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22 Year Old's Killing Spree Left Six Dead in California; Obama's Surprise Trip to Afghanistan; Pope Francis Visits the Holy Land
Aired May 26, 2014 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Brianna Keilar, thank you so much. It's wonderful being with all of you on this Memorial Day. And let's begin there.
On this day, when the nation pauses to remember just how dear and devastating the price of freedom really is.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of Americans are attending events to pay tribute to nearly a million military service members killed in service to their country since the American revolutions. It was actually this civil war, this far (INAUDIBLE) to honor the American war dead.
And now, as we look at these live pictures, beautiful blue skies over our nation's capital, here we are 150 years later watching the national Memorial Day parade. It marks this day of national pride and of grief and of hope that one day Americans will no longer need to make the ultimate sacrifice. And here now, just some moments as the nation reflects and remembers our fallen heroes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Here lie the Americans who fought through Vietnam and those who won a long twilight struggle against communism. Men and women gave their lives to keep men and women safe over more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: I'm inspired each and every day by our men and women in uniform. On this Memorial Day, let us remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice for this great nation.
BRITTANY JACOBS, MOTHER: To me it's important for me to raise him and let him know about his father. His dad would want him to know about him and I want him to know about him and how great of a man he was.
CHUCK HAGEL, DEFENSE SECRETARY: We will never forget your sacrifices and the sacrifices of your loved ones.
OBAMA: And because of them, our nation is stronger, safer, and will always remain a shining beacon of freedom for the rest of the world.
(BUGLE PLAYING TAPS) (END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: And let's take you now live to Barbara Stars who is standing in Arlington national cemetery where we saw the president speaking this morning.
And Barbara,, I mean, I was a little girl in that cemetery where we buried my grandfather. But you, you are standing truly on hallowed ground, at section 60. It is the final resting place for those who served and died in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I'm curious as we see some family members and children behind you do you get a sense today there, Barbara, that something is ending?
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think most people are definitely aware that after 13 years, the war in Iraq is over, the war in Afghanistan is winding down, the president talking about that very fact yesterday when he was in Afghanistan meeting with the troops.
But this is where you see the price paid. Some of the 800, more than 800 troops laid to rest here having fallen on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. And we spoke earlier today to one young widow who brought her very young son to the grave site of his father. I want you to listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NICOLE CAMPBELL, BROTHER KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN: He was a break dancer. And he danced all the time in the house. He was jumping off of walls, jumping off banisters and he would play guitar hero with me.
JONATHAN CAMPBELL, BROTHER KILLED IN AFGHANISTAN: I want people to know that he is like a nice and respectful guy. He's a hard-working gentleman. And he's a pretty tough guy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STARR: So, this is just some of the families and people that we have met today. So many people here, and they come every year as we do so. But you know, I think people are beginning to understand that hopefully with the years of sacrifice are coming to an end -- Brooke.
BALDWIN: And Barbara, just quickly, just to remind our viewers, you know, as we look at the grave markers, you have these families who come every year. They leave behind items and tokens, you know, that are so important to those they lost.
STARR: Well, you know, this actually will bring a smile to everyone's face. When we got here this morning we were told, you know, yet again, what you are mainly seeing behind us are flowers, photos, that kind of thing. They have a new rule that they sort of very nicely describe as no glass containers because what they were having, these young troops would bring their buddies a bottle of beer or a bottle of something else and leave it graveside.
Now that's not supposed to happen. But I can tell you if you walk down just a few rows you will come to a couple of places where young buddies have stopped by today and left their fallen friends a cold beer or a cold glass of something else.
BALDWIN: Barbara Starr, thank you so much for sharing those stories with us at Arlington national cemetery. We appreciate that.
As we mentioned, the president spoke there this morning and he made a brief and sobering reference to the VA scandal saying we must do more to keep faith for those who return to battle.
And CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta has that part of the story.
And Jim, I spotted Eric Shinseki, you know, in the audience there as we all know he's the secretary of Veteran's Affairs. A lot of heat on him because a lot of CNN's reporting. Did he have anything to say?
JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: He did not brag. And you know, typically during this Memorial Day observances, we don't hear from the secretary of Veterans Affairs. We hear from the defense secretary, we hear from the president, not the man at the top of the VA. And I think that is to be expected. But no question about it, the scandal of the VA is not only hanging over Eric Shinseki, it is hanging over President Obama and sort of following him as he is going to these tributes to veterans and soldiers over the last several days.
He was in Afghanistan, as you know, yesterday, on that top secret whirlwind trip to Bagram air base and back. When he talked about taking care of our wounded warriors and veterans being not just a promise quote but a sacred obligation, and so the president hitting this point time and again and he did so earlier this morning at Arlington. Here's what he had too say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: We've been reminded recent days. We must do more to keep faith with our veterans and their families to ensure they get the care and benefits and opportunities that they have earned and that they deserve. These Americans have done their duty. It has nothing more than our country does ours, now and for decades to come.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ACOSTA: And those comments when the president just briefly touching on the VA scandal are a reminder of that he is going to have to get back to work come tomorrow, Brooke. This VA scandal is not going away. He is due to hear from preliminary results from Eric Shinseki's, his internal investigation that has been going on over at the department of Veterans affairs.
And we should point out over the weekend the VA has started to make some adjustments to how veterans are receiving care. A directive from the department facilities across the country saying, you know, that these facilities are having problems with long wait times. Need to start looking outside of Veterans affairs facilities to provide care to those wounded soldiers and heroes to make sure they are getting care.
So, they may be going outside of the VA system from time to time, more often in the future, to go after this problem, attack it and try to solve it and it is certainly unfinished business for the president as he heads into the rest of this week -- Brooke.
BALDWIN: We will try tomorrow and get the update on that investigation, that internal investigation.
Jim Acosta for us at the White House on this Memorial Day. Jim, thank you.
And earlier today, I talked to actor Gary Sinise. And he tells me why he is spending so much time focusing on our nation's military. It was his Dan band played a special Memorial Day concert last night on the national mall. We will play that interview from for you. Don't miss that.
Also ahead, Pope Francis yet again in the headlines. Here this time, he is making an historic trip to the Middle East. And during his visit to the Holy Land, the Pope made calls for a Palestinian state. We will tell you live to Jerusalem and tell you that that story and next this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't tell you how angry I am. It's just awful. And no parent should have to go through this. No parent.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Stunning, the father of a shooting victim speaks out to CNN after a 22-year-old went on a shooting rampage in a California college town. You have to hear this father.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Welcome back. You are watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.
Shattered glass and flowers mark this path of horror, a (INAUDIBLE) by a young man bent on seeking his idea of revenge.
In the case, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, it's all about the evidence and so far there is plenty of it. You have ten crime scenes in 12 locations, a series of retribution videos, chilling 140 page manifesto and the news that Rodger's parents found out about the document in those recent You Tube upload just before the killing spree started, a killing spree that claimed the lives of six young people. Rodgers parents were frantically searching for their son just as the stabbings and shootings were happening. His history of mental health issues; that was no secret.
Police have conducted what they call a welfare check at his home back in April after his mother came across some of his videos, had not heard from him, she got worried, but he convinced police that everything was fine. Santa Barbara county sheriff Bill Brown is defending his agency's previous investigation of this young man.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SHERIFF BILL BROWN, SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA: They found him to be rather shy, timid, polite, well spoken. He explained to the deputies that it was a misunderstanding and that he was although he was having social problems. It was unlikely he was going to continue to be a student here, was probably going to go home. And he was able to convince them that he was not at that point a danger to himself or anyone else.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: And now as police are sifting through the evidence. This community of Isla Vista and UC Santa Barbara must begin this healing process.
(VIDEO CLIP PLAYING)
BALDWIN: Thousands of students attended a vigil on campus Saturday night. All six victims killed were UCSB students.
So let me bring in retired law enforcement agent Lou Palumbo who joins me from New York.
