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From CBSNews.com, the chief of Brookfield police shows the media a photo of the shooter, Radcliffe Haughton.
Yesterday morning, I woke up, turned on CBS and started watching football. During the first or second commercial break, the CBS 58 news team broke in with the news that a man had shot up a spa in the Brookfield Mall, which is just 15 minutes from Marquette's campus.

Obviously, I was shocked, concerned, and saddened all at the same time. I was shocked that a man would choose to open fire in an outlet mall salon of all places. I was concerned that I was sitting in my dorm room just fifteen minutes away and had to go to a major public event (Marquette's volleyball game against Louisville) with the shooter still on the loose. I was saddened by the fate of the victims, especially as it was revealed later on that three women died.

The latest story CBS News released dealt with the confirmation that one of the people killed by Radcliffe Haughton's spree was in fact his ex-wife. The shooting apparently came after Haughton and his wife Zina had divorced and Zina had filed a restraining order against him.

The article had a link to a CBS 58 article which talked about a 2011 standoff between Haughton and police during a domestic dispute. The quote about the article from the CBS News story is almost comical out of context. "CBS Affiliate WDJT reports that a just-released criminal complaint details a stand-off that Radcliffe Haughton had with police in January 2011. The complaint said his wife called police after he started throwing her clothes outside and poured tomato juice on her car."

I mean really? Tomato juice? This guy seems like one of the funny nut-jobs, not somebody who would go and shoot up a spa. CBS News had other coverage of the shooting, perhaps yesterday's most compelling national news story. That included a video from the CBS Evening News which essentially was a straight hard news report on the proceedings. They also pushed a bunch of AP stories about the shooting to their website in order to have a wider breadth of content.

For me personally, this situation reminded me of this summer, when a Seattle man shot up a coffee shop ten minutes from my house in the U-District, which is generally considered one of the safer yet extremely urban areas of the city. It was terrifying knowing that a man who had essentially destroyed my peace of mind was loose and could potentially kill more people (he did kill another person while stealing her car later in the day). 

Both situations display senseless tragedies that could be prevented by some sort of mental health intervention and/or gun regulations. Murder is a part of l





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    Patrick Leary is a Seattlite studying journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He writes the volleyball beat for the Marquette Tribune and loves the Seattle Mariners.

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