Tag: eric frein
Suspected Cop-Killer Frein Taken Into Custody

Suspected Cop-Killer Frein Taken Into Custody

By Laura McCrystal and Mike Newall, The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)

PHILADELPHIA — Eric Frein, the suspected cop-killer who for six weeks was the target of a Poconos manhunt involving more than 1,000 law enforcement officers, surrendered Thursday after being discovered hiding in an abandoned airplane hangar, officials said.

A search team found Frein at the hangar at Birchwood Resort in Tannersville, Pa. U.S. marshals led the search team, two sources confirmed. Frein was unarmed and surrendered without incident, the sources said, and was expected to be transferred to nearby Pike County.

The site — on a near-deserted country road — remained an active crime scene Thursday night, with a road leading to the resort blocked off and law enforcement vehicles driving and in out. A group of police officers huddled at the entrance of the abandoned resort, and patrol cars, lights flashing, lined the road.

Pennsylvania State Police spokeswoman Trooper Connie Devens confirmed Frein was in custody but would not elaborate.

Edward Hanko, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia division, said no shots were fired and no one was hurt during the arrest.

At a late-night news conference, Gov. Tom Corbett and law enforcement officials discussed the manhunt and the arrest. Corbett thanked investigators for their hard work over the last several weeks.

“I particularly want to thank the residents of Northeastern Pennsylvania . . . whose patience, whose tolerance, and whose perseverance have been a tremendous support and lift to the law enforcement personnel,” Corbett said. “You have demonstrated the very best of Pennsylvania.”

He added: “Let me assure you . . . justice will be served.”

A photo of Frein that surfaced after his capture showed him sitting next to a trooper in the back of a car with long dark hair, a thin beard, and what appeared to be a bloodied cut across the bridge of his nose.

The image was in stark contrast to the photos that for weeks had circulated on billboards, the Internet, and the FBI’s Most Wanted List as agents combed the dense Pocono woods: the 31-year-old self-described survivalist, clean-shaven and smiling, and wearing European military garb.

Police say Frein, a fan of Cold War military re-enactments, fatally shot State Police Cpl. Bryon Dickson and wounded Trooper Alex Douglass in a Sept. 12 ambush outside the state police barracks in Blooming Grove.

Three days after the shooting, investigators found a Jeep stuck in the mud, and documents inside that identified Frein as the driver.

Thus began a laborious but tightly focused search that involved investigators from across the country, cost several million dollars, and disrupted daily routines and crippled the tourist business during the peak fall-foliage season. Schools were intermittently closed, and residents became accustomed to regular roadblocks and SWAT team personnel tiptoeing through their neighborhoods.

The manhunt included officers from state and local police, the FBI, U.S. marshals, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies. Tactical teams from other states rotated in and out of the Poconos.

More than once, police said they had found evidence that suggested they were closing in Frein: Serbian cigarettes he was said to favor, two pipe bombs, an AK-47 assault rifle, clothing, and other clues that he wasn’t far away. They said he survived on tuna and ramen noodles, and at least once turned on his cell phone, a misstep that enabled them to tighten their search radius to a five-square-mile area of Pike and Monroe Counties.

But despite multiple sightings, sometimes even by officers at close range, Frein was able to slip back into the woods — a terrain he had studied while growing up in Canadensis. The woods are so dense in some areas that officers tracking him could not see one another from 10 or 15 feet away, police said, and they had to sling their rifles over their shoulders to crawl through the underbrush.

The attack and retreat, police said, had been planned for years. In Frein’s bedroom, they said, they found a book on sniper training. They cited other evidence that he had searched the Internet in 2012 and 2013 for information on police raids, cellphone tracking, and manhunt tactics.

Two weeks ago, officials said they had recovered journal pages handwritten by Frein at a campsite that they said reinforced their resolve to find him. “I will tell you, after reading this cold-blooded and absolutely chilling account, I can only describe Eric Frein’s actions as pure evil,” said State Police Col. George Bivens, who became the public face of the probe.

The journal, they said, offered the most compelling evidence to date of Frein’s premeditation. It did not say why he targeted the barracks, they said, although the writings suggest Frein did not know the troopers he attacked.

Authorities recently added charges against Frein for possession of two weapons of mass destruction. Those are on top of the murder and attempted-murder charges, among others, that Frein faces when he finally ends up in a courtroom.

It was not known when that would be.

In a statement after the arrest, Pennsylvania State Troopers Association President Joseph R. Kovel said: “If you attack troopers, and a civilized society, the Pennsylvania State Police will bring you to justice. Eric Frein is a coward. Cpl. Bryon K. Dickson II and Trooper Alex T. Douglass are true heroes.”

