Surrealist Excitement in Cleveland

From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Date: Sun, May 11, 2003

http://www.cleveland.com/news/index.ssf?/focuson/more/cwrustandoff.html

On Thursday we started getting emails about a crazed-gunman standoff
involving hostages in the incredibly weird-looking Peter B. Lewis
building on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Two of our
friends work in that bizarre-looking business school building.

Fairly soon we (well, our friends) got emails from those very people,
who were hiding in the building with their cell phones and palm pilots.
A SWAT team later escorted them and about 100 others out to safety
under an improvised umbrella of riot shields.

Later in the evening the gunman gave himself up. He was a pissed off
crazy-man who was angry at the school and staff for standing in the way
of his saving the world by Internet. After many conflicts, they had
canceled his computer lab privileges, preventing him from saving the
world. He killed one guy and wounded two.

This building is the WILDEST place for a rampaging nut gunman to go
rampaging. It's designed by Frank Gehry, who also did the Experience
building in Seattle. The building is literally twisted-looking, like a
spaceship that was half melted to slag when it crashed. Antonio Gaudi's
surreal Spanish buildings look like plain boxes compared to Gehry's
outrageous designs.

It is so weird-looking that local SubGenius wags were concerned that
people seeing picture of the building on TV would think it had been
bombed.

**********
An excerpt from the paper:

SWAT's stunner

About 4 p.m., while officers Kurokawa and Stein were coming under fire,
the Cleveland Police Department's elite SWAT unit was training in a
warehouse on Grant Avenue. They spent the picturesque spring afternoon
going over how to handle an "active shooter in a populated structure" -
copspeak for when a person with a gun starts shooting in a crowded
building.

Then they got a call: A gunman at CWRU was shooting randomly in a
classroom building. Several people were hit and possibly dead. The
shooter was on the loose in the building.

It was time to put their training into action.

For years, conventional wisdom was that such situations called for the
"sit, wait and talk" approach - make contact with the suspect and coax
him into surrender.

But with a heavily armed man in a building with about 100 people
inside, that strategy wouldn't be applied.

Cleveland's SWAT-unit members, clad in their distinctive black helmets
and paramilitary uniforms, studied the Lewis building's floor plans
with building engineers, then moved in.

They came under fire right away. Police said the disconnect from
training in an old warehouse to the Lewis building was immediate. The
building is surreal, with its sloping walls, fogged glass ducts and
catacomb-like offices.

"It's a gunman's dream and a SWAT team's nightmare," said one police
officer.

But the floors of the Lewis building were covered with the hallmarks of
any crime scene involving gun violence - spent shell casings and sticky
trails of blood.
***************

--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected (Rev. Ivan Stang, prop.)
PRABOB

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Original file name: Surrealist Excitemen#1AD0AB.txt - converted on Saturday, 25 September 2004, 02:05