Month: March 2014

Gunman kills 12 in D.C. Navy Yard massacre

Year
2013
Month Day
September 16

On September 16, 2013, a 34-year-old man goes on a rampage at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., killing 12 people and wounding several others over the course of an hour before he is fatally shot by police. Investigators later determined that the gunman, Aaron Alexis, a computer contractor for a private information technology firm, had acted alone.

Shortly after 8 a.m., Alexis used his security pass to enter Building 197 at the Navy Yard, a former shipyard, dating to the early 1800s, and weapons plant that now serves as an administrative center for the Navy. At approximately 8:16 a.m., Alexis, armed with a sawed-off Remington 870 shotgun and dressed in a short-sleeve polo shirt and pants, shot his first victim. Over the course of the next hour, he moved through the 630,000-square-foot, multi-level Building 197, the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command, gunning down more victims and exchanging fire with law enforcement officials. Alexis was shot and killed by police at 9:25 a.m. The shooting spree caused officials to put part of Washington on lockdown due to initial suspicions that other gunmen might have been involved in the incident; however, by the end of the day, authorities determined that Alexis had acted alone.

A Navy reservist from 2007 to 2011, Alexis began work as a computer technician at the Navy Yard on September 9, 2013. Five days later, at a gun store in Virginia, he purchased the Remington 870 and ammunition used in the attack. Investigators found no evidence that any specific event triggered the deadly massacre, and they believed Alexis shot his victims at random. The shotgun he used (he also took a handgun from one of his victims) was etched with several phrases, including “Better off this way” and “My ELF weapon,” and the FBI announced there was a variety of evidence indicating Alexis was under the “delusional belief” he was being controlled by extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic waves. In August 2013, Alexis told police in Rhode Island, where he was working, that he was hearing voices. The private IT contracting firm employing Alexis took him off his assignment for a few days then let him back on the job; weeks later, he went to work at the Navy Yard.

The 12 men and women murdered during the September 16th rampage ranged in age from 46 to 73. They were memorialized by then-President Barack Obama at a September 22, 2013, ceremony in which he remembered them and also issued a call to tighten America’s gun laws. That call largely went unheeded, and the number of mass shootings in the U.S. has continued to rise. 

Source

Pope Benedict resigns


Year
2013
Month Day
February 28

On February 28, 2013, less than three weeks after making the unexpected announcement that he would step down, 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI officially resigns. Citing advanced age as the reason for giving up his post as the leader of the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church, Benedict was the first pontiff to relinquish power in nearly 600 years. Two weeks after Benedict resigned, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope.

The son of a policeman, Benedict was born Joseph Ratzinger in the village of Marktl in Bavaria, Germany, on April 16, 1927. During World War II, he was drafted into the German military, which he deserted toward the end of the war. He was held as a POW by Allied forces for a short time in 1945. Ratzinger went on to be ordained into the priesthood in 1951. Afterward, he served as a professor of theology at several German universities until 1977, when he was appointed the archbishop of Munich and Freising; later that year he was elevated to cardinal. From 1981 to 2005, Ratzinger headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a powerful Vatican office responsible for enforcing Catholic doctrine. In that role, he earned the nickname “God’s Rottweiler.”

On April 19, 2005, following the death of Pope John Paul II, the 78-year-old Ratzinger was elected the 265th pope. During his eight-year papacy, Benedict championed a conservative agenda while also contending with scandals involving clergy sex-abuse and corruption at the Vatican Bank.

On February 11, 2013, Benedict, the oldest person elected to the papacy since the 18th century, announced he would resign, saying he no longer had the mental and physical strength required to lead one of the world’s largest religious organizations. The move was all but unprecedented, as until that point all popes of the modern era had remained in office until death. The last pope to resign, Gregory XII, did so in 1415 to end a civil war in the church called the Great Western Schism. Prior to that, in 1294, Pope Celestine V quit after just five months in the job (he hoped to return to his life as a hermit but instead his successor had him imprisoned and he died in captivity).

On March 13, 2013, white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel indicated that a conclave of Catholic cardinals had elected a new pope, the 76-year-old Bergoglio. Six days later, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, he was inaugurated as the Catholic Church’s 266th pontiff. The first South American to helm the church and the first non-European to do so in more than 1,200 years, he also was the first pope to take the name Francis and the first member of the Jesuit order to become pontiff. Francis soon distinguished himself for his humble style (among other things, he opted to live in a Vatican guesthouse rather than the regal papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace, where, for more than a century, his predecessors resided) and for his vision for a church focused less on divisive social issues and more on serving the poor and oppressed.

After retiring, Benedict, whose title became pope emeritus, moved into a former convent inside Vatican City.

READ MORE: 8 Things You May Not Know About the Papal Conclave

Source