Report: School shooter wanted revenge for teasing

Report: School shooter wanted revenge for teasing

CENTENNIAL, Colo.

Investigators say the student who killed a classmate before taking his own life at a suburban Denver high school described himself in a diary as “a psychopath with a superiority complex” and indicated he was exacting revenge for being teased in elementary school.

Karl Pierson, 18, wrote that he planned the Dec. 13 attack at Arapahoe High School to start a conversation about elementary-school teasing, according to investigative reports released Friday.

“Words hurt, can mold a sociopath, and will lead someone a decade later to kill,” he wrote in a document titled “A Diary of a Madman.”

Quarantined plane cleared in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS

A commercial airliner was quarantined on the airport tarmac in Las Vegas for more than an hour Friday while paramedics and health officials evaluated a mother and a child who vomited during a flight from New York, authorities said.

An all-clear was given after officials determined the illness didn’t meet criteria for Ebola.

The woman told authorities that she and the child had traveled in the African country of Gabon, Deputy Clark County Fire Chief Jeff Buchanan said.

NC gay-marriage ban struck down

RALEIGH, N.C.

A federal judge in North Carolina struck down the state’s gay-marriage ban Friday, opening the way for the first same-sex weddings in the state to begin immediately.

U.S. District Court Judge Max O. Cogburn Jr. issued a ruling shortly after 5 p.m. declaring the ban approved by state voters in 2012 unconstitutional.

Cogburn’s ruling follows Monday’s announcement by the U.S. Supreme Court that it would not hear any appeal of a July ruling by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond striking down Virginia’s ban. That court has jurisdiction over North Carolina.

Obama raising money in California

LOS ANGELES

President Barack Obama is on a three-day fundraising swing through California, and what he says at some events will be anybody’s guess.

Two of the four events he’s attending in Los Angeles and San Francisco are closed-door. No media are allowed in.

The California events cap a week in which Obama flew from coast to coast to help raise much-needed campaign cash for fellow Democrats in the run-up to the Nov. 4 congressional elections. Democratic control of the Senate is at stake, and Obama has been urging supporters to help his party preserve its majority.

Teacher whose gun fired in school bathroom charged

SALT LAKE CITY

A Utah teacher who was injured by fragments from a bullet and a porcelain toilet when her gun accidentally went off in a faculty bathroom at an elementary school has been charged with a misdemeanor and resigned from her job.

The charges came earlier this month after she changed her story about what happened in the Sept. 11 shooting. Detectives had confronted her about discrepancies, charging documents show.

Nobody other than the teacher was injured or saw the shooting, but it reignited a debate about whether teachers should be armed. Utah is among a few states that allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns in public schools.

Associated Press