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Murray's religious rants all the rage on the Internet

By Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 11, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.
Updated December 11, 2007 at 11:36 a.m.

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Pastor Phil Abeyta, center, is flanked by two men who didn't give their names while Abeyta, the uncle of Matthew Murray, waited Monday to speak to the media at Youth With A Mission.

Photo by Linda McConnell / Special to the Rocky

Pastor Phil Abeyta, center, is flanked by two men who didn't give their names while Abeyta, the uncle of Matthew Murray, waited Monday to speak to the media at Youth With A Mission.

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The killer who opened fire at two Christian centers, killing four people and wounding five others before being shot and killed himself, spent hours every day on his computer — and users of an Internet message board for people upset with religious organizations believe he left disturbing postings there.

Matthew Murray, 24, was conclusively tied to both shootings when a shell casing found at the Arvada crime scene was matched to a handgun found near his body at New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

A user who posted a note Monday afternoon on an Internet message board made it clear that evidence strongly suggested that Murray was the writer who used the name nghtmrchld26 and posted a number of writings during the past year.

"Guys," Monday's message said, "it's nghtmrchld. Don't ignore the obvious."

The message, left by a user named "choo," went on to list 16 links tying the messages of nghtmrchld26 to Murray and the violence Sunday in Arvada and Colorado Springs.

Those reasons included "told us he was going to 'a better place,'" "told us Christians were to blame for 'this' happening," "said, 'see you all on the other side, we're leaving this nightmare behind to a better place,'" and "said, 'God I can't wait till I can kill you people, I'll just go to some downtown area in some big city and blow up and shoot everything I can.'"

The last quote came from Web postings written by Columbine killer Eric Harris.

Murray, who turned 24 five days before he carried out the attacks, spent three to five hours a day on his home computer, taking classes and, in recent weeks, sending hate mail to the missionary training center where the shootings began.

Murray died after a shootout with a security guard at New Life Church. That deadly confrontation came after attacks on the Youth With A Mission center in Arvada early Sunday and on New Life Church a little more than 12 hours later.

Murray lived with his parents in a split-level home in the 10900 block of East Berry Place in unincorporated Arapahoe County. Murray's computer use and hate mail to the Youth With A Mission program and one of its directors is mentioned in the warrant issued for the search of his home.

A neighbor, 19-year-old Cody Askeland, told The Associated Press that Matthew Murray and his brother, Christopher, were home-schooled and their family was "very, very religious."

Ronald Rex, director of admissions at Colorado Christian University, said Matthew Murray enrolled in a class there about a year ago but dropped it almost immediately.

Christopher Murray is a student Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.

The gunman's father is Dr. Ronald S. Murray, a neurologist involved in research on multiple sclerosis.

Matthew Murray's only previous brush with the law appears to have been in January when he was ticketed by a state trooper on Interstate 25 in Douglas County for driving without his headlights on.

Rocky staff writers Ivan Moreno and Alan Gathright contributed to this report.

Comments

  • December 11, 2007

    9:37 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Spencer writes:

    There is nothing in the story that pertains to the headline.

  • December 11, 2007

    10:40 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Jeff writes:

    Spencer: True 'Dat!

  • December 12, 2007

    9:07 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    MatrixEvolutions writes:

    The Skinny on Matthew Murray and the Church Shootings in Colorado.

    As to Matthew Murray’s murders at the Youth with a Mission and at the church, the notion that the son of a powerful and very devout Christian physician, who was home taught in born again religious fashion and has nothing but a traffic ticket to indicate any prior rebelliousness at his relatively old age of 24, raises great suspicions. The more likely possibility is that Matthew Murray was primed by his parents and/or other religious controllers to be a martyr for the born-again Christians, his mayhem in Colorado Springs and Arvada now being a “burning of the Reichstag” justification for fundamentalist conservatives to crank up to a considerably higher level of repression and control in the United States...

    To read more on this, go to www.matrix-evolutions.com

    Please recommend this website to your friends.