Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
POLICE IN WACO, Texas, have said the bikers involved in a deadly shootout in Waco, Texas, were carrying a massive arsenal of weapons.
Sergeant Patrick Swanton of the Waco Police Department told the Houston Chronicle that knives, brass knuckles, clubs, chains and guns were all found at the site of the bloodbath.
Some of the weapons were found hidden in sacks of tortilla chips, between bags of flour and behind seat cushions and someone also tried to flush a handgun down a toilet.
Restaurant security video reviewed exclusively by The Associated Press showed only one of the dozens of bikers recorded was seen firing a gun from the patio of the Twin Peaks restaurant where nine people were killed.
None of the nine video angles shows the parking lot.
Many of the bikers on tape are likely to have been arrested by Waco police, who rounded up about 170 people, charged them with felony engaging in organized criminal activity and set their bonds at $1 million.
Swanton declined to comment about the video. Swanton has said the people arrested were members of biker gangs with criminal elements that have been monitored by local authorities for months.
“They were not here to drink and eat barbecue,” Swanton said earlier this week. “They came here with violence in mind.”
The video shows bikers on the restaurant patio Sunday, ducking under tables and trying to get inside. At least three people can be seen holding handguns.
Before the shooting, the inside of the restaurant appears to be mostly empty. Bikers and other patrons can be seen walking to the windows facing the parking lot, where most of the shooting happened, when the confrontation was apparently underway.
When gunshots start at 12:24 p.m. on the video, most bikers, other patrons and staff immediately run away from the windows and into the restaurant’s interior.
One camera angle shows bikers running into the men’s bathroom. When there’s no space left in the bathroom, they dash toward the kitchen.
The AP was shown the video Wednesday by representatives of the Twin Peaks franchise, who have said the fighting began outside the restaurant, not inside as police have said. The franchise has not released the video publicly, citing the ongoing investigation.
Video footage shows police with assault rifles entering the door about two minutes after the shooting begins. As two officers enter, bikers can be seen lying on the floor with their hands spread.
Before the shooting, at least 20 members of the Cossacks biker gang can be seen on the patio. Members of the Scimitars, Boozefighters and Leathernecks can also be seen on the tape. While no Bandidos are immediately visible, police and one member of that biker gang have said some of their members were at the event.
Among those arrested was Theron Rhoten, who showed up at the Twin Peaks restaurant for a regional motorcycle club meeting. But, according to his wife, he soon found himself in the middle of a deadly shootout involving scores of other bikers.
Katie Rhoten said her husband ran for cover and was later arrested, along with motorcycle-riding friends and other “nonviolent, noncriminal people.”
Police have said that all those arrested were part of criminal motorcycle gangs, but only five of the nine people killed had criminal histories in Texas, based on court records and a search of their names in a database maintained by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Police have acknowledged firing on armed bikers, but it is not clear how many of the dead were shot by gang members and how many were shot by officers.
- With reporting by Michelle Hennessy.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Well international air travel is more important than public health.
It is.
Frightening part of this disease is people are not infectious until they start displaying symptoms..
Frightening that people in the developing world are still dying of malaria, diarrhoea and lack of clean water. Yet Ebola gets all the media and political attention
The media is just a mouth piece for governments. Get the population in fear and they are easier to control.
I actually think this is somehow positive.. If only infectious once symptoms appear, the infected has some chance of limited spread of infection to others.
However, recent research suggests that infected individuals can spread disease even without showing symptoms.. If this is the case, then the spread Ebola becomes even more difficult to control
There has been no such research coming to that conclusion. Often times you will see nonsense on the internet talking about ”new research” or a cure they’re holding back but most of it is conspiracy theory websites, remember not all websites are equally valid sources of information.
If you don’t read it on the WHO or CDC or HSPCC websites don’t trust it, don’t even trust the news sites because they’ve gotten loads wrong during this thing.
It’s interesting how we only ever hear of new cases of people in the first world….ah yes it’s because our lives are worth more right? Oh wait, they’re not. Makes me sick!
Do you want an extra 5000 articles on here the cover every individual case? I think the purpose of reporting this is to highlight the spread of this disease, not to suggest that white people’s lives are worth more. Honestly, does everything in this country have to relate back to racism?!