(Inquirer staff writers Ben Finley and Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.)

AFP Photo/Tom Mihalek

Fox News Causes America To Fixate On The Wrong Things

Fox News Causes America To Fixate On The Wrong Things

A grisly beheading at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma last week reinforced some Americans’ greatest current fear: that the Islamic State terrorist group has infiltrated the U.S. Murder suspect Alton Nolen severed the head of his victim, just as an ISIS killer severed the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker, among many other victims of the Islamist group. Coupled with Nolen’s reported ties to Islam, that was enough to warrant FBI involvement. Although the agency hasn’t yet determined Nolen’s motive, it doesn’t believe that he represents a further threat to us by ISIS or Islamists. But Fox News sees things differently.

“Sounding the jihadist alarms, Fox News and the right-wing media are eager to label the ghastly crime an act of Islamic terror,” writes Eric Boehlert on the liberal watchdog website Media Matters. “Law enforcement officials, however, aren’t in the same rush, noting that the attack came immediately after Nolen was fired and stating that they’ve yet to find a link to terrorism.”

Boehlert goes on to contrast Fox News’s coverage of the Oklahoma beheading with its coverage of an actual terrorist attack. On Sept. 16, marksman and anti-government extremist Eric Frein allegedly murdered one cop and attempted to kill another two. Hiding out in the Pocono Mountains, officials say Frein is “extremely dangerous” and perhaps in possession of an AK-47.

“We have a well-trained sniper who hates authority, hates society, hates government, and hates cops enough to plug them from ambush. He’s so lethal, so locked and loaded, that communities in the Pocono Mountains feel terrorized,” said Philadelphia columnist Dick Polman. According to the criminal complaint, Frein also collected “various information concerning foreign embassies.”

According to Boehlert’s research, Fox News only mentioned Frein and his killing spree six times in the two weeks since the shooting, and in none of those reports were the assassin’s anti-government sentiments even noted.

Ever since 2008, when Barack Obama began his first term in the White House, Fox News has been building a narrative to destroy him and his legacy. The president is routinely portrayed as having an alarmingly lax stance toward terrorism. Some conservative pundits even stoop so low as to emphasize his middle name, Hussein, to rile up Islamophobic viewers. If details of a story — or the story itself — don’t align with Fox’s ulterior purpose, they’re omitted.

Just as the most important news of the day receives front-page coverage in newspapers, it tends to be allotted the most time in newscasts, signaling its relative importance. Fox News has dedicated hours upon hours to covering the Oklahoma beheading. With such headlines as “Terror in the Heartland,” Boehlert argues, Fox politicized a tragic killing, which investigators reckon was nothing more than a disgruntled ex-employee gone berserk.

“In other words,” notes Boehlert, “on Fox News a Muslim who killed a co-worker in Oklahoma and who remains in police custody represents a much bigger story than a suspected anti-government assassin who killed a cop and remains on the run, eluding hundreds of law enforcement officials while terrorizing a Pennsylvania community.”

The Fox coverage of Nolen’s crime was only the latest in a long history of journalistic misconduct (if the word “journalistic” even applies). To tarnish Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state as well as her reputation before the next presidential election, the network aired almost 1,100 segments on Benghazi across five programs between the date the attack occurred and the formation of a select committee last May to investigate it, according to another Media Matters report. Even though no evidence of a cover-up was found over the course of 13 hearings and 50 briefings, 41 percent of Republicans continue to call Benghazi the biggest scandal in U.S. history, according to the results of a PPP poll.

Fox News had been equally powerful in convincing its viewers of the voter fraud “problem” in America, a problem “more rare than death by lightning,” a study by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice finds. Nevertheless, Fox spearheaded the crusade for the enactment of voter ID laws – motivated, one can reasonably assume, to suppress Democratic votes.

The results of a 2013 Gallup poll showed Fox News to be the nation’s leading news source, while a 2012 survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind revealed viewers of Fox News to be worse informed than even those who watch no news at all.

In April, CNN’s Peter Bergen observed that since 9/11, “extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies … have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology.” But because the top dogs at America’s No. 1 right-wing news channel are better served touting the improbable threat that ISIS poses to the homeland, the network elects to keep its viewers in the dark, distracting them from actual threats: the millions of unlicensed guns, unabated climate change, armed anti-government fanatics, and, of course, all the irrational fixations of Fox News.

Aimee Kuvadia is an editor and freelance journalist covering issues of national and political interest. She earned her M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. Follow her on Twitter @aimeekuvadia.

Photo: ario via Flickr

Want more political news and analysis? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!