Tag: suicide

Veteran RCSO officer kills himself amid investigation

A veteran officer with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office has killed himself amid an investigation by his agency.

The body of Investigator Brian Manecke was discovered on a dirt road in Lincolnton on Friday night. He had apparently killed himself, and the GBI was investigating the death along with Coroner Tim Quarles.

The sheriff’s office issued a short press release late Friday: “On September 15, 2023 at approximately 6:20 pm, the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office was notified by the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office that they located an employee of RCSO in their personal vehicle, deceased with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The investigation into this matter is being held in the jurisdiction of Lincoln County and no other information is available for release at this time.”

The death came as the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office looked into complaints from other law enforcement officers in the region that Manecke had been posting pictures of their children on social media pages that were pro-pedophilia. He was accused of taking a photo of two children from a woman’s Facebook page and posting the image on a known pedophile site, claiming the girls were his. The sheriff’s office had taken out search warrants to look at his devices, including his phone and computer.

But before they could download the material, Manecke disappeared and did not answer phone calls from his supervisor. Then his body was discovered in Lincoln County.

The parents first complained last week to the sheriff’s office about Manecke posting their children’s pictures on social media. They complained again this week when they didn’t feel enough was done. They reached out to WGAC’s Austin Rhodes, who talked about the case on his afternoon radio show on Thursday and Friday.

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Canadian Hospital Suggests Euthanasia to Suicidal Woman Who Went There For Help

A Canadian woman who went to a hospital for help managing her suicidal thoughts and chronic depression was asked if she had considered euthanasia.

Kathrin Mentler, 37, says that she went through a traumatic event earlier this year. When seeking psychiatric help at the Vancouver General Hospital, the doctor suggested the nation’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program.

The Globe and Mail reports, “Ms. Mentler says a clinician told her there would be long waits to see a psychiatrist and that the health care system is ‘broken.’ That was followed by a jarring question: ‘Have you considered MAID?’”

“She was like, ‘I can call the on-call psychiatrist, but there are no beds; there’s no availability,’” Mentler explained. “She said to me: ‘The system is broken.’”

Mentler said that she had not considered MAID but had considered overdosing on pills herself. The doctor told her that attempting suicide on her own could lead to brain damage and other harm but that the euthanasia program would be a more “comfortable” process as she would be sedated.

“I very specifically went there that day because I didn’t want to get into a situation where I would think about taking an overdose of medication,” Mentler said. “The more I think about it, I think it brings up more and more ethical and moral questions around it.”

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US suicides hit an all-time high last year

About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II.

“There’s something wrong. The number should not be going up,” said Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman whose son shot himself to death last year.

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Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted

The sitting vice president, shortly before moving to Washington, D.C., successfully scapegoated through heavily publicized if legally unsuccessful pimping prosecutions a career newspaperman who last week shot himself to death at age 74 rather than sit through yet another prostitution-facilitation trial that he insisted to his dying days was an attack on free speech.

Yet the chances of Kamala Harris being asked this week—or any week—about the late James Larkin, or her starring role in the demonization of his and Michael Lacey’s online classified advertising company Backpage as “the world’s top online brothel,” are vanishingly small. That’s because people have a natural revulsion toward anything associated—however falsely—with child prostitution or sex trafficking, true. But it also stems from something far less excusable: When it comes to conflicts between the feds and those from the professionally unpopular corners of the free speech industry, journalists have been increasingly taking the side of The Man.

You could see this dynamic in stark relief last month in the elite-media response to U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s Independence Day injunction against the federal government from pressuring social media companies to censor individuals for allegedly spreading “misinformation.” As catalogued at Reason by Robby Soave, J.D. Tuccille, Jacob Sullum, and Robert Corn-Revere, and as I experienced during a bizarre panel discussion on CNN, the default journalistic reaction was anxiety that the ruling (in the words of the New York Times news department) “could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.” Sure, there may be First Amendment implications, but, well, have you seen that dangerous whackaloon Alex Berenson?

Far too often, journalists reserve their free speech defenses for people they actually like. And man, did they not like Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey.

