When lives and suffering are on the line, and we’re in these highly compensated roles, 4-5k/month is a privilege to spend for loved ones. Much of it may be lit on fire, so to speak, in personal r&d efforts, but each of them yields a win that gets us closer to a healthy baseline.
I think in casual speech "equally possible" usually is taken to mean "also possible." I think most people would say "equally likely" to express what you're saying.
For what it’s worth, I am a native English speaker and I disagree with the other poster. I would interpret “equally possible” similarly to how you did.
For what it's worth, to me, "it's equally possible" means "it's also possible, however remotely". I know it doesn't make sense, but, then again, neither does "I could care less".
How exactly do you propose to prove something (planting evidence) didn't happen?
Maybe I have too low expectation about USA interface between law enforcement and judiciary, but here in Poland there were many high-profile cases of misconduct of public prosecutors that colluded with the police. The only "proven" cases were about purposefuly destroying evidence: breaking CDs that held incriminating recordings, wiping weapons to remove fingerprints, agreeing to single version of testimony etc. They used procedural quirks to prevent defence from challenging those "mishaps" (like in one high-profile case with broken CD, they argued defence-held copy cannot be submitted, because of continuous custody requirements). Cases with planted evidence were always he-said-she-said, because when police writes a search report where they said you had something, then you have no way to challenge that.
May I add, fraud around those arrest/search reports (however they're called it English) is rampant. It starts with simple things, like notifying the subject about right to attorney. They just tick a box that you declined to summon attorney, and you have no way to challenge that, other than refusing to sign the paper, act of which carries no value.
We're deep, deep into speculation here. I'd wager that as the profile of the case goes up, so too does the dilligence and carefulness of the evidence chain of custody.
They're often not technically pro-bono. Clarke, for example, gets paid by the government, because they have a vested interest in not having cases overturned on appeal due to insufficient counsel.
> Clarke would probably not want anyone to feel indebted to her. In fact, after the Smith case, she returned the $82,944 fee the state paid her, saying that other indigent defendants could use it more.
this will potentially be a self-defense case. since the shooter had chronic back pain, he could argue that shooting the ceo who denied his healthcare was his only means of protecting himself
That's not how criminal trials work. There are no free speech rights in court. Defendants can't just argue whatever they want. Judges have wide latitude to prohibit certain defenses and generally ban both the prosecution and defense from mentioning legally irrelevant points. Self defense is clearly codified under NY state law and this case doesn't even come close to meeting that standard.
Lawyers tripping over each other to have their names associated with a potentially historic case. Remember how the Kardashian family originally became famous and some of them are billionaires now.
> Simpson was the best man at Kardashian and Kris Houghton's wedding in 1978.
> Following the June 12, 1994, murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson stayed in Kardashian's house to avoid the media. Kardashian was the man seen carrying Simpson's garment bag the day that Simpson flew back from Chicago. Prosecutors speculated that the bag may have contained Simpson's bloody clothes or the murder weapon.
> As one of Simpson's lawyers and a member of the defense "Dream Team", Kardashian could not be compelled or subpoenaed to testify against Simpson in the case, which included Simpson's past history and behavior with his ex-wife Nicole, and as to the contents of Simpson's garment bag.
It seems far more likely to be a case of incompetence. Law enforcement actually has an extremely low rate of "solving" cases, especially if you exclude all the "solved" cases where the suspect is caught on scene or that end in a plea bargain (i.e. did not have to establish sufficient evidence in the first place).
Ever since he got "caught" (if you can call someone literally telling the police where he is "the police catching him"), all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" (i.e. attempting to demonstrate that a bullet was not only fired from a given type of gun but a specific singular gun of that type) and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him. They might actually be lucky and produce matches in this case as they have the actual suspect and murder weapon (assuming this wasn't an extremely unlikely 5D chess move of using a body double fall guy and/or different gun) but both of these types of evidence are extremely unreliable and rarely help actually finding the suspect even if they make for good television when they work. As I understand it the police even walked back on the mayor's initial claim about "having a name" to "having a list of names" - not to mention that you don't call in the FBI when you already have good leads yourself (if only for optics/political reasons).
