Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Especially Sarah.

  “Sarah could be a real bitch, like hard-core,” said a friend.

  In that environment of Juggalos, that crazy, bitchy attitude Sarah embodied served her well. She could be who she felt she was, and no one said anything.

  There was one day when a group of them stood around in a circle playing hacky sack outside on the grounds of Black Hawk. Hacky sack is a game whereupon you kick a small beanbag ball (a little smaller than a tennis ball) back and forth, trying not to let it hit the ground. Kids like to play this game at concerts, in parks, standing around convenience stores, on the corner, and in between classes at school.

  When break was over, the kids stopped the game and went back to class.

  Sarah thought she had the hacky sack, but when she realized she didn’t, “she started freakin’ out,” said a student inside the classroom.

  Actually, Sarah Kolb lost it.

  She snapped.

  A full-fledged panic attack set in.

  For a few minutes, absolute terror, as though she had lost a family heirloom or her wallet, settled on Sarah. She was stricken with a terrible bout of anxiety. She rummaged through her desk, hurriedly looking for the hacky sack.

  She couldn’t find it.

  The kid who had the ball on him said, “Hey, Sarah, I have it.” He sort of rubbed it in her face, taunting and teasing Sarah a little bit, allowing her to freak out and go crazy looking for it, while knowing what she was frantically searching for. He had let her stew.

  Sarah didn’t like this. She turned red. Then she hit the kid holding the hacky sack in the face with a punch, storming out of the classroom in a rage.

  All over a hacky sack ball.

  “She had a short fuse,” said a friend, “that could go off at any time.”

  This anecdote explained, in a subtle way, that you had better not mess with Sarah’s possessions. Her “things” were important to her. She was territorial.

  And this, Adrianne Reynolds was about to find out, included her friends—girlfriends, particularly.

  28

  Brad Tobias met Cory Gregory at Black Hawk. Cory hung around with Sarah Kolb. The way Brad viewed that relationship, “Cory was just another guy obsessed with a chick.”

  Everyone seemed to see Cory in this way.

  Sarah and Cory were best friends. At least in terms of how the relationship progressed. Cory was smitten. Totally taken in by whatever aura Sarah had.

  “Man, and I have no idea why,” said a kid from that group of friends. “Have you ever seen Sarah? I mean, why was Cory so into her?”

  Cory had wanted to date Sarah for the longest time—ever since he met her. Their friendship began when they ran into each other in town one day. They were both sophomores in high school then, going through the same problems, embodying the same defiant natures. They believed society had perpetrated difficulties and barriers against them, which no one else seemed to understand. Cory was going to a public school, but Sarah soon convinced him to transfer to Black Hawk and leave the alternative school connected to Moline High School, which he was registered at.

  “He seemed to be doing okay there,” his mother, Teresa Gregory, later told me.

  Cory came home one afternoon and told his father, Bert Gregory, whom he lived with, “I transferred schools.”

  Not that he wanted to transfer, or was asking his dad for his permission, but that he had already gone and done it.

  “What?” Teresa asked when she heard.

  “We accepted it,” his mother later remarked. “It was better than him dropping out.”

  Just before Cory turned seventeen, in the fall of 2004, he told his mother he had decided to join the military. Teresa thought it was a good direction for her boy, who, same as many kids his age, did not seem to have any direction whatsoever.

  After going down and talking to the recruiter, Cory came back with, he claimed, disappointing news. He said he was told that he had to get his GED (or have a high-school diploma) before the military would take him.

  “Too bad they changed that policy,” Teresa Gregory said later. Their lives would have likely been a whole lot different if Cory had joined the military.

  This is simply not true. Either Cory lied to his mother, or he never bothered to check with the military, because the army, for one, will allow an enlistee to join while still in high school. (A recruit can even go to boot camp between his or her junior and senior years.) And there is no regulation stopping someone from applying to the army with a GED.

