"St. Paul’s School failed the children with their attitude toward the senior salute."

Said the lawyer for Owen Labrie, who was 18 at the time of his encounter with a 15-year-old girl.

He described the school as a place where boys, living away from home under the watch of an elite old institution, felt pressure to act like “studs.”

The prosecution said the onus was on Mr. Labrie, not the school. “This isn’t the fault of the culture that’s at St. Paul’s,” Joseph Cherniske, an assistant county attorney, said in his closing argument. “It was the defendant who manipulated that culture.”

The onus is on each individual to control himself and refrain from committing crimes, despite a culture that may urge him on and cause him to lose track of right and wrong. But the onus is on the prosecution to prove each element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

ADDED:  Vester Lee Flanagan II is dead, but surely we hold him responsible for the crimes he committed. And yet, we can see that there was a culture that nurtured his distorted, murderous thinking.

"We would say stuff like, ‘The reporter’s out in the field.’ And he would look at us and say, ‘What are you saying, cotton fields? That’s racist.’"

"We’d be like, ‘What?’ We all know what that means, but he took it as cotton fields, and therefore we’re all racists. This guy was a nightmare... Management’s worst nightmare."

ADDED: Isn't Flanagan a bit like Owen Labrie?

"The fact that he kept his job was because he was an African-American gay man. That’s pretty hard to say no to."

Said former news producer Greg Sextro, quoted in The Daily Beast's "Vester Flanagan Threatened Colleagues, Played the Race Card for Years/The cold-blooded Roanoke killer kept getting fired, kept threatening co-workers, and kept claiming he was the real victim."

Sextro called Flanagan "the biggest dork I’d ever met in my entire life... a really nice guy. A horrible reporter, but really nice... just a goofy guy." And: "I cannot see him doing this ever. He had to have been pushed to the limit to do something like that."

Also in that article, this quote from Flanagan to the judge in his 2013 discrimination lawsuit: "I am hereby requesting a trial which will be heard by a jury of my peers.... I would like my jury to be comprised of African-American women." Not African-American gay men. African-American women.

"During a live interview from Bridgewater Plaza, approximately eight gunshots are heard as reporter Alison Parker is seen interviewing someone on screen."

"The camera, presumably held by photographer Adam Ward, then drops to the ground and the broadcast cuts back to the anchor desk. The video captures an image of the what’s believed to be the suspected shooter before it cuts away."

Ward and Parker shot to death, this morning in Roanoke Virginia.

UPDATE: "Authorities have identified the gunman who killed a TV reporter and photographer as former WDBJ employee Vester Lee Flanagan II" AKA Bryce Williams. He was pursued, and he shot himself and is now in custody and critical condition. Sometime between the murders and the self-shooting, he posted this on Twitter:



UPDATE 2: The murderer has died.