Drunk and Disgruntled Employee Unloads Hot Lead into Server
September 7, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Admit it. You have wanted to do the same thing, and probably more than once. Unless you grew up in the suburbs and didn’t grow up with guns. And if you did grow up with a shotgun, rifle, or pistol of some sort, you would know that what Joshua Lee Campbell, an employee at RANlife Home Loans, of Salt Lake City, Utah, did was pretty stupid and unsafe. If you take the report in the Deseret Times and interleave it with another report from the Salt Lake Times, Campbell, who is a youthful 23, went to a concert on August 12 in Pioneer Park in SLT as part of the Twilight Series of concerts. That night, the concert featured Matisyahu, an American Hasidic Jewish reggae/rock/hip-hop artist from White Plains, New York, (Yes, that is IBM country, and yes, that is an Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation of “Matthew.”) Maybe Campbell had a bad day at the office, maybe he got fired up by the concert, but according to the charges filed by the police on August 23, Campbell went to the concert with a co-worker, had a little too much to drink, and decided to go back to the office. Soon thereafter, police received a call from someone claiming that his gun was stolen, his life was threatened, and the gun was discharged. Police arrived at RANlife Home Loans and found Campbell passed out on the floor, with seven rounds pumped into a server that the police were told was worth $100,000. Campbell had been threatening to the co-worker earlier that he was going to shoot the server and save the eighth bullet for himself, which thankfully he did not do. Campbell has been charged with second-degree criminal mischief, carrying a weapon while under the influence of alcohol, lying to police, and intoxication, all of which are misdemeanors in Utah. Apparently there is no charge for shooting a server dead. And the way some systems behave, you can understand why this might be the case. Based on the price of the server and the fact that it took seven bullets to kill it, I would wager that it was a Power Systems machine running IBM i or a predecessor. A Windows box wouldn’t cost that much and wouldn’t need more than one bullet.
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