After a Halloween party shooting, focus on Airbnb policy draws outrage
Five days after a mass shooting at an Airbnb in a small, wealthy community left five people dead, residents across California’s Bay Area are frustrated by the police response and the focus on Airbnb policies rather than the victims.
The five partygoers killed in the shooting at a Halloween party in the city of Orinda on Thursday evening were in their late teens and 20s, and had come to Orinda from other less-affluent Bay Area towns, including Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo, Pittsburg and Antioch. An Instagram advertisement for the “Airbnb Mansion Party” circulating on social media, made it clear that the party’s organizers, and many of the attendees, were black.
“If her name was Alison instead of Tiyon, if his name was Michael instead of Omar, if these children were white or it was one of your kids, would you still be OK with this coverage?” said Cheryl Sudduth, a Bay Area resident and commissioner of the county’s
Racial Justice Oversight Body. “I guarantee the answer is not yes.”
“People see a white child as a victim, but a black child is seen as part of the circumstances. People say, ‘What do you think happens when you have a party with more than a few of you?’” she said.
On Monday, law enforcement still had not made any arrests, or even told the public whether there were one or multiple suspects in the quintuple murder, which claimed the lives of a beloved young local DJ 24-yearold Omar Taylor, 19-year-old Oshiana Thompkins, 22-year-old Tiyon Farley, 29-year-old Javin County, and 23-yearold Raymon Hill Jr.
The Orinda police chief’s first message at a news conference on Friday was reassurance to local residents: “We haven’t been able to confirm how many suspects there are,” chief David Cook said, but, “we have no reason to believe they were from Orinda.”
Local officials have yet to provide any public details about the possible shooter or shooters, what type of firearm was used, or even how many people in total were injured because some of the injured may have driven or been taken to the hospital by car rather than ambulance.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Tuesday that law enforcement officials were investigating whether the shooting was connected to another shooting in San Francisco in 2015 that left four young people dead.
At a Orinda city council meeting on Tuesday evening, much of the conversation focused on the policies for shortterm rentals.
Darrion Jones, a 25-year-old native of Richmond told the Guardian he believed one of the only reasons the Orinda Halloween shooting made the national news in the first place was because it happened in a small, wealthy town with little history of gun violence.
But the reaction that followed the media coverage was not the typical reaction to a mass shooting, he said.
“What bothers is me that innocent lives were lost and on Twitter you
usually see all these ‘pray for’ hashtags. But this wasn’t that,” Jones said.
“No matter what the situation was [the shooter] killed innocent people and it doesn’t have the same impact because it’s black kids. That’s the bottom line,” said Jones, who says his first experience with losing someone to gun violence was during his freshman year of high school.
“[If ] it’s an inner-city area, that kind of stuff gets looked over because people think it’s common,” Jones said. “But it deserves the same attention as people whose lives are lost in other areas.”
Christine Chalmers, an Orinda resident who lives just four houses away from the Airbnb where the shooting took place, said that some of her neighbors’ reactions to the violence left her disappointed.
“Part of what we love about Orinda is how close we are to so many parts of the Bay Area. So then to retreat into ‘We don’t have that here’ feels like a betrayal of our larger Bay Area community,” Chalmers said.
Chalmers recalls looking out of her window around 2.30am, about five hours after the shooting, as police gathered witness statements. She says she saw party-goers trying to stay warm and heard the sounds of people sobbing.
“I can’t describe how horrible that is,” Chalmers said.
Afterwards, Chalmers said, the “ungenerous” comments she’s heard about the shooting from some of her neighbors left her saddened, but not surprised.
“I don’t know any community that’s immune from racism and white supremacy,” she said.
But the Orinda resident challenged the notion that the majority of her neighbors were more concerned about disruption from chaotic Airbnb parties than the lives that had been lost.
There is a large faction of Orinda residents who are collecting donations, beautifying memorials, and sharing links to GoFundMe pages for the five victims, Chalmers said.
