Today's the day for the beginning of Lindsay's sentencing hearing! Here are a couple of articles that were posted last night/this morning, to whet your appetite. Splitting over two posts due to length.
High School friend says Halifax mall plotter had a 'creepy' interest in Nazism
'She was in my writing club and her writing was so violent and gory and visceral,' says former friend
Brett Bundale · The Canadian Press · Posted: Apr 16, 2018 7:25 AM AT | Last Updated: 2 hours ago
Lindsay Souvannarath has been held in custody since her arrest in 2015. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
High school friends remember Lindsay Souvannarath as quiet, clean-cut and weird.
She wore yellow high heels and bright lipstick to class at her middle-class high school in suburban Chicago. She joined a role-playing club that brought Dungeons and Dragons to life, liked creative writing and contributed to the year book.
It wasn't till later that Souvannarath embraced a "school shooter chic" aesthetic, as described in what appears to be her Tumblr blog featuring a pink swastika.
She became obsessed with Nazism, the Columbine shooting and a plot she nicknamed "Der Untergang" — a Valentine's Day shooting spree at a Halifax shopping mall, according to her former friends and a statement of facts in the case.
Randall Steven Shepherd is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his role in the mall attack plot. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
It's that plan to go on a murderous rampage at the Halifax Shopping Centre in 2015 that would lead to Souvannarath's downfall —
and a sentencing hearing that begins Monday in Nova Scotia Supreme Court.
Souvannarath pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder last April, several months after Randall Steven Shepherd — a Halifax man described in court as the "cheerleader" of the shooting plot — was sentenced to a decade in jail. A third alleged conspirator,
19-year-old James Gamble, was found dead in his Halifax-area home a day before the planned attack.
'There was no defence'
Luke Craggs, Souvannarath's defence attorney, said in an interview he is recommending a sentence of 12 to 14 years, with credit for time served, while he said the Crown is recommending 20 years to life in prison.
He said his client, now 26, decided to plead guilty after a failed bid to have some social media messages tossed out.
"Once the Facebook messages were ruled admissible, then there was no defence," he said. "Once you see some of the conversations between her and Mr. Gamble, you'll understand why they said that."
Lawyers for the Crown have said there were "hundreds of thousands of pages" of evidence in the case.
The start of the conspiracy
The conspiracy can be traced back to December 2014, when Souvannarath and Gamble began an online relationship, exchanging explicit intimate photographs and a fascination with mass shootings, a statement of facts in the Shepherd case said.
The two began plotting an attack. They talked about weapons, ammunition, clothes, the number of dead, "whether they would taunt the victims," and whether to upload pictures to the internet as the massacre unfolded, the document said.
The two picked the Halifax Shopping Centre because it meant "mass panic," it said. They would start at the food court, which they thought would give them the best cover, using guns owned by Gamble's father as well as a knife, the statement said.
The massacre was to end with their own suicides.
Shepherd wasn't part of these conversations, but he knew what they were planning, and offered to provide bottles for Molotov cocktails. He planned to kill himself before the attack.
American Lindsay Souvannarath started to develop an interest in Nazism in high school according to a former friend. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
Souvannarath left her home in Geneva, Ill., on Feb 13, 2015, and flew to Halifax on a one-way ticket, allegedly carrying her "death outfit" and books on serial killers in her luggage.
But the plan began to fall apart before she landed in Nova Scotia.
Acting on a tip, police surrounded Gamble's home outside Halifax. He agreed over the phone to come outside, but instead shot himself in the head.
Meanwhile, Shepherd went to the airport on a city bus to meet Souvannarath, but was arrested while waiting.
Officers also sent online photos of Souvannarath to border agents at the Halifax airport, instructing them to detain anyone matching her description arriving on a flight from Chicago via New York.
When Souvannarath arrived, she was detained by the Canada Border Services Agency.
The arrests made international headlines and shocked Nova Scotians. The spectre of shooters opening fire in the food court of a popular mall threatened thousands of shoppers and workers and unsettled the city for months.
'Would have changed the face of Halifax forever'
One judge noted that it was difficult to imagine a crime more damaging to a community's sense of peace and security, while a Crown lawyer said the "horrible plan would have changed the face of Halifax forever."
As police in Halifax investigated the conspiracy, officers in Illinois were called upon to search Souvannarath's suburban two-storey home.
"They asked us to conduct a search warrant for her house," Geneva Police Department Cmdr. Julie Nash said in an interview. "We retrieved some computers, electronic devices and things like that."
She added that Souvannarath was not known to local police.
'None of us were surprised'
Yet her arrest didn't come as a surprise to a small handful of high school friends.
"When we heard the news that she got arrested at the airport for what she was planning on doing, none of us were surprised," Sabrina Szigeti, a former friend, said in an interview from Aurora, Ill.
In high school, she said Souvannarath displayed a "creepy" interest in Nazis.
"I met Lindsay in the role playing club in my high school," Szigeti said. "We played Dungeons and Dragons and that sort of thing."
She said Souvannarath made other students uncomfortable when she insisted on playing a Nazi ghost.
"Most of us would play gentle giants and elves," she said. "It was really weird."
Szigeti said there were other clues she was troubled, such as comments she made that "stupid people deserved to die."
"She was in my writing club and her writing was so violent and gory and visceral," she said.
However, Szigeti said she was "very quiet in class" and that "none of the teachers could have known" how disturbed she was when she graduated in 2010.
Five days set aside for sentencing
A spokesman for Coe College, a liberal arts college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, confirmed that Souvannarath enrolled as a student in the fall of 2010 and graduated in 2014 with a bachelor of arts in English and creative writing.
