Too Young to Kill

by M. William Phelps

Near the end of the letter, Adrianne said she was bisexual and hoped Sarah didn’t have a problem with it. If Sarah was “straight lesbian,” Adrianne made a point, it didn’t matter to her.

  It appears that Adrianne never heard back from Sarah.

  Hey sweetheart, Adrianne wrote a few days later, do you like me at all? If so, in what way?

  Adrianne needed to know if she and Sarah were becoming lovers, friends, or enemies: I really like you, as in I’d like to go out with you. But do you like me enough that if we went out that you’d respect me enough to know that I’m not going to sleep with you right away?

  In an attempt to find out if all the rumors she had heard about Sarah being a troublemaker with a cold heart were true, Adrianne asked Sarah straight out: You wouldn’t do anything to put me in danger, would you?

  Sarah had visited Adrianne at her East Moline house a few days before Adrianne wrote this latest letter. Adrianne explained that her brother (Jo’s son) thought Sarah was trying to come across as tough. He didn’t like it.

  My brother thought you were trying to act hard, Adrianne wrote, so you could . . . do me a favor of just relaxing.

  Then came more rules for the relationship. Adrianne wanted Sarah to dress nicely the next time she came over to her house: And do something with your hair before you come and meet my dad. . . . DON’T WEAR BAGGY CLOTHES. PLEASE.

  These letters are extraordinary if we note the timing. Adrianne was as confused as she was desperately reaching out a hand to a torn and tattered, angry Sarah Kolb. On that same day Adrianne had written to Sarah, she had also written a letter to a boy back home, telling him to relay a message to another boy:

  I miss him and still love him with all my heart.

  31

  In the beginning, Adrianne Reynolds wanted nothing more than for Sarah Kolb to like her. She did what she could to get Sarah to understand that she wasn’t trying to be phony, and she yearned for nothing more than to be a part of Sarah’s life.

  Sarah was leery, however.

  Adrianne pushed the idea of a romance. And at first, Sarah seemed to be genuinely interested in dating her.

  “I first saw her outside on one of our cigarette breaks,” Sarah later said. “I was very attracted to her. She was a very cute girl.”

  Sarah had strict rules where “friends,” “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” fit into the scope of her life. She was outspoken about this, once saying, “A friend is somebody I like to spend my time with, share my thoughts with, hang out with.” Cory Gregory, in other words. “A boyfriend,” on the other hand, “or girlfriend, is someone that I’d like to get to know better, someone that I can, oh, what’s the word? I don’t know. ‘Understand.’ Someone that can understand me the same way. Someone that I would like to have a future with, maybe.”

  Sarah admitted later that after meeting Adrianne she saw the possibility of there being the opportunity for them to have a lesbian relationship.

  “That was why,” Sarah said, “we were getting to know each other first.” Sarah explained that she wanted “to take it really slow” with Adrianne. Sarah had just come off that viciously hurtful breakup with a much older, adult woman who had “bruised” her feelings. She wasn’t going to allow it to happen again.

  What is the most you’ve done with a girl? Adrianne asked in one note.

  A lesbian relationship was something Adrianne was giving serious consideration to. She wanted to see what it could offer. All boys at that age wanted sex, Adrianne knew. Bed you down and send you on your way. Adrianne was after more than that. She desired true love—any way she could get it. She understood another female could provide this for her, maybe more personal and deep than any boy.

  Adrianne was still keeping her attachments to boys, and Sarah was doing the same thing. By this time, Sarah had her eyes on Sean McKittrick, a tall, skinny, good-looking kid with spiked black hair, who was staying out of town then, but was slated to start classes at Black Hawk after the first of the year. Sarah and Cory had made plans to pick up Sean after Christmas and drive him back to the Moline area. Sarah had always had a “thing” for Sean, she later admitted, which she hoped could be more after he moved into the area.

  As each day passed, the dense and frigid December air in Illinois turned bone-chilling and arctic. Sarah Kolb felt that Adrianne Reynolds was not so much interested in her as a girlfriend, but rather was looking to be part of the crowd Sarah led. Sarah began to feel that Adrianne was trying to use her to step into her role as the group leader.

