Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/708348
ByTamaraLush TheAssociatedPress FORT MYERS, FLA. Acou- pleofdoorsdownfromClub Blu,whereayoungmanand a14-year-oldboywerekilled while attending a teen party, shop owner Idis Ed- ouard hoisted a rod above his head to gently move a girl's blue dress aside. "The bullet was there," he said, pointing to a spot on the ceiling. "And there. It shattered that window." The pock-marks were from another mass shoot- ing, not connected to the club, a couple of years ago. Both shootings remind Ed- ouard, a Haitian immi- grant, that the city he has called home for several de- cades may be increasingly unsafe. In the past year, there have been at least six shootings in the area, a place known more for its stunningGulfbeachesthan for gun violence. On Sunday, Club Blu hosted a swimsuit-themed party in hopes of providing a safe place for kids in an alcohol-free venue with se- curity. As the club was clos- ing around 12:30 a.m. Mon- day and parents were arriv- ingtopickuptheirchildren, gunfire erupted. Two were slain and 17 others, ranging in age from 12 to 27, were wounded. Police have not released a motive, saying only that it wasn'tterrorism.Threeper- sonsofinterestwerebooked on unrelated charges. Eager to show concern about the violence, officials opened a fund to assist the families. The TOGETHER FortMyersFundhadraised over $10,000 by Tuesday af- ternoon, said Sarah Owen, president and CEO of the Southwest Florida Commu- nity Foundation. The foundation has al- ways beenreadytorespond tonaturaldisasters,butcre- ating a fund for shooting victims is new, Owen said. "There'sthisgeneralfeel- ing in the community that everybody's heart-broken, feeling like, 'What can we do?'" Owen said. In Fort Myers, a string of shootings started in Sep- tember, with seven people suffering gunshot wounds during four separate shoot- ings over a seven-hour pe- riod. A shooting during a zombie festival in Octo- ber killed one person and wounded five others. In March,fourpeoplesurvived a shooting at a park. Overall, crime in Florida has been on the decline, as Gov. Rick Scott noted dur- inganewsconferenceMon- day. "The positive is we are at a 45-year low in our crime rate.Thenegatives—Ican't imagine this happening to any person in our state," he said. But while overall crime might be down, violent crime in Lee County for 2015 spiked more than 6 percent compared with the year before. There are about 700,000 people in the county and about 74,000 in Fort Myers, which is home to a palm tree-lined downtown and spring training for the Bos- ton Red Sox and Minnesota Twins. In Fort Myers, about 55percentofthepopulation is white and 32 percent is black. Most of those at the club were African-Ameri- can. ClubBluislocatedincen- tral Fort Myers, within city limits. It's not in the high- est-crime neighborhoods, but business owners and residents say the area has changed. Once a sleepy retiree community, Lee County has gone through rapid boom-and-bust cycles in recent decades. "Thisusedtobethemain corridor of business," said Richard Lawrence, an em- ployee of a plumbing parts store that's located next door to Club Blu. Car dealerships used to dot the area, but when the countygrew,sodidthebusi- nesses.Thedealershipsand other stores left the area a decade or two ago for more advantageouslocationsfur- ther south. Stores in strip malls,suchastheonehome to Club Blu and the plumb- ing store, were left half empty. Former dealerships turned into churches. Lee County was among the hardest hit in the na- tion for foreclosures during the recession, and with the foreclosures came unem- ployment. Over the years, drugs and gangs have crept in — although locals aren't exactlysureifonehadtodo with the other. "A lot of this stuff you read about Fort Myers, it's drug- and gang-related," the 63-year-old Lawrence said. "I'm an old guy, and I gotta tell you, in my day, youmighthavepeoplefight. But youdidn't shootpeople. Now, they just don't value life." Lawrence questioned why a teen night would be held at a nightclub, or why parents would allow such young children to be out that late. Unemployment, a lack of education and easy access to guns are all part of the problem, said pastor Wil- liam Glover of Fort Myers. "We have to move away from the idea that this is a single issue problem," he said. "Like most of the so- cial issues we're dealing with, there's no single so- lution." On Tuesday, the national televisionlivetruckshadva- cated the strip mall's park- ing lot, leaving only the lo- cal stations. A makeshift memorial with flowers and stuffedanimalshadsprung up on a planter outside the entrance,andagarbagecan overflowedwithjournalists' empty plastic water bottles and Starbucks bags. Authorities called in police cadets to comb the parking lot for clues, and under a hot Florida sun, they fanned out past the two signs at the entrance to the strip mall. One was a "space for lease" sign, while the other read: "We come to you: concealed weapon permit." SHOOTING By Geoff Mulvihill and Megan Trimble The Associated Press PHILADELPHIA Unmoved by Bernie Sanders' plea for party unity behind Hillary Clinton, thousands of Sand- ers supporters chanting "Bernie