Investor kills colleagues in Pa. boardroom meeting

[Ian David]

By Jon Hurdle | February 13, 2007
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - An investor disgruntled over a bad deal called six colleagues to a boardroom meeting before shooting dead execution-style three of them and eventually turning the gun on himself, police said on Tuesday.

Vincent Dortch, 44, of Newark, Delaware, called the board meeting on Monday night and tied four associates to chairs before shooting them, said Chief Inspector of Detectives Joseph Fox of the Philadelphia Police. One man survived.

"Four lives ended violently over what appears to be an investment gone bad," said Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross at a news conference.

Dortch, who called a meeting for the Watson International investment company in an office at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, blamed the men for the loss of about $200,000 associated with an investment in Binghamton, New York, police said.

"He believed that they defrauded him," Fox said.

When the men were gathered in the boardroom, Dortch wasted no time in telling them they were about to die, police said.


Philadelphia police are at the scene of a multiple shooting at the former Philadelphia Navy Yard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 12, 2007. (REUTERS/Tim Shaffer)


More:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/02/13/investor_kills_colleagues_in_pa_boardroom_meeting/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News

[intheflow]

1. The guy who survived is the real story.

Shot multiple times he managed to get out of the binds that tied him to a chair and then sliced together a phone line that had been ripped apart to call 9-1-1. Good lord, that man has one hell of a will to live!

[zonkers]

2. I bet those dead guys did rip him off.

[progressivebydesign]

8. That was extremely cruel and uncalled for.

People who would actually execute their colleagues, are usually paranoid and angry.. and usually.. completely wrong in their assigning of blame. Your post was pretty damn ghoulish.

[OKthatsIT]

32. LOL...your post is pretty damn naive

[UpInArms]

3. Watson International website

http://www.watsoninternational.com/

That’s why your investment to develop the former IBM Corporate Getaway Resort provides you with a profitable business opportunity.

The birthplace of Global IT Hardware, Software and Services giant, International Business Machines (IBM) is now being transformed into a World Class Entertainment and Banquet Facility. Join Watson International in this project to create a partnership of enduring value and appreciation.

This masterplanned facility located in Binghamton, NY, is now called the Watson Complex.

Timing is of the essence, and the time is now!

Robert Norris
Vice President of Business Development
[e-mail]
Phone: [phone]

[superconnected]

4. Cause you know, money is more important than life...

And how much is life worth - aparently 200k divided by 5, 20k.

Do soldiers have life insurance policies?

[Ian David]

5. Soldiers have life insurance policies, unless they purchase their own body armor.

Wearing non-approved body armor voids your policy.

[Possumpoint]

11. Math 101

200k divided by 5 = 40k

[primavera]

6. I wonder whether this guy could have killed so many...

... had he been armed with only a hammer instead of a gun. I keep hearing gun advocates talk about how a gun is only a tool, no different than a hammer. Yet I imagine you'd have to be pretty damned skilled with the violent use of a hammer to manage to kill three people with one before someone tackled you.

[NashVegas]

7. If Someone Wants to Harm You Badly Enough, They Will

At least the gun is quicker and doesn't leave as much of a mess.

[Lautremont]

9. You ought to work for the NRA!

Think of the sloganeering such an angle opens up: "Guns: Not Messy, Like Hammers!"

[Hardrada]

15. LOL

[NashVegas]

27. I Think I Saw That In a Movie

that starred Dudley Moore & Darryl Hannah.

:)

[Seldona]

18. Yea... wouldn't want a mess...

:crazy:

[BreweryYardRat]

12. Possibly.

Just aim for the head/throat/spine.

Hand-to-hand stuff (hammers, knives, etc) requires intelligence and a knowledge of target areas to properly use.

Guns? Not so much.

This is why I'm against people having anything you can convert to full-auto...the people who'd buy something like that are often dumb enough to spray and pray.