  A big no-no in Sarah’s book.

  There was a negative aura beginning to form around them as Adrianne worked her way into Sarah’s inner circle. As someone in this group explained to me later, “Adrianne was slowly trying to take Sarah’s mojo from her.”

  At least, this was how it seemed—how those in the group, especially Sarah, interpreted Adrianne’s desperate desire to be one of them.

  It wasn’t something that happened all at once. Or anything Adrianne set out to do intentionally, and certainly not vengefully.

  “Sarah felt Adrianne was trying to take her place inside the group,” said a source.

  Turf. Sarah was all about protecting her terrain, part of which centered on Cory; whether she liked Cory (in that way) was not an issue. But as Adrianne got to know Sarah better, Adrianne and Cory became closer and started to hang around more and more.

  When one looks at these two young lives in hindsight, it’s clear Adrianne and Sarah shared many of the same low self-esteem issues. However, where social networking and hanging out with a group were concerned, the similarities ended. While Adrianne was tattooing her notebooks with hearts and cartoon pictures of herself and friends, fantasizing about love and lying in clover fields, dreaming of children and being married, writing poems about broken loves and the boys she liked, Sarah was scribing things along the lines of “Hate, Kill, Destroy.”

  Sarah’s doodling was darker and self-contained, matching her tough, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo image—that F-the-world philosophy she and the other Juggalos lived by. Sarah was hung up on not being perfect in the eyes of society in general, and not fitting into the proper role she felt society demanded from a sixteen-year-old girl. And this was one of the areas in which she and Adrianne clashed: Sarah was being herself here, which allowed her to pick up quickly on the fact that Adrianne was trying to be someone she was not.

  And this angered Sarah.

  Resentment brewed.

  Even hatred.

  To the point where Sarah was in the process of putting Adrianne to the ultimate test to see if Adrianne was truly one of them, or just some floozy from Texas trying to fit in.

  32

  For Cory and Sarah, their lives outside the confines of Black Hawk Outreach, and the meager hours they worked at their part-time jobs, focused on the party house in Rock Island. This was not your typical frat house environment, a rented home run by a group of jocks or college kids having keg parties on the weekends, leaving empty pizza boxes and cigarette-filled red party cups stinking of stale beer scattered around.

  This was a Juggalo house.

  There was booze. Sex. And, of course, lots and lots of drugs.

  “Anything we could get our hands on,” Henry Orenstein (pseudonym), who also lived in the house, later told me. “Every hour of the day there was a party going on inside that house.”

  Not a group of kids sitting around playing PlayStation, passing a bong. This was a concerted effort to get as high as they could whenever they could. Even Sarah later described how there was a separate area of the house specifically set aside for getting high.

  “The attic was used for doing drugs, smoking pot,” Sarah admitted.

  Orenstein, along with five others, including Cory (sometimes) and Nate Gaudet, stayed at the house. The main drug of choice on any given day or night was pot, but when they could get it, X (Ecstasy) was what these particular Juggalos craved most. Some cocaine moved in and out of the house, too. But it was mainly X.


  “The first time we took X, it was just something to do,” said one housemate. “We heard a lot about it and wanted to try it. Seemed like a good party drug. . . .”

  That experiment offered an entire new world of numbness.

  “Within it, we found fake happiness.”

  About the most Adrianne went for after she started to hang at the house was booze, if she even dabbled in that. Some said, in fact, Adrianne only drank because she felt they’d accept her more.

  “We tried to get her to take X, but she wasn’t down with it,” said Henry.

  Adrianne didn’t even want to hang out upstairs in the attic, for fear of getting a “contact high” from all the pot smoke hovering in the air.

  “Yeah,” Sarah added, “she didn’t want to be up there because she didn’t do drugs. She didn’t want to be around it. . . .”