  Cory continued hanging (and now doing other things) with Sarah Kolb, who was no doubt influencing his life and decisions, if not telling him what to do and when to do it.

  “I met Sarah at the mall,” Cory said during an interview with NBC, “and then we ended up going and smoking weed behind [a department store].”

  Weed and booze—both became Cory’s greatest loves, besides, that is, Sarah Kolb, whom he was now seeing every day. Cory wanted to sleep with Sarah something bad, friends said. Sarah knew this, of course, and used it to keep him on a leash. In this early stage of the relationship, she never came out and said no to Cory, but then she didn’t say yes, either. Cory was always left to feel as though he was in the middle, and had a shot with Sarah.

  “In the back of his mind somewhere,” Teresa Gregory said, “Cory always believed there was a chance for the two of them—that if he just hung in there long enough, best friends would become lovers.”

  “He was always trying to get with her and she wouldn’t have anything of it,” Brad Tobias explained. “She used him for whatever she wanted to use him for. If she wanted to use him as a ride somewhere, she used him as a ride. If she wanted to use him as someone to cry on, she used him for that. If she wanted him to beat up someone, she had Cory beat someone up.”

  As they became closer, the relationship with Sarah defined who Cory became. Some said he liked the idea that she was “in control” of his life and told him what to do. He needed that sort of direction. Cory had come from a broken home in which his mother had left the household. That’s a very important factor in how his life was shaping up with Sarah, who quite possibly picked up on this lack of femininity in Cory’s everyday life and filled that role, knowingly or not.

  At times, Cory wrote Sarah letters, telling her exactly how he felt. In one, he said he loved her: I have since I first laid eyes on you. Sarah was all he ever thought about. She was the only person, Cory wrote, I [feel] I [can] speak my emotions [to]. . . . He concluded by saying he would be there for Sarah in the same way, no matter what it was she needed.

  That last line spoke to the manipulative temperament brewing inside of Sarah, giving her a considerable amount of power over Cory. Something she learned to coddle and experiment with—a switch she could turn on and off whenever she wanted.

  Sarah liked the idea of being in charge—the leader of the pack. And this was how the relationship between her and Cory progressed. Every day Sarah began to feel more in control over Cory Gregory.

  But then, Adrianne Reynolds walked onto the scene, nudging her way into Cory and Sarah’s lives.

  Which changed everything.

  29

  Cory Gregory never had a reputation for being a tough kid. Those at Black Hawk who knew of him saw Cory as another Juggalo who liked to do drugs, drink booze, smoke cigarettes, stick to Sarah Kolb like pants, and follow the crowd with whom he ran—whatever it was they decided to do on any given day.

  “If Cory was ever to try to step up on you,” a former Black Hawk student recalled, “you would just have to say ‘shut up,’ and get up in his face, and he would back right down.”

  And yet, others said Cory had a mean streak you didn’t want to mess with. A temper that, same as Sarah’s, erupted at any given moment for no apparent reason.

  Nate Gaudet and Cory were tight. They went back five years, to grammar school. But that anger inside Cory exposed itself inside the dynamic of their friendship every so often. There was one day when C
ory and Nate were driving around the QC. Cory sat in the front. Nate drove. There was another kid, a Juggalo, in the backseat. There wasn’t much talk going on inside the car. Music played. They smoked cigarettes.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Cory punched Nate on the side of the head as Nate drove. No love taps here; these were hard shots to the face and head that rattled Nate’s cage damn good.

  “What the fuck?” Nate said.

  Cory laughed.

  “Come on, man. What’d you hit me for?”

  Cory replied with a straight face. “I done felt like it, that’s all.” He laughed then and raised his fist, without hitting Nate, kind of taunting him.

  “That’s how Cory was sometimes,” said a source. “He would snap. He gave Nate a few bumps on the face that day. Nate never said or did nothing about it. And we’re talking these two were ‘supposedly’ best friends.”

  Then there was the pot-smoking side of Cory. He loved to get high, as often as he could. And what would he talk about afterward, with the mellow buzz of the weed fueling an inherent desire he harbored for freaking people out?

