Mass murder is the violent crime of killing a number of people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time and in close geographic proximity. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more persons kill several others.
A spree killer is someone who commits a criminal act that involves two or more murders in a short time, often in multiple locations. There are different opinions about what durations of time a killing spree may take place in. The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics has spoken of "almost no time break between murders", but some academics consider that a killing spree may last weeks or months, e.g. the case of Andrew Cunanan, who murdered five people over three months.
Suicide by cop, also known as suicide by police or law-enforcement-assisted suicide, is a suicide method in which a suicidal individual deliberately behaves in a threatening manner with intent to provoke a lethal response from a public safety or law enforcement officer to end their own life.
Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.
Edgar Ray Killen was an American Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, at age 92.
The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders, or the Mississippi Burning murders, were the abduction and murder of three activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement. The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Since 1890 and through the turn of the century, Southern states had systematically disenfranchised most black voters by discrimination in voter registration and voting.
Jerry W. Mitchell is an American investigative reporter formerly with The Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. He convinced authorities to reopen many cold murder cases from the civil rights era, his investigations providing the basis for prosecutions, prompting one colleague to call him "the South's Simon Wiesenthal". In 2009, he received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.
California State Prison, Los Angeles County (LAC) is a male-only state prison located in the city of Lancaster, in Los Angeles County, California. The only state prison located in the county, it is also referenced as Los Angeles County State Prison, CSP-Los Angeles County, and CSP-LAC. Only occasionally is the prison referred to as Lancaster State Prison, which was particularly avoided in 1992 partly to ease the stigma for Lancaster.
James Snowden was an American truck driver and white supremacist. He was arrested as a co-conspirator in the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, for transporting the kidnapped activists to a remote location to be killed. He was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He was sentenced in 1967 by federal district judge William Cox to three years for depriving the murdered men of their civil rights.
James Craig Anderson was a 47-year-old American man who was murdered in a hate crime in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 26, 2011, by 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon of Brandon. At the time of his death, Anderson was working on the assembly line at the Nissan plant in Canton, and raising an adopted son with his partner.
On April 18, 2017, a racially motivated shooting spree occurred in Fresno, California, leaving three white people dead. The gunman, Kori Ali Muhammad, a black supremacist, was convicted of four murders and four attempted murders. Muhammad said he went on his shooting spree because of his hatred for white people and particularly white men. Muhammad fired off 17 shots, shooting and killing three men, shooting at and missing another three men, and shooting at a vehicle with passengers inside. The passengers of the vehicle were unharmed. All of Muhammad's victims were white.
On April 13, 1937, Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels, two black men, were lynched in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. They had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive.
Willie Gay Jr. is an American professional football linebacker for the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Mississippi State. He was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs with the 63rd overall selection in the 2020 NFL draft.
Dan Anderson was an African-American man who was murdered in Macon, Mississippi, on May 20, 1927 at the age of 32. Anderson's father and grandfather had also been lynched.
The 1996 Jackson firehouse shooting was a mass murder that took place on April 24, 1996, at a firehouse in Jackson, Mississippi in the United States. Firefighter Kenneth Tornes fatally shot four of his supervisors, after killing his wife earlier that day.
On February 17, 2023, a spree shooting occurred in Arkabutla, Mississippi, United States. Six people were killed, and a seventh was injured. The suspect, 52-year-old Richard Dale Crum, was later arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