And Lou, you know, I keep going back as I am reading more and more about the story, I'm going back to the path that this man, the shooter's mother saw these videos uploaded to You Tube or social media, contacted a therapist, therapist contacts mental health, mental health hotline contacts police, police go to this young man's home, yet they didn't have a warrant to go inside. I mean, what really can police do?
LOU PALUMBO, RETIRED LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENT: Well, police did exactly what they did in this instance, Brooke, what they were permitted to do. They went and they interviewed the person of concern. He supplied them sufficient answers based on the information volunteered by the chief. He articulated himself well. He was polite. H was intelligent. He expressed the fact that it was probably a misunderstanding and the police were contented that was appropriate accounting for his activities. What they would be looking for, Brooke --
BALDWIN: You have been on these welfare checks, Lou. You know what they're looking for.
PALUMBO: Absolutely. And the thing I will tell you is that normally they involve the elderly people, you know, because they suddenly break communication with their children or their loved ones after a view days or a week. They call the police and say can you do us a favor and can you check on someone?
I have actually requested the police to check on someone for me. They were fine but I wanted to make sure they were OK. So, it is more common place than people will think. The difference with this set of circumstance is the fact that the police will supply somewhat specific information regarding his state of mind.
They arrive at the scene. They interview him. They are looking for behavioral characteristics that are inconsistent with a norm. He didn't display them. They had no reason to further this encounter. They had no license, or warrant, or permission to legally enter the home, unless he allowed them to. So they stopped where they did and that was the right thing.
BALDWIN: And that's the thing, apparently this young man, this is part of his manifesto, being frightened that police were so close to potentially, you know, upending his room because they would have found things.
He wrote this. I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do and reported me for it. He went on, if that was the case the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons along with my writings what I plan to do with them.
Since, Lou, you know police didn't have that warrant to search, to look through his things to maybe potentially have stopped him. What else could have been done? Where do we go from here because they were so close in finding that evidence, in stopping this?
PALUMBO: Where I think we can go from here is, and it is quite obvious, we need to continue to learn from this episode. The police cannot enact a policy that authorizes them to conduct a search. You're protected under the fourth amendment.
This is something that has to be legislative. It has to go to the courts. The courts need to redefine what the prerogative of law enforcement might be in an instance similar to this. The reality of the situation is everything went according to the way it should have under the circumstances that existed.
BALDWIN: We hear people saying, Lou, I'm trying to jump in and this frustrates me because, you know, I'm sick of covering these stories. And we hear people saying, see something, say something, people said something and yet, look, what happened?
PALUMBO: Well, here's the problem, though. The vehicle wasn't correct. You see, what the parent or the mental health professional should have done collaboratively was gone via an attorney to a court system, petition the court to have a court ordered psychiatric evaluation and have this young man remanded. That's the process. You can have that done. The police do not -- how would you say, in a text book fashion, take people off the street unless they have good cause to believe that they are a risk to themselves or others.
But I d want to point one thing out to you, Brooke, that everybody is not picking up on. This young man somehow at the age of 22 and a student had the resources to go out and purchase approximately $3,000 worth of handguns as well as 400 rounds of ammunition to go with it, driving a BMW. There are little problems here that have tangential to this whole, how would you say, tragic episode that I think are worth addressing. There is no substitute for parenting. I'm not pointing the finger at the parents.
BALDWIN: Yes. Let's not do that. We're not inside the situation.
PALUMBO: I agree. But I will say this to you. You have to keep track of your kids. It appears as though these parents were doing that, they just didn't know which vehicle to employ to further pursue this issue with their son. And although they did have therapist, this needed to go beyond the police. He needed to go to a court. He needed to be ordered into psychiatric evaluation with the intension of possibility holding him in a hospital and having him treated.
BALDWIN: We will have the entire, again, mental health discussion and what more can be done if there is a next time.
Lou Palumbo, thank you so much.
It's just frustrating every single way to talk about this. And all six students who lost their lives late Friday night at Isla Vista, they were students at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The first victims, these three young men in Elliot Rodger's apartment, his two roommates, George Chen seen here and Cheng Hong were found stabbed to death along with another man, Weihan Wang. The two young women who were shot outside the Alpha Phi sorority house, Catherin Cooper here and Veronika Weiss, both members of the tribe Delta sorority at UCSB.
