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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 7,720
Default Mentally unstable? Here, have a gun!!!


SEATTLE -- The man who opened fire inside the Jewish Federation in
Seattle was found guilty Monday morning in his second trial.

After deliberating for three days following the end of the trial last
week, a King County jury found Naveed Haq guilty of murder, five
counts of attempted murder, unlawful imprisonment
and malicious harassment.

Haq, 34, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the July 2006
shootings, in which Pam Waechter, the federation's 58-year-old
campaign director, was killed. Five employees - Cheryl Stumbo, Carol
Goldman, Dayna Klein, Christina Rexroad and Layla Bush - were wounded.

Haq's first trial ended last year with jurors deadlocked on whether he
was legally insane during the shooting spree on July 28, 2006.

In the second trial, jurors had to decide whether Haq should be
convicted and go to prison - or found not guilty by reason of insanity
and go to a mental hospital.

This time, prosecutors reduced the number of charges and a judge
allowed them to play recordings of Naveed Haq's phone conversations
with his mother while he was in jail.

In one conversation, he is heard to say, "Whatever, mom - I did it
purposefully." His mother says, "No, no, no, no." Haq says, "No, mom,
I did it by purpose. You'd be proud of me. Now I'm going to heaven."

Haq drove from his eastern Washington home to Seattle the day of the
attack and forced a teenage girl at gunpoint to let him into the
Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Once in the second-floor office,
he opened fire, shooting some people in their cubicles, some in the
hall and one, Pamela Waechter, fatally as she fled down a stairwell.

Prosecutors acknowledged Haq's history of mental illness, but focused
his opening statement on Haq's preparations in an effort to show that
his mind was clear that day.

Haq made several trips to gun stores in the weeks prior to the attack,
wrote two documents on his father's computer criticizing Israel and
U.S. policy in the Middle East and used MapQuest to find directions to
the center from his family's home in Pasco, 180 miles east of Seattle.

On his way to the Jewish center, he pulled off Interstate 5 and
test-fired his gun, prosecutors said, and when pulled over for driving
down a bus-only street in rush hour, he seemed normal to a police
officer.

In a recorded phone conversation after the shooting, Raz said, Haq
told his mother, "I did a very good thing. I did it for a good
reason."