[benEzra]

23. Banned in 1986...

This is why I'm against people having anything you can convert to full-auto...the people who'd buy something like that are often dumb enough to spray and pray.

Weapons fitting that description were banned in 1986 (actually placed under the Title 2/Class III provisions of the National Firearms Act). Under current law, anything that can easily be converted to a machinegun is a machinegun for the purposes of the National Firearms Act.

That's why there are no civilian (NFA Title 1) firearms that fire from an open bolt, because those can be converted to automatic fire by filing the sear.

[BreweryYardRat]

24. Learn something new every day.

Thanks!

[Sin]

17. If he got them by surprise he could have.

If he had the hammer in a bag, pulled it out, and depending on how close they were to each other, he could have cracked the first person in the back of the head.
And then, depending on what type of hammer it was, quickly swung back-wards the claws and/or point into the guys neck beside him, hell even his eye if he was lucky , would take a matter of seconds.
Now the other three seeing this, would most likely be in shock, giving him ample time to get to the third one, off guard, while the first one is either knocked senseless or just dead outright, and the 2nd bleeds To death.
The 3rd one is hard to tell how he would go, a crack to the nose at the right speed could do it, but its up in the air. By now, the "Flee or fight" calculations would have run there course through the others minds, after seeing what came before, flee would be the most likely course of events, and then he has them, as they stumble over their partners bodies, and maybe slip in the blood to get to the door, Maxwell will smack them down with his silver hammer I'm thinking......







then again he could have brought a Knife.

[Irreverend IX]

31. Do you feel this incident provides a rationale for increased gun control?

Guns are used defensively by civilians millions of times each year, and in most of those cases the aggressor simply runs away after seeing the gun and no one is hurt. And if you want to stop incidents like this one with legislation, nothing short of a total gun ban will so much as put a dent in the crime figures. But you can bet that a black market will flourish following any such ban, and even today anyone who has a hookup for hard drugs will have little trouble finding guns for sale on the black market.

It's interesting to note that many (probably the majority of) companies forbid their employees to carry concealed guns in the workplace, and in many cases even in their cars. Such policies do nothing to stop people bent on murder and mayhem like the guy in the story, but they do help ensure that no law-abiding gun owners will be able to resist maniacal shooters in the workplace.

Gun control is a farcical social experiment that does nothing to stop crime. If the politicians decided to look into increasing mental health care funding instead of blaming everything on a piece of metal, they might actually make some headway toward reducing incidents like this.

[primavera]

34. I wonder if what you say is true...

... that guns are used defensively millions of times each year with the most common result being that the "aggressor" runs away with no harm done to anyone. If that were in fact the case, I don't know that it would change my mind entirely on guns, but I would certainly grant that it was a point worth taking into consideration. The problem is, I don't know that to be the case. How does one measure such things? For instance, if I come up to you and ask you for directions to the 7-11 and you mistake my intentions and pull out your gun and I appropriately run away from you, is that one of your instances of a successful "defensive" use of a firearm? If I approach you to ask for a light and you simply shoot me on sight, how am I, now a corpse, going to refute your one-sided account of the incident as one in which you were appropriately defending yourself? Personally, I wouldn't characterize those incidents as "defensive" uses of guns, but how can anyone know what really happened, or what someone's true intentions were? Who decides how these incidents will be characterized and whether they'll be added to the column of appropriate, defensive uses of a firearm? Who tabulates these things, what kind of methodology are they using? As far as I can tell, the "studies" done which quote these sorts of figures mostly seem to come from the NRA and, quite frankly, they're about as reliable and impartial a source as the shrub: if they say it, I know immediately that it's got to be full of shit.

[Irreverend IX]

35. Here's a source for you:

http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

This is a summary of an article on defensive gun uses written by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, who self-identifies as a liberal Democrat. This page contains links to Kleck's article and responses to his findings. Kleck conducted the only study to date that focuses specifically on defensive gun uses, and he concluded that there are about two million defensive gun uses in the US each year.

