2/26/2009
Walton "Minister" Shoots and Kills 2, Wounds 3 More
The Northwest Florida Daily News is reporting that a man with a recent history of threatening behavior opened fire on a neighboring townhome and killed two people this morning. From what I can find online, he looks to be a self-styled minister of some sort.
Tactical units from Okaloosa and Santa Rosa counties helped Walton sheriff's deputies arrest 60-year-old Dannie Baker, who barricaded himself inside his Miramar Beach home after the shooting, according to the paper.
Baker is a former Republican campaign volunteer, but he alarmed party officials last year when he sent "radical" e-mails. They passed them on to the Walton County Sheriff's Office.
Thursday, he apparently used a rifle to open fire on a group of Hispanics at a townhome near his. Aside from the two dead, another is in critical condition and two more are expected to survive.
Florida Division of Corporation records show a Dannie Roy Baker, at the address where the standoff occurred, as a director of the non-profit Perfect Hearts Ministry.
The group's website says it was, "Organized to promote the gospel through Christian music." The site also has a book for sale called "Man's Perfection Before God," by Dannie R. Boy. The domain registration shows that Dannie Baker is the admin and tech contact.
On the website of Magnolia Books, an independent bookseller in Mobile, the author describes the book as, "This book is my testimony of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, and by my covenant with God, walking in man's perfection before God."
According to Walton County court records, a Dannie Roy Baker was charged with misdemeanor resisting an officer without violence in 2007. He pled nolo contendere and adjudication was withheld in the case. He shows only a few traffic tickets in Okaloosa County and nothing in Bay or Santa Rosa counties.
UPDATE:
A Dannie R. Baker has an ad on ABsoluteAgency.com to meet a woman. The man lives in Miramar Beach, but the date of birth is off by two years. The photos on the site show a heavier man, but with the same two streaks of gray in his beard.
In the ad, the man says:"I'm looking for a woman to be my bride and to have my children and to enjoy my lifestyle on the beach in Florida, USA!!! I want a Christian who wants to be a ministers wife. I want a wife who wants to live in America and travel some in ministry one day. I'm looking for my dream girl that I have waited a lifetime to be with!!! If this fits your vision for life get in touch with me. Maybe God is putting us together!!!"
16 comments:
Sick bastard hiding behind the Lord to commit such racist and despicable killing of 2 young students from Chile. When is this going to stop. I pray for the families of the victims.
Dannie Roy Baker should rot in jail!
We don't really know enough at this point to draw definitive conclusions about this motivations. Not to excuse him or downplay the heinous nature of what he did, but I'm very curious to know whether he's suffered some sort of mental break.
Im from Chile and Work and Travel needs to get full information about this.. I really wish him the worse...
Tony,
Thank you for providing this information. You were the first to provide this amount of detail.
I am a Latina blogger and many Latino bloggers across the country are following this story.
Will you be conducting additional investigation about the murders? If so, will you find out the answers to a few questions please?
1. Would you provide us more background on Dannie Roy Baker?
a. What was in the emails that "threated national political candidates" that were reported to the FBI last year? Did the FBI investigate? What was the outcome?
2. What did Baker mean when he said "the Revolution is going to begin?" I have been reading some of the ANTI Immigration Blogs and besides the Ron Paul sites, there is only vague references to Revolution, as in violent action against those they think are "illegal aliens."
3. What did Baker mean when he asked his neighbor if she had any immigrants in her house and to get them out? Does this mean he would have murdered them too?
4. Was Baker a member of any anti immigration groups? Minutemen? Alipac? KKK? Stormfront? White Nationalists? NSMs? Are there any of these groups located close to where he lived? Are the police checking Baker's internet use?
5. Will the police be charging Baker with a Hate Crime? I read on another site that he is going to be in court tomorrow (Tuesday)
It is obvious there is more to this story and that Baker was influenced by someone. I think getting the answers to these questions will be very helpful in stopping any future violence against those viewed as "illegal aliens" by these extremists.
Thank you for your help and I hope to hear from you soon.
Dee Perez Scott
Immigration Talk with a Mexican American
http://immigrationmexicanamerican.blogspot.com/
Dee,
I appreciate you reading the blog.
Yes, I'm looking into a couple of minor things related to Baker and will post them as I get them. However, I'm sure almost all of the new info about him will come from the Northwest Florida Daily News. They have the staff to devote to covering this story.
Although it's unavoidable that people look for deeper meanings in tragedies like this, I would caution you not to jump to conclusions on this particular case.
The indications I've seen to this point are that Baker was simply mentally ill, and not part of some bigger conspiracy.
The thing that strikes me is the difference between his mugshot and the photos he posted with his personal ad. He clearly has gone through some serious recent physical deterioration. That, and his increasingly erratic behavior, culminating with the shooting, suggests some sort of mental breakdown. I wonder if he was on medication and stopped taking it, or if a physical or circumstantial change has caused a mental break.
Please understand, I don't want to make excuses for him. He did a horrible thing that will hurt not only those he targeted, but ripple out to have harmful effects on hundreds, if not thousands, of other people.
But we need to make sure that we use our reasoning skills, and not our emotions, to try to make sense of what has happened.
Tony,
Thank you for your quick response. I am a fan.
I agree with you. I don't want to excuse Baker either, but I agree, he may have been mentally ill or depressed or on drugs or a myriad of other contributing factors.
However, how many weak minded people like Baker are there across the country?