He seems to have been mentally unstable for a while before engaging in this killing and the fact he wrote a manifesto strongly suggests he had an intention of being caught or at least considered it highly likely. The monopoly money bag wasn't necessarily a "red herring" as everyone I heard talk about it interpreted it as intending to send a message, which seems to agree with the apparent contents of his manifesto (based on what news reports have cited from it). The water bottle the police now wants to use for DNA evidence may have been deliberately left there for this purpose, too.
Based on what I've heard of his manifesto, he may have intended to kill other people too but have realized the difficulty involved given that his very public first killing likely spooked the other people on his list. I think it's more likely he didn't fully plan out an entire sequence of killings or didn't account for these complications and essentially gave up, settling on being caught sooner rather than later. People generally don't write manifestos when they don't also want to take credit for their actions.
People can have contradictory motives. People in real life aren't driven by carefully considered system of beliefs. Only in fiction are people required to make sense.
We just make enough sense to mostly get by in the world.
That said, apparently his manifesto is fairly short and honestly sounds more like a confession than an actual political manifesto.
My point is more that usually when you hear about a killer having a manifesto you expect a lenghty diatribe about what they think is wrong with society and why they think what they did helps fix it - whether it's early 20th century "propaganda of the deed" anarchists, late 20th century "fall of the West" primitivists or early 21st century "race war" white supremacists and "new crusade" Christian nationalists. Of course for e.g. Islamist terrorists you don't even need a manifesto because everyone knows the cliff notes version already (Western imperialism, Islamic caliphate, blasphemy, etc). Instead this guy seems to have largely been upset with privatized healthcare, which is a common sentiment but rarely enough to motivate someone to pull off such an elaborate stunt.
That his manifesto is pretty rushed and incomplete does support the idea that he's more mentally unstable than genuinely "politically radicalized" though. The Christchurch shooter's manifesto for example was fairly incoherent and seemed more like an elaborate trolling attempt than a sophisticated political tract but clearly some effort went into it. Luigi's almost feels like a half-hearted homework assignment. I wouldn't be surprised if he quickly wrote it after the killing on a whim and didn't give it much thought before, which again would fit with my impression that he really focused on the first killing and didn't plan out much beyond that. As someone struggling with ADHD and autistic hyperfixation (not saying either of those apply to him), I can relate.
They don’t even need to actually tie him to the killing to put him in jail for a long time - possession of an illegal suppressor is a slam dunk here, and that’s major jail time.
It wouldn’t help him with any of the rest of this mess, but possessing the illegal suppressor is an easy ‘we can keep him in jail until we figure out the rest of this’ situation.
> all I've been hearing about is how the police wants to use DNA evidence and bullet "fingerpints" [...] and other CSI woo to now tie the actual crime to him
I don't know about your country, but in my country if you look like the person shown on CCTV committing a crime, you're wearing the same jacket, you're carrying the same illegal gun, and you're carrying a handwritten manifesto justifying the crime?
That's enough evidence for a normal jury of normal people to convict. The cops don't really need to add any DNA or CSI woo, juries are capable of exercising common sense.
Only way there's reasonable doubt here is if the guy's carrying the first place trophy for the CEO shooter lookalike contest.
Yeah, that's why I'm pointing it out. It's like the police is trying to oversell their investigative work in the public image, which strongly suggests that they had very little hand in actually catching him and now try to compensate - whether it's because they really were tipped off by a McDonald's employee or because the FBI found him doing something fishier. But the fact he had everything on him strongly suggests that the McDonald's story is at least credible.
It's pretty humiliating if you have a big militarized police force and can't catch a guy who killed a big important CEO in public and then went on wearing the murder suit in public until a random McDonald's guy calls you up and literally tells you where to find him, in public.
Remember when hundreds of militants crossed the most secure border wall in any "Western" country ever both on foot, in vehicles and on paragliders and went on to massacre literally over a thousand people including hundreds of reservists before the second most overfunded military in the world was able to put a stop to them and stupidly ended up killing civvies and friendlies in the crossfire because it has a doctrine of preventing hostage taking at any cost?
Remember when the US spy agencies prevented a credible terrorist plot by accidentally catching a guy in the Middle East carrying a thumb drive with terrorist plans on it?
Surveillance exists to maintain control, it can't help establish it. Dragnet surveillance exists to reconstruct events, not to prevent them. And most importantly, it all exists to suppress, not to protect. It's about dominance, not security.
