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Richard Baumhammers

American mass murderer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ7324023 ↗
Source-derived summary

Richard Scott Baumhammers (born May 17, 1965) is an American spree killer and white supremacist who committed a racially motivated shooting spree on April 28, 2000, in the metropolitan area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing five people and paralyzing one.

Early life

Richard Baumhammers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Andrejs and Inese Baumhammers, both Lutheran Latvian immigrants who fled the Soviet occupation of their homeland. Both parents became faculty members of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Dental Medicine and opened a successful practice on Fifth Avenue, near the university. Baumhammers was the second child to Andrejs and Inese; his older sister Daina was born in 1963. The family settled in the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Lebanon. Baumhammers was a second-string kicker on the Mt. Lebanon High School football team.

After completing high school in 1983, Baumhammers graduated from Kent State University in Ohio in 1989 and began law school at Cumberland Law School in Birmingham, Alabama. A Cumberland classmate described Baumhammers as "gregarious, a good student, in the top third of his class." After graduating from Cumberland, Baumhammers enrolled in a specialized one-year international program at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California, where he received a master's degree in transnational business practice and specialized in both immigration law and international law.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Richard Baumhammers” as american mass murderer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1965, 2000, 1963, 1983—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1965-05-17. The account is most persuasive where Richard, Baumhammers and American can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american mass murderer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7324023. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2000, 1963 and 1983.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Richard Baumhammers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.