Officer slayings bring a new anguish to Iowa at end of a rancorous election
Officer slayings bring a new anguish to Iowa at end of a rancorous election:- A day after police in Iowa captured a man they say killed two officers in a pair of brazen ambushes, authorities said they still didn’t know the motive for the “cowardly” attacks, and residents grappled with their anguish.
Scott Michael Greene, 46, whose relationship with his mother had disintegrated so badly that each received protective orders against the other, was formally charged with two counts of first-degree murder. He was taken from the hospital where he had been evaluated to the Polk County jail, restrained, the Des Moines Register reported, by the handcuffs of the two slain officers.
Outside the Des Moines police department, a steady stream of mourners gathered around a makeshift memorial — a parked patrol car barely visible under the flower bouquets, stuffed animals, condolence notes and children’s drawings.
Mary White, 42, stood by the memorial with her arm around her 11-year-old son, Alex, their eyes both red-rimmed from crying.
“Why should you have to die for wearing a badge and protecting people? It makes me so angry,” she said. To White, who works closely with law enforcement at her job with Central Iowa Search and Rescue, the ambushes seemed somehow connected to a deeper divide in the country that she struggles to understand.
“Everybody is against everybody. Why?” she said, her eyes welling up. “Look how this community has come together, people who don’t know each other. Why can’t our nation come together, what happened between 9/11 and now? Why are we enemies?”
While investigators will try to determine what prompted the attack — and what, if any, connection it might have had to a confrontation between the suspected gunman and police over the Confederate flag at a high school football game just weeks earlier — the Des Moines police chief said he will not be among those trying to discern a reason for the bloodshed.
“What happened yesterday was calculated murder of two law enforcement officers, plain and simple,” Dana Wingert, the police chief in Iowa’s largest city, said at a news briefing Thursday.
Wingert was visibly angry as he discussed the shootings, which claimed the lives of Sgt. Anthony Beminio, 38, one of his officers, and Justin Martin, 24, a rookie officer from neighboring Urbandale.
“I won’t try to reason or make sense of this,” Wingert said. “This was calculated murder. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. It was cowardly in every sense of the word.”
Both were working the overnight shift and were sitting in their patrol cars, on main roads that went through quiet residential areas. Greene approached Martin first, authorities said investigators had determined, and fired multiple rounds from a high-powered rifle. Twenty minutes later, as officers responded to that shooting, they discovered Beminio.
Before the killings, Greene had been clashing with police, strangers and his family with increasing frequency, and on at least two occasions he was apparently involved in racially charged confrontations.
People who knew and encountered him described him as someone who acted strangely and was “ready to blow.” Greene and his mother had each accused the other of abuse, and in court documents Patricia Greene described her son as mentally disturbed and volatile.
Greene is believed to have become seriously depressed when his father died of cancer six years ago. In the wake of that loss, Larry Draughn, who lives several houses down from where Greene lived with his mother and his daughter in Urbandale, befriended him and took him fishing several times. But he said soon he began to feel uneasy around Greene.
“I thought it was just mourning, but the more I got to know him, something wasn’t right. He scared my wife and daughter,” Draughn said. “He had a lot of anger, and I started holding him at arms’ length. He wasn’t in his right mind; he needed help he didn’t get.”
Gordon Sterk, who owns two local Ace Hardware stores and had employed Greene part time on three separate occasions over the past few years, saw Greene on Tuesday, the day before the shooting, and said he seemed agitated and not himself. He came into the store and started straightening the shelves even though he didn’t work there anymore, and an employee said to him, “looks like we taught you well.” Greene snapped, “you didn’t teach me that, my dad did.”
“His dad was his best friend,” Sterk said at his store on Thursday. “He loved his daughter, that’s why it’s so shocking that he’d put her in this position. He didn’t give us any indication, that’s why we hired him three times.”
He had called in sick because of his depression a few times when he worked for Sterk. Then, about a year ago, he told Sterk he started medication and “had a whole new outlook and was thinking clearer.”
A close friend of Patricia Greene’s, who asked not to be identified, stood in her driveway crying about the crime. “Nobody wins,” she said, with tears brimming. She said she spoke to her friend early Wednesday, and she was inconsolable. “She did not raise him like that,” the woman said.
People here are highly politically engaged; the voter turnout rate in Polk County was nearly 82 percent in 2012, among the highest in the nation. Campaign signs sprout from many lawns, the Trump ones outnumbering the Clinton ones. At the edge of Greene’s property is a huge Trump-Pence sign, and his neighbors across the street have six.
The horrifying violence erupted just as people eagerly awaiting an end to the rancorous presidential campaign, and many people wondered about a connection.
At a vigil held at the Unitarian Church of Christ in Urbandale on Wednesday night, Bishop Alan Scarfe of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa cautioned that America’s impulse to indulge our “basest” impulses around the presidential election unleashed a torrent of hate that won’t subside after Nov. 8.
“It is a time to mourn what we are becoming,” Scarfe said.
“This whole thing just makes me sick,” said Diana Griffith, 72. “I wanted to show my support, but I guess I also just wanted to comfort myself.”
Others said the shootings shattered a sense of community in Urbandale. They described the Des Moines suburb as peaceful and close-knit, with a helpful and noncontroversial police force.
That sentiment was echoed by Antone Williams, an African American man, who drove by the police memorial Thursday afternoon to allow volunteers to place blue electrical tape across his back window.
Source:-https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/were-slayings-of-two-officers-connected-to-election-rancor-in-anguish-some-iowans-search-their-souls/2016/11/03/1994f9e2-a213-11e6-a44d-cc2898cfab06_story.html
