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Rampage mirrors Illinois shootings
Tuesday, May 02, 2000 By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Access to guns common factor, professor believes
If Richard Baumhammers was a copycat, he had plenty of killers to imitate.
A quick and natural reaction has been to equate his tear of violence last week as the flip side of Ronald Taylor's.
For complete Post-Gazette coverage, click here.
But Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said Baumhammers' case resembles shootings in July in which a racist gunman shot Asians and Jews, then killed former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, who was black.
"The closest case that it reminds me of is that one," Blumstein said yesterday.
On Independence Day weekend 1999, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith went on his rampage in Illinois and Indiana.
Smith shot at Orthodox Jews, black people and Asians that Friday night in the northern suburbs of Chicago, where he had grown up. Byrdsong, 43, was killed there as he walked with his children.
Then on Saturday, Smith shot at blacks and Asians near the University of Illinois, where he had been enrolled but quit before being expelled over charges of domestic violence, possessing drugs and posting racist literature.
On Sunday, he returned to Bloomington, where he had just completed his third year of college at Indiana University. There, he killed Won Joon Yoon, 26, a Korean-American man, at a church near the school.
The violence finally ended when Smith shot himself on July 4.
Smith grew up in the affluent northern suburbs of Chicago, in Wilmette and Northfield. His father was a doctor, and his mother was a real estate agent and former town trustee.
Blumstein said the similarities between the two cases extended to the high-powered weaponry of the killers.
"This is, to my mind, the striking common element of all of these cases," he said.
"People go over to the edge in a lot of ways. But if they didn't have access to such weaponry, it would be an incident but not a rampage."
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