There’s a lot to this story.
A judge in Oklahoma handled down a death sentence to Alton Nolen, an ISIS-inspired Muslim convert who beheaded a co-worker and critically stabbed another in September 2014.
Nolen, 33, was reportedly obsessed with watching Islamic State beheading videos and was inspired by the brutal terror group.
During his trial, Nolen’s lawyers argued he was mentally ill and he believed he was doing the right thing because of his delusional misinterpretations of the Quran.
Classic move: everyone who is a jihadist is mentally ill.
However, prosecutors took exception, saying Nolen knew right from wrong before the attack. While hospitalized after the attack, Nolen confessed to the attacks, saying he didn’t “regret it at all” and “oppressors don’t need to be here.”
He repeatedly pleaded guilty and asked to be executed, but the judge initially refused to accept his plea.
The attack happened the day after Nolen was suspended from his job at a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma for “personnel issues” (among them allegedly saying he didn’t like white people). He left the plant and returned with a knife which he used to perpetrate the attack.
After beheading Colleen Hufford, 54, he tried to behead Traci Johnson, whom he believed was responsible for reporting him to the plant’s human resources manager.
While attempting to behead Johnson, he was shot by the plant’s CEO Mark Vaughan, a reserve deputy in Oklahoma County. Johnson survived the attack and testified against him.
Nolen had repeatedly tried to convert other workers to Islam and was reported to have become increasingly aggressive and belligerent toward them.
On his Facebook page where called himself “Jah’Keem Yisrael,” he condemned the U.S. and Israel claiming that sharia law was coming. The page also featured pictures of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and an image of a partially-decapitated man with someone standing over him pulling his head back to show the wound.
Patrick T. Dunleavy, former deputy inspector general of the New York State Police Criminal Intelligence Unit and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection, said it likely that Alton’s actions were the result of becoming radicalized.
Via Clarion