  Sarah was the one who brought Adrianne to the house for the first time. No one seemed to recall the exact date, but everyone agreed it was in early December, the latter part of the first week, or the beginning of the week after. Cory, attached to Sarah like a chain wallet, was with them. Sarah had planned on going over to the party house after she got out of work. She called and asked Adrianne to go along.

  “Sure,” Adrianne said.

  “I brought her with me to hang out,” Sarah recalled, “because it was an opportunity outside of school to actually get to know her better. We didn’t have class together [anymore], and I wanted to get to know her better.”

  Walking into the living room that day, Sarah called out for everyone’s attention. “Hey, hey. . . .” It was loud. Lots of talking. Music blaring. A good smog of cigarette and pot smoke hanging eye level. “Everyone . . . this is Adrianne.”

  Adrianne said a few words. “What’s up?” She waved. Her thick Texas accent was obvious. It seemed to draw attention to her.

  “Who are you?” someone asked. “Where y’all from?”

  Adrianne explained.

  They sat down and talked.

  There was another reason why Adrianne didn’t take X or anything harder than the booze and pot, Henry explained.

  “Because Sarah told her not to.”

  The first time Henry Orenstein met Nate Gaudet, Nate had come out to the party house with Cory and Sarah to “kick it,” Henry explained. “Nate was cool.”

  Nate didn’t seem aggressive or angry.

  “The most aggression I ever saw out of Nate,” said a former friend, “was when I’d look across [the] room and watch him fuck his girlfriend. That was about the extent of the aggression I saw in Nate.”

  Sarah, on the other hand, wasn’t someone who was all that into jumping around, displaying a high level of energy. Most in the group were mellow, laid-back. Sarah, in particular, loved nothing more than sitting on a chair inside the living room and, listening to her music, enjoying whatever high she was on.

  “Chill and smoke and drink, that was Sarah.”

  There was a part of Sarah Kolb all about flipping the bird to the system. She had an official army outfit (fatigues), but she had vandalized the thing as an F-U to the government. She put patches all over it. Covered it with Sharpie-written slurs. Graffitied it up. At this time, Sarah had bleached blond hair down to her shoulders. She wore black army boots too big for her feet, laces running up her shins. On the walls of her bedroom was a collage of photographs, some of the faces x’d out with a pen, others colored over.

  Cory and Sarah’s relationship was no secret inside the party house. Everyone considered them friends. Nothing more. But again, many in the house later confirmed, Sarah would use Cory’s “obsession with her for her personal gain.”

  “With Cory, when she wasn’t around,” said a housemate, “he wouldn’t talk about her like, ‘I want to fuck her.’ Cory was actually in love with Sarah.”

  And Cory was now growing jealous of Sean McKittrick, whom Sarah was talking about more and more as 2005 grew closer.

  It just hurtz my heart, Cory wrote to Sarah, when you talk about him. He asked Sarah if she noticed how he had always looked at the ground when she mentioned Sean.

  Cory considered Sean one of his closest friends. When Cory went to see Sean once with Sarah, Sean and Cory, according to an interview another friend later gave to police, “both attempted suicide together by hanging themselves . . . and it was Sarah who cut them down.” Sarah ended up staying with them the entire night, making sure they were okay.

  Then there was that stick Sarah carried in her car, a weapon everyone would soon be talking about.

  “She was racist, for sure,” said a QC Juggalo. “We all weren’t like that, though. Especially when talking about ignorant racism. If you’re just hatin’ someone because of their skin color or religion, or what they believe, that’s a stupid reason to hate someone. You should hate them for who they are. If I call someone nigger, it’s generally because they just don’t carry themselves well. They’re a very ignorant person. I’ll call a white person [the N-word], too. . . .”

  Sarah had gone to a Catholic school, but later she talked about “not really finding anything” in what she was being taught. Nothing “solid that gave her any actual proof of what they [the Catholic establishment] were trying to tell” her “was out there.”

  Apparently, faith wasn’t something Sarah accepted without question. One could say she was raised with a divine belief, but then, perhaps like many kids going through their teen years, society and materialism began to affect it to a point where she decided to reject it all with one broad stroke.