As for your examples of firearm misuse in the name of self-defense, such incidents are almost unheard of outside Brady Campaign literature. Civilians are held accountable by the legal system for every shot they fire (unlike cops, who can fire wildly in crowded areas with no consequences as during the NYC groom shooting). In any case of an alleged self-defense shoot, the DA will want to see compelling evidence that the shooter's life was at risk Even in cases where someone makes a 100% justified self-defense shoot, they will usually run up thousands of dollars worth of legal bills to get through the system unscathed.

I know of a case where a guy fired a shot at a group of drunks who attacked with sticks and bottles after they had already broken his arm, and the shooter was convicted of felony discharge of a firearm and lost his right to own guns. If you so much as display a firearm in public outside a legitimate self-defense situation you can be convicted of brandishing. Long story short, anyone who behaves recklessly with a gun will be shipped to the big house very soon. But that doesn't happen often; one Florida study found that concealed carry license holders were seven times less likely to be arrested for any crime than members of the general public (and something like 30 times less likely to be busted for violent crimes) and other states have released similar statistics.

[primavera]

36. Sorry, still sounds thin to me

I'll definitely check out the Kleck study that you cite, but, as you yourself state, it is the only study out there of its kind. Has anyone else been able to reproduce the results of that study? Are the statistical models he's employing to arrive at his conclusions sound? Does anyone know, has anyone ever tested them?

You say that inappropriate firearm uses only occur in Brady Campaign literature. How do you know? How does anyone know? Okay, if I shoot somebody, I'm obviously going to have to explain it to somebody, as there's a dead or injured person to account for. My account may or may not be acceptable to a law enforcement officer, but the testimony I provide is obviously always going to be based upon my subjective perception of events which may be completely flawed and paranoid. And what if I merely wave a gun at somebody and they run away? Who's going to file a police report? How is that episode going to be recorded? Maybe my action was appropriate, maybe it wasn't, who's to say? I don't know either, it just makes intuitive sense to me that the times when people are apt to employ a firearm are when they're afraid. The judgement of people when they are afraid is so compromised by their fear as to be almost totally unreliable. Yet you would have me believe that it never happens that gun owners get freaked out and make errors in judgement. That sounds pretty incredible to me.

You say that there are these millions of righteous uses of firearms, yet, in the same breath, you tel me that a firearm can scarecely be used at all without being arrested. These two statements seem incompatible to me.

[Irreverend IX]

38. Only one of its kind?

Did you read the page I linked to? I quote:

Prior to Dr. Kleck's survey, thirteen other surveys indicated a range of between 800,000 to 2.5 million DGU's annually. However these surveys each had their flaws which prompted Dr. Kleck to conduct his own study specifically tailored to estimate the number of DGU's annually.

Subsequent to Kleck's study, the Department of Justice sponsored a survey in 1994 titled, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms (text, PDF). Using a smaller sample size than Kleck's, this survey estimated 1.5 million DGU's annually.

There were many other studies done before Kleck's, but he felt they had flaws and structured his own study in such a way as to eliminate those flaws. Other studies had addressed DGUs before, but Kleck was the first person to focus a study entirely on DGUs. Many of the other studies were surveys of gun ownership in general, like the DoJ paper cited above.

Gun owners will make errors on occasion, but all in all it's not that hard to tell whether someone's threatening your life. Can you provide any news accounts of someone with a concealed carry license who shot an innocent person by mistake? I'm guessing they'll be few and far between; statistics show that CCW license holders are among the least criminal demographics in society.

You say that there are these millions of righteous uses of firearms, yet, in the same breath, you tel me that a firearm can scarecely be used at all without being arrested. These two statements seem incompatible to me.