or bust!" took to the streets under the hot sun Tuesday for another round of protests on Day 2 of the Democratic convention. They held a midday rally at City Hall, then made their way down Broad Street to the convention site. By early evening, a large crowd had formed outside the subway station closest to the Wells Fargo Center as the delegates in- side the hall were on the verge of nominating Clin- ton for president. The crowd consisted of an assortment of protest- ers espousing a variety of causes, but mostly Sanders supporters and other Clin- ton foes on the left. Some gathered around a radio to hear what was happening inside the hall, and when Clinton's name was placed in nomination, a chant of "Nominate Sanders!" went up. Earlier in the day, partic- ipants at the rally charged that Sanders was cheated out of the nomination by Clinton, and they said they weren't swayed by his Mon- day night plea to his sup- porters to fall in line be- hind Clinton for the good of the country. "He persuaded no one to vote for Hillary," said Greg Gregg, a retired 69-year- old nurse from Salem, Or- egon. He said he intends to cast his ballot in Novem- ber for Green Party candi- date Jill Stein, quoting the turn-of-the-last-century so- cialist labor leader Eugene Debs as saying, "I'd rather vote for what I want and lose than what I don't want and win." For a brief period Tues- day afternoon, "Bernie or bust" demonstrators who set out for the convention site by subway were forced by police to get off one stop short of their destination. In a crowd-control mea- sure that was also used the night before, only passen- gers with media or conven- tion credentials were al- lowed to ride all the way to the Wells Fargo Center. The longstanding bitter- ness between the Vermont senator's supporters and Clinton's seemed to grow worse over the past few days after a trove of hacked emails showed that officials at the Democratic National Committee played favor- ites during the primaries and worked to undermine Sanders' campaign. Black Men for Bernie founder Bruce Carter said Monday's speeches from Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not persuade him to sup- port Clinton. "They really agitate peo- ple more every time they stand up and do the Hillary Clinton, hoo-rah hoo-rah," he said. Carter, a Dallas res- ident, said he doesn't fear a Donald Trump presidency: "I've lived under nine white presidents in my lifetime." With temperatures climbing again toward the mid-90s, Chris Scully, a 28-year-old an engineer from Troy, New York, held a "Jill Before Hill" sign out- side City Hall and said he opposes Clinton because of her war record as secretary of state. As Scully spoke, a passer- by called out: "That's a vote for Trump!" A separate protest, this one against police brutal- ity and racial injustice, took shape in north Philadelphia near the Temple Univer- sity campus, where about 500 people began march- ing down Broad Street to- ward City Hall. The march- ers planned to link up with the "Bernie of bust" demon- strators. Protest leader Erica Mines told the crowd it was an "anti-police rally" and a "black and brown resistance march" and in- structed all white people to move to the back. The crowd chanted, "Don't vote for Hillary! She's killing black people!" March participant Ti- ara Willis, 24, of Philadel- phia, said she subscribes to the slogan "I'm with her ... I guess," explaining that she supports Sanders' call to back Clinton. She said she won't back Trump and called Clinton "the lesser of two evils." On Monday evening, 54 people were cited for disor- derly conduct for trying to climb the barricades out- side the convention cen- ter during a pro-Sand- ers demonstration. Police estimated 5,500 people took part in the conven- tion's opening-day protests around the city. Many of them chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, the DNC has got to go!" and carried signs reading "Never Hill- ary," "Just Go to Jail Hill- ary" and "You Lost Me at Hillary." CONVENTION Sanders supporters unmoved by plea to unify behind Clinton By Raphael Satter The Associated Press PARIS Experts who've fol- lowed the leak of Demo- cratic National Committee documents say they believe the party's claim that Mos- cow had a hand in the hack, lending weight to the ex- traordinary allegation that theKremlinistryingtotam- per with the U.S. presiden- tial contest. "You're left with all the signs pointing to Moscow," said Matt Tait, a U.K.