  “There were some of us who believed that God is here and did whatever they say He did,” said one Juggalo. “With Sarah, in one way she rejected Christianity, and for her family, she embraced it.”

  Two different people.

  Both trying to please the other.

  Sarah Kolb.

  33

  Several at the party house were upstairs in the attic smoking pot on the day when Sarah and Cory brought Adrianne over to the house that first time and introduced Adrianne to everyone downstairs.

  Adrianne was out of her element in this environment. The people around her were not who she wanted to be, whether she understood that about herself or not. Yet, Adrianne was conducting herself like she had been—to borrow a Juggalo term—a social reject all her life, too.

  Realizing several fellow Jugs were upstairs, partying in the attic, Cory and Sarah grabbed Adrianne and told her to come along.

  No sooner had Adrianne walked into the attic than she turned around and told Sarah, “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  Adrianne wasn’t interested in smoking dope. She had no use for it.

  “Cool,” Sarah said.

  There were several guys up in the attic besides Cory. All of them sat around in a circle with Sarah, smoking. As soon as Adrianne was out of earshot, Sarah turned to Kory Allison, another Jug who lived in the house, and Henry Orenstein.

  “Hey,” Sarah said, addressing them both, “I brought [Adrianne] here.... Look, she wants to party. . . . She’s trying to get laid tonight. I figure I can look to you guys for that.”

  Cory Gregory, inhaling a hit of a joint, smiled. Nodded.

  “That ain’t no problem,” Henry said. “Just get her back up here.”

  Sarah laughed. Shook her head. “Yeah.”

  “Our initial reaction to Adrianne being at the house that day,” Henry later explained, not mincing words, “was that she wanted to fuck.”

  It was clear to everyone in the attic that Sarah was facilitating this for Adrianne. Sarah and Adrianne must have talked this over before arriving, and Sarah was fulfilling a desire of Adrianne’s.

  No one doubted this.

  34

  Over two hundred years before Adrianne Reynolds moved to the QC, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe called the Sauk. Where the tribe settled later became Rock Island. At the time, the Sauk were the largest tribe in North America. One leader of the tribe, Black Hawk, was a man who, if legend has it correct, held
animosity toward Americans that carried over from the Revolutionary War up to the War of 1812. Black Hawk became the only man to have a war—the Black Hawk War—named after him. This happened after he grew tired of the white man squeezing the land his ancestors had left for future tribes. Metaphorically speaking, Black Hawk’s contempt for those who had impaled the societal values around him was an indication of the same disdain those Juggalos hanging out in that Rock Island party house had felt. Valid or not, it was how these kids viewed the world around them. They wanted to be left alone. Not judged by what they wore or the music they listened to. Anyone who entered the Juggalo culture, trying to be somebody they were not, was not only spitting on what the Jugs believed, but lying to them. Most of these kids could brush it off. Turn a cheek. Go on with their partying without a second thought. But Sarah Kolb was different: this sort of betrayal was personal.

  In her heart, Sarah needed to know that Adrianne Reynolds was not trying to infiltrate the group, per se, and take her place. So Sarah devised that test for Adrianne—which was now, with that request she had made to Henry Orenstein and Kory Allison, under way.

  They sat around inside the party house as the evening turned to night. Outside, it was cold enough to see a person’s breath like smoke. Inside, the booze and drugs kept everyone warm. The chosen poison of the night was “Jack.” Jack Daniel’s whiskey. And, of course, lots of pot and other drugs they had on hand. For Sarah and Cory, they stuck to drinks and a gram of cocaine they snorted throughout the evening.

  Adrianne was in the kitchen at one point with Cory. They talked.

  In the living room, Sarah turned to Kory Allison and bumped him on the shoulder. “Go in there and talk to her. She’s lookin’ to hook up!”

  They laughed.

  Kory Allison got up and walked into the kitchen.

  “Hey,” Cory Gregory said to the other Kory. “What up? What up?”

  Kory, with a K, nodded.

  “This is Adrianne,” Cory said, introducing her. Adrianne smiled her little Texas charm. Kory nodded as if he could care less.