The sixth victim was Christopher Martinez, a young man shot and killed while getting a sandwich at a local Deli. And you have to hear from his father here, Richard Martinez talked with our owned Kyung Lah. He remembered his son and then he told her that nothing has changed since the Sandy Hook shootings. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RICHARD MARTINEZ, FATHER OF SHOOTING VICTIM: He is our only child. He died on Friday. I'm 61 years old now. Never have another child. So the reason I'm doing this right now is to try to see if we can do anything to make my son's death mean something because that's all we have got.
KYUNG LAH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: He's not going to grow up to be a man to work in the world. What did we lose?
MARTINEZ: I think he had the capacity to be much more than we are. He was articulate, determined, nice, and tough. If there's all of those things in the media about the shooter, then there's nothing about the victims, then it sends the wrong message. And the people need to understand that real people died here. And they need to know, put faces, names, and histories to the people who died to make it real for them. That it could be them because if you start talking about the people who died, then they are real.
LAH: The politicians after Sandy Hook swore that they would do something.
MARTINEZ: We're all proud to be Americans. What kind of message does it send to the world when we have such a -- such a rudderless bunch of idiots in government? I can't tell you how angry I am. It's just awful. And no parents should have to go through this. No parent to have a kid die because in this kind of a situation.
What has changed? We have learned nothing? These things are going to continue until somebody does something. So where the hell is the leadership? Where the hell are these people we elect to Congress that we spend so much money on? These people are getting rich sitting in Congress. And what do they do? They don't take care of our kids.
My kid died because nobody responded to what happened at Sandy Hook. Those parents lost little kids. It is bad enough that I lost my 20- year-old. But I have 20 years with my son. That's all I had. But those people lost their children at six and 7-years-old. How do you think they feel? And who started it now? Who is doing anything for them now? Who is standing up for those kids that died back then in an elementary school? Why wasn't something done? It's outrageous.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Pope Francis is wrapping up his three-day visit to the Middle East and Jerusalem. But his trip took unexpected turn from the historic photo ops and religious masses because the pontiff gave a personal invitation to leaders of Israel and the Palestinian authority to come to the Vatican for a peace initiative. He actually spoke with Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas about having quote- unquote "encounter of prayer." And CNN has learned that Abbas and Israeli president Shimon Peres have accepted that invite. It will take place sometime next month.
So, let's bring in our senior international correspondent Ivan Watson in Jerusalem for us.
And Ivan, do we know what prompted the Pope to open up this invitation for this peace initiative?
IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he came to the holy land calling for peace basically, saying that that was the primary message he was trying to bring to a place since it's long been associated with conflict. He, upon touching them, he's the first Pope to have actually started the trip by flying into the occupied West Bank where he declared the Vatican support for the quote, "state of Palestine." So, he repeated the fact that he believes a state of Palestine should be independent living with freedom and dignity within international border side by side with a state of Israel that does not have to suffer from terrorist attacks.
And I think, also, he has a real concern for the Christian community that dwindling the minority that continues to live here in the Holy Land, but is shrinking. There few work then 10,000 Palestinian Christians now living in Jerusalem. Of course, really, the most important place in Christianity and occupation and conflict do not help that community.
So those are some of the reasons that may have prompted the Pope to push forward with this quite unusual diplomatic initiative -- Brooke.
BALDWIN: I mean, it seems like he is asserting the role of Vatican. It is almost peacemaker.
WATSON: That's right. And you know, I spoke with the Jewish rabbi from his native country of Argentina. Rabbi Abraham Scorca (ph) who accompanied the pope on this trip along with an Argentinean Muslim sheik as a kind of interfaith message. That rabbi described his old friend, Pope Francis, as a revolutionary who does want to shake things up and believes strongly in peace, and would want to see the willingness to work towards peace from Israeli leadership. That was coming from the Jewish rabbi who was brought along on this trip. Who also, I might add specified that Pope Francis really is a friend of the Jews.