This antipathy for Larkin/Lacey and the New Times alt-weekly chain the duo launched in Phoenix was obvious long before politicians began moving on from Craigslist to Backpage in their morally panicked crusade against technology companies that allegedly promote “sex trafficking.” (I use quotation marks here not to intimate that sex trafficking does not exist, but rather that, as Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has documented better than any living reporter, the term is overwhelmingly deployed by politicians and law enforcement to describe and punish conduct that has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing unwitting adults, let alone minors, into the sex business.)

The New Times honchos—especially Lacey, who was always the more public and pugilistic face of the franchise—were resented because they threw sharp elbows at both the graybeard alternative weeklies to their left and at the big-city dailies that were originally to their right but then tacked over time to the kind of bloodless lefty respectability space inhabited by NPR. The New Times papers hurled buckets of snark onto anyone perceived as Establishment, which pissed off boomer lefty journalists almost as much as elected Republican officials such as Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona Sen. John McCain.

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Bully DEI trainer paid $7,500 an hour is heard LAUGHING as she taunts beloved gay school principal driven to suicide for questioning her woke diktats – as crony who held no-whites school meetings is also identified

Disturbing new audio depicts the moment a beloved gay high school principal was shamed for standing up to an anti-racism trainer – whose bullying helped drive the teacher to suicide.  

Richard Bilkszto, 60, was found dead on July 13 after two years of emotional turmoil stemming from the encounter.

He was devastated when Kike Ojo-Thompson turned on him during a session in April 2021 after he challenged her claim that Canada – where both lived – is more racist  than the US. 

In the audio of the session, obtained by The Free Press, Bilkszto can be heard saying that maybe Canada was not ‘the bastion of white supremacy’ that Ojo-Thompson had made it out to be.

He pointed out that public schools serving Canada’s poorest students are generally better funded than their equivalents in the United States.

Ojo-Thompson turned on Bilkszto, telling him in front of all of the others gathered: ‘As white people, there’s a whole bunch going on that isn’t your personal experience. It will never be. You will never know it to be so. You will never know it to be so.

‘So your job in this work, as white people, is to believe.’

Ojo-Thompson – who was paid $7,500 an hour for eight hours of seminars – laughed in a subsequent discussion over the challenge made by Bilkszto, who was described as a deeply progressive man hailed for his focus on ‘equity’ at work. The anti-racism trainer was later branded ‘abusive’ by an official government investigation into her antics. 

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Backpage Founder, Alt-Weekly Entrepreneur, and Free Speech Warrior James Larkin Has Died

Entrepreneur, journalist, and First Amendment warrior James Larkin has died, just a little over a week before he was slated to stand trial for his role in running the web-classifieds platform Backpage. Larkin, 74, took his own life on Monday.

A native of Maricopa County, Arizona, he leaves behind a wife and six children, as well as a string of newspapers and a legacy of fighting for free speech.

With journalist Michael Lacey, Larkin built the Phoenix New Times from an anti-war student newspaper into a broad—and still-thriving—record of Maricopa County culture and politics. New Times didn’t shy away from honest reporting on local law enforcement and power figures—including Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy—or on controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights, or the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles.

“I had just come back from school in Mexico City and had been exposed to the Mexican student movement in the late 60’s and early 70’s and they were really serious radicals, serious revolutionaries, and a lot of them were killed in the ensuing years, murdered by the Mexican government. I realized that politics were serious,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. “I felt that the paper…really had an opportunity to be politically powerful.”

San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce B. Brugmann described Larkin and Lacey’s aesthetic as “desert libertarianism on the rocks.” They expanded their alt-weekly empire nationwide, eventually running 17 free papers, including the Miami New Times, Westword, the Dallas Observer, and The Village Voice.

The company stood out for being both highly profitable and a hard-hitting journalistic enterprise—a perfect blend of Larkin’s business acumen, Lacey’s brash indie-press M.O, and the pair’s shared commitment to exposing and standing up to government malfeasance. Collectively, the papers and their staffers were nominated for more than 1,400 national writing awards, won one Pulitzer, and were finalists for the Pulitzer six other times.

“We weren’t trying to curry favor,” Larkin told Reason in 2018. And they took a “stubborn approach to bureaucrats telling us ‘you can’t do that’ or ‘we’re not going to allow you to do that.’ We knew what our rights were.”

“Law enforcement, politicians, bureaucrats, regulatory types. They don’t really understand the First Amendment,” he added.