  “How he wanted to set up a chain on girls with a bunch of kids and fuck them,” said a friend. “Nate Gaudet was into this, too.”

  Cory and Nate often talked about what they called “tag teaming” girls. And the most shocking part about this, perhaps, was that they rarely had a hard time finding a girl to take part. In fact, there was a time in the basement of Nate’s when twenty or so kids got together and listened to music, drank, and got high. Nate and Cory and a few others set up a train on a girl and videotaped it.

  Nate’s father found the tape after kicking the kids out of his house.

  “You’d be surprised at how many of the girls we knew were open to it,” said a source.

  One more sign that this group was out of control.

  Nate, Sarah, Cory, and several others hung around what was a genuine party house located outside Moline in Rock Island. Nate met Sarah through Cory. For just about a two-year period leading up to January 2005, Nate, Sarah, and Cory spent most of their time together.

  “Nate seemed like a normal kid,” said a former classmate. “He was another one of those adolescent kids that was trying to be what he wasn’t.”

  Maybe they all were.

  Sarah, Adrianne, and Cory fell into that same clique. They fit themselves into a group of Juggalos more than the group fit into who they were. Juggalos not only dress a certain way, but true Juggalos speak their own language and drink a beverage called Faygo, an inexpensive soft drink. Being a Juggalo wasn’t the same as belonging to the 4-H club or Boy Scouts—it was a way of life.

  A religion.

  Juggalos will say they are misunderstood. That society doesn’t quite “get” who they are, or what they represent. According to some, however, the attitude many in the East Moline sect of the group (aptly called the QC Juggalos) routinely displayed was “I’m better than you, so shut the F up and stay out of my way.”

  Badass people haters. Counterculture wags.

  “Social rejects,” one Juggalo from the area explained to me. “We do not like society,” he added. “Society judges us. We hate people. Society is nothing but a bunch of ignorance. Everyday people are just ignorant. They choose not to open their eyes to the things that are happening right in front of them.... They want to blame everything negative that happens with kids on music. I’m sorry, but if you are that fucking stupid that you’d listen to a song and that makes you kill someone, you’re a problem to begin with. Would you blame country music for a redneck guy who goes out and drives his truck drunk? Or beats his wife? Course not. You’re not going to blame that on the country music. But if a kid does it, you’re going to say it was the music he listens to that made him do it.”

  Hanging out together as a group, Juggalos found solace in one another. Camaraderie. A common understanding. A bond. It was a brotherhood, a place wherein everyone agreed that society didn’t know jack shit about who they were or what they felt.

  The connection between the QC Juggalos, it is safe to say, was also fueled by the drugs they used.

  “God yes,” said that same QC Juggalo.

  Their everyday lives were centered on drugs.

  When one looks deeper into the Juggalo group Sarah and Cory were now a part of, however, a skinheadlike undertone emerges. For example, Sarah kept a club in her car, half of an old broom handle, duct-taped on one end. She had a name for it: the “nigger stick.” And there’s no hiding the fact that although Juggalo sects have been popping up all over the country, a majority of the groups are from the Midwest and the South; and more and more, these groups have been associated with violence against African Americans and other nonwhite groups. In Seattle, for instance, seven people were arrested in 2009. They ranged in age from fourteen to twenty-nine. They had been charged, according to a Seattle Times article, with attacking a group of park dwellers. The victims explained in police reports that the gang carried machetes, beat and robbed people and threatened decapitation. Two kids from the group admitted they were Juggalos, the Times reported, and that Juggalos have become increasingly ganglike.

  In another example reported by the Times, an eighteen-year-old Juggalo entered a known Massachusetts gay bar yielding a hatchet and gun and assaulted three patrons. The kid ran off to Arkansas, the report said, where he killed a female companion and a police officer before police shot him dead.

  On his website, the kid had posted a simple—but telling—message: Are you a Juggalo?