-based cybersecurity consultant who has put in roughly 20 hours combing through the leaked DNC documents. Tait and others invoke several categories of evi- dence. The first was pro- vided by threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike, an Irvine, Californiacompanythatwas hired by the Democrats to clean out the party's net- work. It delivered a report last month identifying Rus- sia's intelligence services as being behind two separate electronic break-ins at the DNC. The second category of evidence was provided by electronic fingerprints on some of the documents sug- gesting the files had been run through Russian lan- guage-configuredmachines. Most convincing for Tait was evidence that the inter- net infrastructure tied the DNC hackers to a separate campaign that targeted Ger- many's parliament last year. In May, Germany's domes- tic intelligence chief took the unusual step of pub- licly blaming that attack on Moscow, saying the Kremlin wasn't just spying — it was gearing up for sabotage. "More than anything else I think (that) really puts to rest the 'Who is this?'" Tait said Tuesday. "It's one thing to say that they were typing stuff in Russian or they were coming from a Russian IP (internet protocol) address or their systems were con- figured in Russian. It's an- other thing to say this was being run by the same serv- ers being publicly attributed by German intelligence as being Russian." Hillary Clinton's cam- paign, citing CrowdStrike, blamed Russia for hack- ing the party's computers and suggested the goal was to benefit Donald Trump's campaign. Trump tweeted Tuesday thattheDemocratsweretry- ingto"deflectthehorrorand stupidity" of the leak, calling the suggestion "crazy!" A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesdaycalledtheallegation "paranoid." WikiLeaksfounderJulian Assange,whobeganpublish- ing thousands of the emails last week, said Monday that there was "no proof" Russia was behind the hack. On Tuesday, leaders of the Senate Judiciary Com- mittee pressed the FBI and Justice Department for details on the investi- gation, including how and when federal investigators learned of the breach and what action is being taken in response. Assigning blame in the world of cyberespionage is extraordinarily difficult. Some of the clues uncovered by Tait are easy to forge and attackers routinely use mis- direction to lead investiga- tors astray. Others in the field are wary of companies such as CrowdStrike, which may face pressure from cli- ents or investors to spin gripping stories about gov- ernment hackers with code- names like "Fancy Bear" or "APT28." "I don't like circumstan- tial evidence when it comes to blaming a foreign gov- ernment," said Jeffrey Carr, the chief executive of Taia Global, a threat intelligence company. Carr rejected the idea of tying the DNC at- tackers to previous breaches based on their tools or their methods, saying it was "like finding a gun that was used in the commission of a crime. Anybody could be pulling the trigger." So far the only public claim of responsibility for the breach has come from a previously unknown ac- tor calling himself Guccifer 2.0. The self-described lone Romanian hacker has up- loaded several tranches of DNCmaterialtoawebsitein the past month and boasted of handing a larger trove to WikiLeaks. Guccifer 2.0 has not re- sponded to repeated mes- sages from The Associated Press, but doubts about his story are growing. On Tues- day,ThreatConnect,anintel- ligence firm based in Arling- ton, Virginia, said it found evidencethatthehackerwas communicating with jour- nalists via a dedicated vir- tual private network based out of Russia. Motherboard journalist Lorenzo Fran- ceschi-Bicchierai said the hacker stumbled through an interview over Twitter when quizzed in Romanian last month. "We showed it to half a dozen Romanians and no one had one iota of a doubt that the person behind the keyboard was not Roma- nian," Franceschi-Bicchie- rai said in an email. CYBERSECURITY Experts see merit in claims of Russian hacking LYNNESLADKY—THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Florida Gov. Rick Scott makes a statement at a news conference in response to a deadly shooting outside the Club Blu nightclub in Fort Myers, Florida, on Monday. Violence at club signals changing city in southwest Florida JOHN MINCHILLO — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders listens during a rally near City Hall in Philadelphia on Tuesday during the second day of the Democratic National Convention. CALIC#778199 GERBER 385-1153 HINKLE ROOFING & CONSTRUCTION, INC Round Up Saloon Round Up Saloon 610WashingtonSt. Red Bluff Supporting Farmers Market with live music on Wednesdaynites call for dates (530) 527-9901 (530) 529-1220 100 Jackson St. Red Bluff Water Aerobic Classes Monthly Special $ 28 00 a month No Enrollment Fee Stop by or call for information ARetirementCommunity 750 David Avenue Red Bluff, CA. 96080 (530) 527-9193 www.tehamaestatesretirement.com Tours Provided Daily 607MainStreet,RedBluff 527-0772 DailyCheeseburger Special with Fries 11am to 3pm $ 5.29 Senior Breakfast Special 6:30am to 11am $ 5.99 TUSCANPOOL SUPPLY MonthlyPoolService Equipment Upgrades and more Licensed, Bonded & Insured CLS#944446 40 CHESTNUT AVENUE (530) 527-3262 Bankruptcy: $ 899 (Forindividualchapter7does not include filing fee) Flexible Payment Arrangements Free Consultations LawOfficesof DerekD.Soriano Offices also in Chico, Willows 530-402-8281 Hablamos Espanol : 530.636.2529 derek.soriano@dereksoriano.com Smog Check (MOST CARS & PICK-UPS) 527-9841 • 195 S. Main St. starting at $ 29 95 + $ 8 25 certificate Shop Equipped With 4SmogMachines For Fast Service No appointment Needed We Do Alignments, Brakes, Shocks, Struts, Oil Changes, Suspension, Trailer Repairs, Batteries & Wipers 530 529-0797 1375MontgomeryRd. Red Bluff, CA | NEWS | REDBLUFFDAILYNEWS.COM WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2016 4 B