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RIP, Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto Educator Who Stood up to Woke Bullying—and Paid the Price

In late April, 2021, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer named Kike Ojo-Thompson presented a lecture to senior Toronto public-school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that (Ojo-Thompson believes) afflicts Canadian society. Canada, she said, is a bastion of “white supremacy and colonialism,” in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.

Anyone who lives in Canada knows this to be a preposterous claim. But in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which opportunistic DEI entrepreneurs in Canada treated as a gold rush, such lies have been treated as unfalsifiable. The same is true of the (equally preposterous) claim that Canada’s experience with anti-black racism directly mirrors that of the United States. And so it was expected that Ojo-Thompson’s audience would simply nod politely and keep their mouths shut until her jeremiad had concluded.

But one audience member refused to submit: Richard Bilkszto, a long-time principal at the Toronto District School Board who’d also once taught at an inner-city school in upstate New York. Having worked on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he told Ojo-Thompson that her generalizations about the two countries seemed misguided; and that denouncing Canada in such a vicious manner would do “an incredible disservice to our learners.”

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Canada’s push to euthanize veterans with PTSD is ‘disgusting, unacceptable and infuriating’, says female artillery gunner who spent six months on the front line in Afghanistan

Canada has the world’s most permissive assisted suicide program. The country is on track to record some 13,500 state-sanctioned suicides in 2022, a 34 percent rise on the 10,064 in 2021, according to Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s analysis of official data. 

Canada’s politicians are currently weighing whether to expand access to include children and the mentally ill. 

Critics have argued the approach is a ‘slippery slope’ in a country where red tape makes it easier to access doctor-assisted suicide than it is to access benefits and help. 

Sheren is enraged by the ‘unacceptable’ and ‘infuriating’ law. She says she personally knows almost a dozen veterans who have been offered euthanasia by authorities, a ‘disgusting’ approach to ‘people who were willing to put their lives on the line… then you have the audacity to tell them it’s better if you just die’. 

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Antifa activist commits suicide after Hungarian police discover 70,000 child porn files on his computer

An Antifa activist committed suicide after Hungarian police raided his house. However, the investigation is not over, as police want to know how he obtained 70,000 graphic pedophilia recordings, with many of them depicting the torture and rape of small children. The case, which is connected to the German Antifa scene, has spooked Hungary, with police discovering signs of a strange ritual close to where the man hung himself.

The massive child porn stash on the Antifa activist’s hard drive came as a shocking twist in a case that spans the left-wing Antifa scenes of Hungary and Germany. So far, the name of the activist has not been released by Hungarian police.

The man was a Hungarian Antifa activist believed to have played a major role in attacking individuals thought to be far-right activists on the streets of Budapest with the help of German activists in February of this year. During the investigation in connection with the street attacks, the police found the child porn on the man’s laptop after his partner’s apartment was raided. Police found no evidence that his partner was involved in any child porn crimes.

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What in the World Happened at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978?

Iam Laurie Efrein Kahalas, survivor of the Peoples Temple. I never lived in Jonestown, but I held a key position in the States up through the time of the tragedy on November 18, 1978. I am also the author of the “In Plain Sight (IPS)” project, the documented deconstruction of the Port Kaituma airstrip massacre (where Leo Ryan was killed), which preceded the deaths at Jonestown. Hard to deconstruct what was accepted as “history” in just this single article, but the IPS project fills that out. 

I realize that, from out of the deep dark jungle, headlines ablaze. From them all the public retains to this day is “drink the kool-aid.” For years following, it was even “a bizarre murder/suicide ritual.” Twin tragedies: Congressman Leo Ryan murdered—a foremost CIA critic and sponsor of the Ryan Hughes amendment requiring the president to report all covert operations to Congress sent to investigate the People’s Temple in Guyana—and then close to a thousand deaths at Jonestown. Not just that you can’t have one without the other, but that the same party must have been guilty of both.

That was never true; but there was never any investigation, just blaring headlines. I was in D.C. personally a year after, when congressional aides admitted that they had the on-site NBC film footage (NBC had accompanied the congressman). But when I demanded that they blow up the faces and bring in survivors to identify the so-called “Temple killers,” they adamantly refused. Even though that would have been Burden of Proof 101, especially in the face of massively contradictory so-called “eyewitness IDs”! 

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