Melissa Cameron

I don’t have a lot of light for y’all as an opener this week, I’ve been trying to keep my thoughts away from the fact that I still have a few more of these Mondays ahead of me. I’m ok, and you can skip this, so let’s press on.

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Our first victim this week is 83 year old Choyce Moon, found killed in his home in Dallas, Texas, around 12 noon on January 1st, 2017.

A man has been arrested for the New Year’s Day murder of his 83-year-old father and for injuring his 80-year-old mother.

Choyce Moon, 83, was found murdered inside his South Dallas home on Redbird Lane Sunday morning, and his 80-year-old wife Mae Francis Moon was seriously injured.

Their son Donald Moon, 55, was arrested Jan. 4 near downtown Dallas. He has a lengthy criminal record, mainly with charges of family violence. He was released in March from state prison after serving time for a conviction.

In another article I found, Donald Moon confessed that he did it on the 30th of December, and that his parents were found only after a neighbours noticed uncollected newspapers and called the police for a welfare check. That turned up the dead man in a chair in the lounge room, and wounded woman in her bedroom. This article also claims that it was knife wounds that killed the father, and that Mae Moon was stabbed when trying to come between the pair in an argument.

So. There’s no record of the gun used in this sorry crime, in fact, I’m starting to question if a gun was used. I’m wary of overriding the Gun Violence Archive, and the news source they quote says the woman was ‘shot’, but the police are reported as using ‘homicidal violence’ as Choyce Moon’s cause of death in that article (and others.) The eventual confession (quoted here) says that Donald Moon attacked his parents with a knife on the 30th of December.

I’m not going to make a call on anything other than the date. I have had qualms on a previous Archive listing, for a man that was found shot, on the 1st, but that had been missing for weeks. This time I have more evidence to say that the murder happened before the date claimed, and a question over the fact that it was violence that involved a gun at all, so I’m still mulling over if I’m going to include the Moon family incident in my work. I don’t think that I can. It might seem strange, since my date choice was almost arbitrary, but one day of gun violence is one day of gun violence. And if the violence did not fall on that day…

I’ll let you know, but I think my Choyce Joseph Moon commemoration ends here.

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A fifteen year old boy, Sean Crizer shot and killed sixteen year old Charlotte Zaremba in her bedroom around 2am on New Years Day in Ellicott City, Howard County, Maryland. Upon hearing a scuffle in her daughter’s room, Suzanne Zaremba, who had just returned from picking her daughter up from a New Years party, entered the room to find the masked boy, who shot her daughter, then her in the leg, and then himself as she, a registered nurse, and her husband, also a registered nurse, performed CPR on Charlotte. Suzanne survived while Crizer died later in hospital.

The boy was later implicated in two prior burglaries in the area surrounding Howard High School, the neighbourhood in which he and the Zaremba’s lived, and it was found that in one of them the gun was stolen which he used to kill Charlotte, and himself.

It was reported that the police found no close friendship or relationship between the girl and the shooter, even after going through their cellphone and computer data, though the Washington Post reported that a friend knew that he had asked her to homecoming. Her response had been that she did not reciprocate the feelings that he had, and that she was going with friends. We left off at DP 1 last week, so we’re up to DP2.

I’ve had a case of a moving target, so to speak, in the ledger that I’ve been pursuing on the Gun Violence Archive. On the day I downloaded the listing I’ve been referring and gradually adding extra data to, in Excel format, this incident was placed at #45, and in the months that it’s taken me to comb through the associated linked pages from the main 3 pages that catalogue January 1 on the internet version of the archive, the incident was moved from page 2 to page 3. (I have a feeling that the location was slightly shifted, from the original report that listed Richmond, to Prince George, also in Virginia.)

I’m going to put in where I first saw it, here, but from now on if you look to the archive, you will see that it is out of sync with my listing. I’m sorry about that, but I’m going to preserve my original record.

With that squared away, the incident itself is unusual, (at least accounting for those I’ve written of thus far,) in that it is a suicide. As per the GVA:

Suicides

Because of the way Law Enforcement and Coroners report suicides, they cannot be collected in near real time so they DO NOT appear on our Daily Summary Ledger. They ARE added to our End of Year totals in AGGREGATE when they become available.

So if the GVA don’t tend to add suicides to the individual counts (link to their methodology), I’m led to think that it’s because this was a judge, who shot himself in his office, the extra media attention it garnered made it a necessary inclusion in the list. Judge Nathan Curtis Lee (60), on the evening of January first, suffered an intraoral wound according to “Jeanette Collins, district administrator with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond.” (Source) The death was ruled a suicide. DP1

Jermaine Anderson Spearman died on Wednesday the 4th of January after being shot around 5pm on January 1st.

Spearman was a passenger in a gold Honda Accord when an unknown suspect fired a shot into the car.

I found very little else about this crime, but it really sticks out to me that we know the brand and colour of the vehicle he was in, but not even the caliber of the round that struck him in the neck, creating the wound that would later kill him. DP 2

Robert Ward, 43, was killed inside his home allegedly by by Miles Richardson Holt (18) and Jonathon Kyle Elliot (20). As Ward’s son tells it;

“Someone was banging on the door at 10 o’clock at night,” said Jordan Ward, one of Robert Ward’s sons. “He went and grabbed a shotgun and went to see what it was. About the time he walked into the living room, whoever it was started firing at the windows and shot the house and my dad didn’t survive.”

A different son, 11 years old, hid under his bed, then after it went quiet and his dad didn’t respond, he called 911. No details about the guns, so one each for Elliott and Holt. DP 1 + 2

Reported by the Chicago Tribune:

On the West Side just before 5:55 a.m., a 39-year-old man was shot to death in the West Garfield Park neighborhood. He was identified as John Warship, of the 4400 block of West Wilcox Street, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Officers found Warship on the sidewalk in the 4600 block of West Monroe Street after responding to a call of shots fired. He had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene at 6:10 a.m.

As a person who died from gunshot wounds in Chicago over a violent New Years weekend, Warship’s story got a lot of attention, but none of it mentioned a weapon, a suspect, or a motive. DP1

Twenty-two year old Maryann Nabil Rosail was in a parked car with three other people when a gun accidentally discharged, shooting her in the side. She died later in hospital. Despite it being ruled a homicide, no charges appear to have been made. Rosail was in the car with her female friend, and two males they had met at a New Years Eve party. No gun details. DP2

Korrey Miller (41) appears to have been shot to death by someone known to him. He was killed in his home in North St Louis County, MO, after a disturbance. Once again, there are many articles that each repeat the same scant information about this case, and as such the gun is unknown. DP1

Yes, I’m getting tired of these too. Lucky for us, there’s only 12 incidents left to discuss for 1 January 2017.