Five days have been set aside for the 26-year-old's sentencing hearing at the Law Courts in Halifax.
On Monday, counsel will make submissions and read an agreed statement of facts into the record. The judge is expected to reserve his sentencing decision and come back later in the week.
Souvannarath is being held at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional facility in a Halifax-area industrial park, though Craggs said she will likely be transferred to a women's institution in southern Ontario after sentencing.
She's been in custody for just over three years.
SOURCE:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...-day-shooting-shopping-centre-court-1.4621122
As Valentine's Day mall plot sentencing begins, new details from court records
Nova Scotia prosecutors once planned to call lead investigator of Columbine massacre to testify
Blair Rhodes · CBC News · Posted: Apr 16, 2018 5:00 AM AT | Last Updated: 4 hours ago
Sentencing begins Monday for Lindsay Souvannarath, shown at Halifax provincial court in 2015, on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder connected with a planned Valentine's Day mass shooting at the Halifax Shopping Centre. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
The plan to bomb the Halifax Shopping Centre on Valentine's Day 2015 and open fire in the mall's food court was intended to mimic the 1999 Columbine massacre.
So much so that Nova Scotia prosecutors were preparing to bring the lead investigator from the infamous U.S. school shooting to Halifax to testify at the trial of two people charged in the shopping mall plot that was foiled by police.
That trial never went ahead after the pair pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, and this morning a sentencing hearing begins in Nova Scotia Supreme Court for the second plotter, Lindsay Souvannarath.
But records submitted to the court before Souvannarath's plea shed light on some of the strategy the Crown would have used at trial. They also detail how evidence of the woman's "affinity for Nazism" would be handled in court, and concerns over enforcing publication bans on pre-trial motions in a trial that likely would have draw international attention.
Souvannarath was 23 when she was arrested at Halifax Stanfield International Airport on Feb. 13, 2015, after flying to Nova Scotia from her home in Geneva, Ill. She has been in custody ever since.
A co-conspirator, Randall Shepherd, a 20-year-old who lived in Halifax, had gone to meet her there and was arrested at the same time. He is currently serving a
10-year prison sentence for his role in the plot.
A third man involved, James Gamble, 19, killed himself at his Timberlea, N.S., home as police surrounded the house on the day of the arrests.
Randall Steven Shepherd is serving a 10-year prison sentence for his role in the mall attack plot. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
The three were so-called "Columbiners," people who considered Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the perpetrators of the Colorado school shooting that killed 13 and injured another 21 — to be heroes.
According to the court documents, the Crown maintains Souvannarath, Shepherd and Gamble started discussing their conspiracy online just before Christmas 2014.
As the Crown made elaborate preparations for what promised to be a lengthy jury trial, they planned to bring to Halifax Kate Battan, the lead investigator of the Columbine shooting, in order to explain what happened there.
CBC News reached out to Battan to try to gain her perspective on the Halifax case, but a spokesperson declined the interview request.
As deadly as it was, Harris and Klebold wanted the Columbine attack to be much worse. They had constructed bombs they tried to detonate.
They had also intended to detonate cars crammed with explosives outside the school. The car bombs were supposed to go off after first responders arrived to deal with the first casualties. None of their bombs exploded as they had planned.
The conspiracy involved shooting and bomb attacks at the Halifax Shopping Centre in Halifax. (CBC)
Souvannarath's guilty plea a year ago caught prosecutors off guard, and came after a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge ruled the Crown could use evidence obtained from her home state of Illinois.
Acting on a request from police in Nova Scotia, American investigators obtained a search warrant to access Souvannarath's social media accounts, including Facebook.
The three Nova Scotia conspirators were hoping their planned attack on the mall would equal or exceed the carnage caused in Columbine, according to court documents.
Like their heroes, Souvannarath and Gamble planned to use Molotov cocktails in their attack on the mall food court, the court heard at Shepherd's sentencing hearing.
As Valentine's Day approached, Shepherd decided he would not participate in the actual attack, but agreed to supply the makings of the bombs. When he was arrested, he had a gas can, a whiskey bottle and a lighter in his possession.
But while Harris and Klebold carried a small arsenal of guns and knives, the Nova Scotia conspirators had only a rifle and shotgun.
'Affinity for Nazism'
The trial preparation records show other details and concerns about how the case against Souvannarath would unfold.
The Crown did not intend to call evidence about Souvannarath's "affinity for Nazism or other racially charged materials except to the extent that it is inextricably bound to the conspiracy."
While the Crown intended to use Souvannarath's Facebook conversations against her, it planned to edit sexually explicit photographs that were part of the social media exchange among the conspirators. The woman has been described as Gamble's online girlfriend.
In addition to the contents of her social media accounts, the Crown also planned to use statements Souvannarath gave to Canada Border Service officers when she arrived in Halifax and a statement she provided to an undercover operator.
Because of the high-profile nature of the conspiracy and the fact Souvannarath is from the United States, the court worried about whether international media would respect a publication ban imposed by a Canadian judge on reporting things such as pre-trial motions or in-trial hearings where the jury was not present.
A researcher prepared a report, citing the case of B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton, which also attracted attention from international media.
The report suggested the presiding judge give a more detailed, explicit warning about the applicable publication ban at the start of the trial.
None of these considerations or details were applicable, because the two surviving conspirators avoided a trial by entering guilty pleas.
SOURCE:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...ack-lindsay-souvannarath-sentencing-1.4618021