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March 16, 2009

If at First You Don't Succeed...

On Valentine’s Day, 35 year-old Frank Garcia drove into the parking lot of the Lakeside Memorial Hospital parking lot in Brockport, New York, at approximately 5:00 AM. Just four days earlier, Garcia had been fired from his nursing position at the hospital, and he wasted little time before exiting his vehicle and physically attacking Mary Silliman, 23, a former co-worker who was on a break. Two individuals who were driving by the hospital at that moment, Randal Norman and Audra Dillion, saw Garcia beating Silliman and stopped to help. When they got out of their car, Garcia opened fire with a .40-caliber Glock pistol, killing Norman and Silliman. Audra Dillion was also shot, but she managed to drive herself to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where she recovered from her injuries.

Garcia was not done yet. He then drove 50 miles to Canandaigua, New York, where he went door-to door looking for the home of another former co-worker. Garcia eventually found Kimberly Glatz and her husband Christopher and shot the couple execution-style after terrorizing the entire family, including Glatz’s 14 year-old daughter and 13 year-old son. Kimberly Glatz worked with Garcia while he was a part-time nursing supervisor at Wesley Gardens nursing home in Rochester. Garcia was fired from this position in October 2008.

The rampage finally ended when Garcia was arrested after negotiating his surrender by cell phone. He has been charged with a total of four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of second-degree kidnapping, and one count of attempted murder.

After the shootings, it was revealed that Garcia possessed a permit to carry a concealed handgun in New York. Officials reportedly denied Garcia’s request for a permit three times before granting him one in 2007. He was first denied a permit in 1994 after omitting information about his criminal record on his application, including arrests for criminal possession of a weapon, assault, and harassment. He then filed two more permit requests in 2001 and 2006 that were denied because of “omission[s] of fact” and because it was determined that Garcia “lack[ed] moral character.”

In a letter written prior to the 2001 denial, Garcia told a local judge about his enjoyment of the “works of Jefferson, J. locke, madison, and Hamilton” and “the organic Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Garcia also discusses his need to protect himself with a gun in light of his view that “executive atthoraties/police officers are not bond to protect me. 95% of the time there are in pursut of the perpetrator and 5% arrive late when needed. So you see. I have no-one but myself for my own protection, especially in the city of Rochester.” At the end of the letter, Garcia offers to produce “Public-law 89-297” at an upcoming hearing, which, he claims, “calls for the total disarmament of our sovereign nation, from citizens to the military. This is all part of the New world order agenda.”

Garcia’s successful 2007 request for a permit was initially denied. However, judicial hearing officer and longtime Judge Charles Maloy reversed the denial and granted Garcia the right to carry a concealed weapon. The county court judge who initially denied the permit had the right to review the case but instead signed the permit in April 2007.

Judge Maloy has yet to explain why he issued Garcia a concealed carry permit, but it is clear that this permit offered no “protection” to Garcia or anyone else. Instead, it endangered an entire community that has now paid a terrible and unimaginable price.

2 comments:

  1. What did the Garcia CCW permit have to do with his killing spree? A permit is just a plastic card that removes the legal penalty for carrying a concealed weapon in public. It doesn't grant anyone special powers. Garcia wasn't concerned with the laws against murder, so he clearly would not care about laws against carrying weapons in public if he didn't have a permit.

    A person who plans to kill people can do it just as easily without a CCW permit as they can with it. If fact, having a permit makes it harder, because it requires you to provide vital information to cops that can be used to arrest you if you ever commit a crime

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  2. Thanks for your comment, thestaplegunkid9. Obviously, Frank Garcia did care about New York’s laws concerning the carrying of concealed weapons. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have applied for a concealed carry permit not once, but a total of four times before finally being approved in 2007. And that permit clearly emboldened him to carry a handgun in public, as it made it legal for him to do so.

    The question of precisely when Garcia snapped and decided to kill is harder to pin down. He did not exit his car at the Lakeside Memorial Hospital firing his weapon. The incident began with a verbal argument between Garcia and former co-worker Mary Silliman, who was on a break outside the hospital. This then escalated into Garcia physically beating Silliman. Randal Norman and Audra Dillion then drove into the parking lot to help Silliman, and it was only at that point that Garcia opened fire with his .40-caliber Glock.

    When did Garcia first decide to employ lethal force? We don’t know. But we do know that if a gun not been present during the confrontation at Lakeside Memorial Hospital, the situation probably would have resulted in a simple assault/battery case with no fatalities. And we also know that the state of New York permitted Garcia to carry his handgun in public despite a disturbing background that included criminal offenses, blatant misstatements of fact, and evidence of mental instability.

    As we state up front in our “Ordinary People” series of blogs, the gun lobby continues to assert that concealed carry permit holders make their communities safer—that they are not just law-abiding, but the most law-abiding citizens in America. The stories we continue to see on a regular basis suggest that this is not the case, however—that in fact the screening for concealed carry permit holders, in many jurisdictions, is no more vigorous than for gun purchasers. We believe there needs to be a far greater emphasis on public safety in extending these permits, and policies which demonstrate an equal respect for the rights of unarmed Americans. - CSGV

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