As you suspected, most gun uses that end with the aggressor fleeing don't get reported to the police, so it's very hard to count all those incidents without doing a large-scale survey like Kleck's. I've read several personal accounts where someone heard a burglar in their house and loudly racked a pump-action shotgun, after which the burglar panicked and ran away. Incidents like this won't get anyone arrested, because the crooks who fled won't be making police reports. Self-defense shootings in public places are where it becomes important for shooters to prove they were justified, and in cut and dry cases like the self-defense shooting in Seattle a while back, DAs often won't press charges. It's not easy to overcome one's natural psychological resistance toward shooting humans, so even people with a lot of target-shooting practice are unlikely to fire at people who aren't presenting a clear and serious threat to their lives. You'll need a stronger motivation than mere nervousness to shoot somebody.

[rocktivity]

10. REPEAL THE BANKRUPTCY LAWS!!!

:wow:
rocknation

[SoCalDem]

13. Money strikes again..

Money kills marriages, friendships, families too..

Sad all round..

[rocktivity]

37. Money trumps life sometimes.

:(
rocknation

[kineneb]

14. and so it begins

Instead of jumping out of windows, they will kill those who invest money poorly. The new, mean Amerika.

[brentspeak]

16. Well, there was that day-trader in Atlanta about 8 years ago who blew away a bunch of people

after losing his shirt.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. How could he tie up four colleagues without any help?

Especially if two of the six remained untied.

:shrug:

Yes, he had a gun, but

a) Try tying someone up one-handed, especially if that person is unwilling

b) Even if you force people to tie one another up, in the end, you have to tie the last person up yourself.

Did they just acquiesce?

[1932]

22. Scenario b, and you shoot the last guy rather than tie him up.

Why would you need to tie up the last guy?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

25. Even so, couldn't guys 2 and 3 jump him while he was tying up guy 1?

I remember hearing a self-defense expert who said that the time to stop playing along with a gunman or other criminal was when he started tying people up, because more often than not, it was the prelude to killing them.

[flvegan]

26. 6 colleagues went in, 4 were tied up

3 died, one survived. The other two (of the six) probably had to tie the 4 up while the shooter kept the gun on them.

My guess.

[benEzra]

39. Never trust an attacker who wants to tie you up...

from a self-defense article:

1. Never trust your assailant...A more recent example is the BTK killer Dennis Rader, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita for 31 years, naming himself BTK for "bind, torture, kill". Rader would convince his victims that he was only going to rob them and steal their car, but he needed to tie them up so they wouldn't call the police right away. Once the victim was tied up, he was able to do as he wished.

If the aggressor wants to tie you up, it's probably because he wants to do something that he doesn't think he can pull off with you untied. If he just wanted your money, he doesn't have to tie you up to take it.

Certainly in any scenario where an aggressor is playing out some sort of preplanned mass execution, the WORST thing to do is to do nothing and hope it somehow turns out better. Even a disjointed resistance by multiple people is better than nothing, but indecision is the same as compliance.

Hindsight is always easier than actually being in a situation, but if you have one aggressor and six victims, odds are that had they simultaneously attacked, they would have prevailed. It couldn't have gone any worse than it did.

The same would apply to someone who pulls a weapon on you in a parking lot and tells you to "get in the car." That's a flag that they want to do something to you that they can't do in a crowded area...better to run, possible get injured, but have a higher likelihood of treatment and survival at Crime Scene #1, than to comply and be taken to Crime Scene #2.

[raccoon]

40. I agree with that expert.

But who knows what they'd do in such a situation? Thing is, the bad guy has the surprise element on his side...you don't.

[okoboji]

20. where's the blame Holywood crowd

almost sounds like a scene from the movie Dogma

[leftofthedial]

21. well there was (briefly)

one sane capitalist

[daleo]

28. Someone will want to make a movie out of this

Just saying.

[AlCzervik]

29. i doubt it, i think maybe a Law & Order episode.

[daleo]

33. That's very possible as well

Or TV "movie of the week".

[alcibiades_mystery]

30. Anyone investing in Binghamton NY has problems to begin with

Awwww, I'm jes kiddin'...I went to college there.