Well… You brought it up
Did I say it had anything to do with skin colour? The man in the US who had it wasn’t white. I’m talking about how the luck of what location on the globe you were located when that piece of sperm attached itself to an egg decides whether or not your life is considered valuable or not
Larry when Ebola broke out first in Africa there were continuous updates on case by case. It is now impossible to do this in Africa due to the volume of outbreaks. There has only being a few official out breaks in the rest of the world so makes it easy to report at early stages. How does this make anyone better than any other person?
Ban all flights from these affected areas
Lets tease this out….
When we fly planes over with medicine and food we can’t bring them back? Just leave them parked over there?
No, you say, let OUR people come back, just no Africans.
But the virus does not care if you’re an African or not, it can infect anyone.
So blood test them perhaps.
100s of people coming back and forth, a high tech complex blood test for all of them? Where do we hold these 100s of people in the mean time?
So we let food and medicine go back and forth, just no passenger flights.
So we stop doctors and aid workers and trade missions and businessmen making deals and pharma executives overseeing drug trials coming back and forth, that won’t work.
So ok let THEM through but stop Bob the passenger whos taking a nonessential flight.
Who decides what’s nonessential? Say we just stop anyone not on business, medical work or aid. Congratulations you’ve stopped 5 out of every 50 people, a trickle at best..
…There are no easy simple answers. We can’t lie to ourselves and pretend that it’s just so obvious and sure aren’t they all morons for not thinking of it, they have thought about it, they know it would lead to disaster.
Agree.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the diagnosis can be confirmed unless you are symptomatic. And the incubation period is 21 days…scary stuff.
Careful there larry or you will be quarantined.
To the people saying ”shut down all flights to the affected countries” …think about what that would mean for a minute. You’re thinking about Mohammad going to the UK to visit his sister or claim asylum and carrying the virus that way, he does not need to go on that trip so lets stop him right?
But that’s only a tiny % of the flights, REALLY tiny. Most of the flights are trade and aid related, and many of them are cargo planes taking food and medicine in and out of the countries affected, not to mention doctors and CDC teams which are the only thing keeping this contained. If we close off all flights it will stop 70-80% of imports and shelves are gonna run dry, hospitals are gonna run out of pankillers, antivirals, antibiotics and many of the people (including, I remind you, children) affected are going to go from what would have been a recovery or at worst a painless death on a morphine pump to dying in mortal agony as their organs liquify.
Imagine the civil unrest when the shelves start to run dry and the already meager hospitals run out of medicine …govts get toppled, suddenly nobody is controlling the borders and suddenly you have total anarchy where 4-5 countries used to be, people getting on flights without any border controls or exit screening, then they arrive claiming asylum from this anarchy and what do we do? Shoot them out of the sky? or isolate them? Do you want a couple of planes of ebola infected parked on the ramp at Dublin airport?
It’s not as simple as just isolating the countries, and if you just wanna close off casual flights it’s such a small % of the travel its; statistically insignificant anyway. The only way to control this is with medical aid.
So, what are you trying to say Ryan?
United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: Ebola is Airborne – Same Transmission as the Flu Virus.
According to the Center for Aerobiological Sciences, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland:
(1) Ebola has an aerosol stability that is comparable to Influenza-A
(2) Much like Flu, Airborne Ebola transmissions need Winter type conditions to maximize Aerosol infection
Once again a conspiracy theorists ignorance of medicine, just like your ignorance of engineering and physics with things like 9/11 lets him down.
Blood can be whooshed up into the air by an ‘aerosol generating procedure’ in a hospital and get onto someones skin in a way that can infect them, that is not the same as the virus being aerosolized in the way airborne viruses are.
Stick to making a balls of physics and geopolitics, at least there you are entertaining.
Think about this. A SI terrorist decides to get the ebola intentionally. Then he travels to Dublin, lives there for the 30 days or so until the illness become to obvious, during this time enter in touch with as many people as possible. Then we have a problem.
I believe is about time that the international authorities that so quickly are willing to mobilise billion in weapon get the act together and start to really take this seriously.
The world is flat, this is no longer problem for Africa this is a global problem.
have your say