  30

  Brad Tobias had moved to the QC from Texas not long before the 2004 Black Hawk Outreach semester began. When he heard Adrianne was from a town in Texas not far away from where he had been born and raised, Brad wanted to meet her.

  “When I first met Adrianne, I found her to be giddy,” Brad recalled. “Bubbly. Friendly.”

  They were interested in each other from the start. As if in junior high again, Adrianne wrote their names all over her notebooks, with hearts and XOXOXO around the names.

  But as Brad got to know Adrianne more personally, he began to see that she was trying to be somebody she was not. Adrianne was never one to spike her hair, he said, or wear black clothes and dark makeup, Goth-like. Yet, when she started to hang out with, and grow affection for, Sarah, Brad said, “Adrianne changed.” Now she wanted to be a Juggalette, same as Sarah. But only because she believed it allowed her to fit in with Sarah and that group of people Sarah ran with, including Cory and Nate.

  “What Adrianne was,” Brad remembered, “was a goody-good girl.”

  Adrianne was bisexual, Brad said. “She told me. We discussed it.”

  And now Adrianne wanted to date Sarah.

  Brad was curious. Adrianne was talking about Sarah one afternoon: Sarah this. Sarah that. All things Sarah.

  Adrianne was infatuated with Sarah and her lifestyle, and she wanted in on it.

  “What is the interest in Sarah?” Tobias asked Adrianne. He and Adrianne were dating by then, but they had an open relationship, one could say. It was the first week of December 2004.

  Adrianne shrugged. Smiled. “I think Sarah’s cute.”

  “How?” Brad wondered, a laugh in his voice. He was shocked by the comment. He found nothing about Sarah “cute.” Sarah was an angry girl, more Joan Jett than Jordin Sparks. Rough around the edges. Even dirty and crude. There were times when she didn’t bathe regularly. What was so darn attractive about any of that? Brad wanted to know.

  Adrianne saw something different in Sarah, she explained.

  “She’s popular,” Adrianne said.

  And there it was: the true attraction Adrianne had for Sarah in this courting stage of their relationship. Adrianne wanted to be popular. Same as Sarah. She wanted the kids to notice her. Same as they did Sarah. She felt that if she hung around with Sarah, that mystery surrounding the girl with a face full of piercings and badass attitude would rub off on her.

  Sarah was one of only a few Juggalettes in that
Black Hawk sect of the group—and Adrianne was now desperately seeking to be the next.

  “Adrianne was all about making friends,” Brad observed. “If Adrianne could have made everyone her friend, that would have made her the happiest, the best day of her life.”

  Adrianne reached out to Sarah during the latter part of that first week in December. She wrote a note to Sarah and placed it on her desk. Adrianne wanted Sarah to understand a few things about where she was coming from. The letter was neatly written in Adrianne’s near-perfect penmanship—an important point to note, because Adrianne apologized to Sarah in the letter for her “sloppy handwriting.”

  Next to Sarah’s name, Adrianne drew a heart, half colored it in:

  Hey babe, what are you doing? Nothing too much here except lying in bed being very bored.

  All of the periods and dots above the i’s were hearts.

  They had apparently made plans to go out, but Adrianne wanted to know if Sarah had decided what they were going to do. Adrianne said she had to work from either “eleven to two, or eleven to three.” She asked Sarah if she just wanted to stay here (Adrianne’s house) and sleep until I get off work, or if you are wanting to spend the night with me.

  Adrianne went on to warn Sarah that it would be a few days before I could actually probably stay with you because I have to get on this birth control shot because my parents know how much I love kids and how bad I want them and they don’t want me to get pregnant.

  Adrianne had been on birth control. There’s no obvious explanation as to why she felt the need to mention this, other than to test Sarah and see how she would react to the statement. It turned out to be a mistake on Adrianne’s part. She was telling Sarah that she was having sex with boys, which Sarah did not appreciate. Sarah demanded monogamous relationships, with boys or girls.