As the Miami Herald columnist Myriam Marquez said (and I strongly agree):
"The courts will deal with Baker's guilt or innocence, his motivation, and whether he's mentally ill. The horror of his actions serve as a warning about brewing hatred in small pockets of our country. Hatred that's fanned by the Internet and anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed on talk radio and some cable TV shows -- twisted into vendettas against the innocent."
So finding answers to the questions is very important so that we can Stop the Hate and these senseless murders, as occurred with these young innocent students, and Marcelo Lucero, Luis Ramirez and Jose Sucuzhanay.
Additionally Tony,
My guess is the picture Baker posted on the dating website was one he took 20 years ago. Thats what people often do on those sites.
The mug shot looks more like a 60 year old man.
Tony :
It seems that Dannie Roy Baker has been dysfunctional and maladapted all his life. According to someone that has known him for many years.
This Murderer is incapable of staying in a job and hates his parents.
It seems that the killer Dannie Roy Baker had a History of Mental Illness, Agression, Hate and conflict and threats to his own Parents
Vicente Duque
Dee: You're right, the people who really concern me are the talk-radio and cable wingnuts who get people all fired up to go out and do things like this.
I think the photos on the personal ad are much more recent than that. And even if five or 10 years old, they still show quite a physical slide downhill. I'm betting when we learn more about him, we'll find that he's started getting much worse in recent years.
Vicente: Very interesting comment from the person who says he has known Baker for a while. If Baker was that obviously mentally unstable, I'd sure be interested in hearing whether anyone tried to get him psych help.
Thanks for reading guys.
Tony
Hi guys,
I read your discussion briefly. I can only affirm that Tony is on the right track with analyzing the causes of Baker's horrible deed. He used to be my landlord for two summers (2003 and 2005) while I was there as a WAT student so I dare to say that I know him quite well.
In general, Dannie has been a mentally ill person for a long time (it's not important for how long). His health has been deteriorating dramatically since 2003 I would say. While in 2003 he was still quite OK although I have seen dramatic mood swings and outbursts of agression mainly against weaker persons, usually girls in his house who were also WAT students.
But it was much worse in 2005. Dannie was taking a lot of medications and sometimes he was absolutely out of his mind. He became more and more convinced that he has a direct contact with God in his third form of Holy Spirit.
For some weird reason he had to find a scapegoat for his miserable life so he blamed my brother for erasing his "important emails". It was an absurdity and I tried to convince him that he would never do such a thing, there was no rational reason. But Dannie just made me speechless when he told me that "Holy Spirit told him that John (my brother) was the Evil in his house and he was the one who deleted his mailbox". I couldn't object to that. It was an irrational realm of on absolutely insane man. After this event my brother rather left his house...
So, here I am offering you a brief picture of Dannie R. Baker (used to call him Dannie R. Boy), a self-proclaimed preacher who wrote a passionate book about his personal journey of perfection before God which ended with shooting 2 innocent people.
And I am not even talking about his dreams to marry some young Russian women.
Dannie is a sick and pitiful man.
Igor,
Thanks for the post.
What you're describing sounds like my layman's understanding of schizophrenia. Wonder if he stopped taking his prescribed meds and started self-medicating with drugs/alcohol.
By the way, what is WAT?
Yeah Tony. Your reconstruction of this case is very plausible. I remember the situations when Dannie lacked his medications. He was a very nervous person, channeling his aggression usually against his birds which he bred in dozens. I think he was trying to substitute the medications with proper drugs. I am not sure but I think mostly with marijuana.
WAT means Work and Travel. It's a programm for university students from Central and Eastern Europe. I myself come from Slovakia.
Hm, one more thing to Dee:
I want to emphasize that Dannie was just an insane man. However, I would never expect him to kill someone. I would not consider him as an anti-imigrant radical or some xenophobic extremist.
His life is just a miserable story of a man who never really had a woman and never really worked. He has suffered enormously from an inferiority complex and feeling of absolute uselesness.
Although it might sound absurd to you, I think his killing was a desperate act of a man who wanted to be useful. I think he wanted to say that he is ready to bring sacrifices (in other words to be useful) in order to defend his beloved country from (mainly Hispanic) immigrants. He wasn't very intelligent so I assume that he just didn't have a clue about the difference between Chilean exchange students and Mexican immigrants.
So, it has to be considered as an desperate act of a man possessed by an inferiority complex and not a murder fuled by some ideology of hatred.
Igor,
Thank you for the update. This is very helpful.
You do make my point for me when you say "I think he wanted to say that he is ready to bring sacrifices (in other words to be useful) in order to defend his beloved country from (mainly Hispanic) immigrants."
There is a reason Dannie thought Latino Immigrants were the enemy. Surely you hear all of the anger and venom coming from the ANTI Immigration extremists. You say Dannie wanted to be a hero. He thought by killing those he heard were evil immigrants, he would be considered a hero.
That is the problem with all of the Hate Talk by the extremists. We do have the weak minded, like Dannie, who hear them then, like Dannie, or the Caucasian Crew in Patchogue, New York, or the students in Shenandoah, PA, they murder innocent students or fathers.
I've already seen Dannie's news video posted on podblanc, a White Supremist site.
I think all of this ANTI Immigrant Hate Talk needs to stop. Too many people are dying.
http://podblanc.com/lone-wolf-dannie-baker-ready-revolution-begin-miramar-beach-walton-county-fl
Igor:
I'm a journalist from Chile. I need to talk with you as soon as posible about what you know about D. Baker.
Please, give me an email or phone where I can find you. My email is fran.2000@live.com
Thanks.
Francisca
Igor:
I correct myself, my email is fran.2000@live.cl not .com
Thanks
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