“I think the majority of people in Orinda that I’ve interacted with feel that these are our losses. I think it’s a very small group who feel otherwise.”
In a 2018 study of gun violence coverage in the San Francisco Bay area, researchers with the Berkeley Media Studies group found that the overrepresentation of young black and Latino males as victims and perpetrators of gun violence can reinforce harmful racial stereotypes, including the belief that gun violence is an inevitable part of life for communities of color, rather than a preventable issue.
“They’ll tell you as if you’re talking about the weather,” Sudduth says of some news coverage about gun violence victims of color who are from lower-income communities.
“There was another shooting in East Palo Alto, four more people died. Tomorrow, the sun will set at 6pm. Like it’s no big deal,” Sudduth continues.
The Gun Violence Archive, a notfor-profit that produces national data on shootings using public media reports, describes a mass shooting as any instance during which four or more people are shot. By their definition, there have been more than 330 mass shootings in the United States this year, more than one a day.
But the victim count alone does not determine which mass shootings are treated as national tragedies, with major news coverage and response from lawmakers. Activists say there have long been stark racial and class disparities in which shootings are seen as high-profile incidents – and which victims are seen as “innocent”.
Race is certainly one of the factors that can lead to inconsistencies in the way mass shootings are reported on and the amount of attention they garner, said Jim MacMillan, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism who examines the way gun violence is covered by news media.
“There is a discrepancy in coverage,” MacMillan says. “If you think all of the mass shootings that have gotten collective national coverage and you can pick up a national newspaper and see all the faces the next day. They’re not usually black faces.”
It deserves the same attention as people whose lives are lost in other areas.
man named Steve Bannon.”
The contacts continued until close to election day as Trump struggled in the opinion polls. According to the prosecutor, “Roger Stone emailed campaign chairman Paul Manafort to save, in Stone’s words, ‘Trump’s ass’. And he emailed Bannon about a way he had to win this but ‘it wasn’t pretty’.”
The prosecutor argued that Stone relied on Corsi and conservative radio host Randy Credico as intermediaries with the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, although he later lied about the sequence of events and tried to make Credico the fall guy.
But as House investigators closed in, Stone pressured Credico to cover his tracks. He threatened him and and even his dog. He also asked him to “do a Frank Pentangeli”, a reference to a character in The Godfather Part II who falsely claims he cannot remember anything.
Stone also told Credico not to comply with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In an email on 25 January last year, Stone wrote to Credico: “Waste of your time – tell him to go fuck himself.” Credico replied: “Who?”
Stone said: “Mueller.”
Stone has pleaded not guilty to charges of obstructing justice, witness tampering and lying to the committee.
Stone’s defence lawyer, Bruce Rogow, defended his client’s contacts with Bannon, Gates and the defence contractor Erik Prince. “We’ll let the evidence reflect what those relationships were and whether there was any corrupt intent in it,” he said.What linked the group, he argued, was a combined effort to get Trump elected. “That is not a crime.”Rogow pleaded with the jury to consider the context of Stone’s testimony to the House intelligence committee. “We are talking about his state of mind that the Russians did not collude with him or with the Trump campaign, and that’s how he goes into this,” Rogow said.
The first witness called by the prosecution was Michelle Taylor, a former FBI agent who worked on the case. She testified that on 14 June 2016, the day the Washington Post reported Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee, there were three phone calls between Trump and Stone. The content of the calls is unknown.
Taylor also described emails between Stone, Corsi, Credico, Bannon, Manafort and Prince that suggested a politically crucial WikiLeaks dump was imminent. Credico sent a text on 3 October 2016 to Stone that alleged Clinton “will kill without conscience the same way Luca Brasi did” – another Godfather reference. Credico also sent photos of himself outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange was holed up.
Sitting in court, Stone looked at the exhibits as they were displayed on computer monitors, sometimes taking handwritten notes.
The case resumes at 9.30am on Thursday.