Molly asked him what was going on.
He replied, “I need to tell you something, but I don’t know if I can.”
Molly’s voice intensifies, and as she tells this part of the story, we feel like we’re in the room with her and the student. “Immediately, I thought, He has a gun. I’m going to have to talk my way out of this.”
The student unzipped his coat and reached inside. “I bet no one has told you they have a loaded gun before?” he said and pulled out a 9mm. He also stood a magazine up on the desk and pulled out a holster from his ankle.
Molly got down on her knees beside him. She remembered some of the hostage negotiation training she had been through years before. She didn’t know it at the time, but she now believes she had been trained for this moment.
“I needed to relinquish power to lower the emotion,” she whispers to us. “I put my hand on his shoulder and interlaced my fingers with his.”
The student told Molly that an entity had called him on the phone and told him that if he didn’t kill everybody in the school, they would kill his family.
Molly started silently praying, Lord, give me the words.
“I came to you because I think you’re the only person who can talk me out of it,” the student told her, and then he asked, “Do you believe in God?”
She responded, “I do, but I can see that maybe you don’t.”
He was quiet for a while, then told her, “Do you know how many times I prayed for help and He never helped me?”
So Molly started praying out loud, the most heartfelt prayer she’d ever prayed. She prayed to remove the student’s pain. They were both in tears. He raised the gun up at one point, and she truly thought he was going to shoot himself in the head, but all he did was scratch the top of his skull with his finger. They stayed there, kneeling on the floor and praying, for one hour and fifteen minutes.
“I’m going to stay here until you give me the gun,” Molly told him.
He put the weapon’s safety on and handed the gun to her. He put both arms around her. They hugged and sobbed for several minutes. She told him “I love you” and “I’m proud of you; doing what is right is hard.”
She finishes her story, and we all take a deep breath. Molly believes she was meant to be there that morning, for that moment, to save all the kids at that school. We’re all lucky she was.
—
A majority of mass shooters had a significant life stressor in the days, weeks, and months prior to their attacks, and they often made threatening communications, provoking concern from others, during this same period. The problem was, most people didn’t know what to do with that concern.
Like CPR, crisis intervention is a skill anyone can learn—you don’t have to be a doctor or psychologist. And, like CPR, crisis intervention can save people’s lives. If a person in crisis is a balloon ready to pop, think of crisis intervention as the art of letting a little bit of the air out. It’s not completely deflating the balloon, or figuring out then and there how and why it got so full, or making sure it doesn’t ever get inflated again. It’s not a long-term mental health treatment. Crisis intervention is nothing more than recognizing when someone is in a crisis and stepping in to help them through that moment. A crisis is a time-limited event. Crisis intervention is helping to take someone out of the danger zone and bring them back closer to equilibrium, to a place where the moment feels manageable again. This can be done for our coworkers, our neighbors, our families, or anyone in our community.
Crisis intervention is teachable. We know this because we’ve taught it to thousands of people over the last few years: police officers, teachers, journalists, church volunteers, college professors, and office workers. We started down this road by researching what protocols for crisis intervention various professions used, from policing to psychiatric nursing to special education. We went through hours and hours of existing training in various professional fields, looking for commonalities among the techniques. Jill spent forty hours in Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training for police officers. We saw some questionable techniques that we knew couldn’t be working (“Clap your hands in someone’s face and scream their name”). We also reviewed published studies of crisis intervention strategies, looking for evidence of effectiveness.
The result of our research is a simple, effective four-step model:
• Step 1: De-escalate yourself. We can’t help someone else in crisis when we are escalated ourselves. In psychology, this phenomenon is called emotional contagion—other people unconsciously pick up on our internal state. Have you ever been in a bad mood at home, and then, all of a sudden, everyone in your house is in a bad mood? If we’re angry or panicked, it’s impossible for us to calm down someone else who is also angry or panicked. The best way to de-escalate oneself is to take a few deep breaths, which literally stops our biological fight-or-flight response. De-escalating oneself also requires acknowledging when we are not the right person to do this because of our own stress and limits. A crisis is not personal. Although someone in crisis may hurl insults our way, crisis intervention involves knowing that the crisis is not about us and being able to brush off any negativity directed at us.
• Step 2: De-escalate the space around you. Having an audience is escalating. Someone in crisis should be in a private space, without others watching. When a student is in crisis in one of our college classrooms, we first ask them to leave the room with us. If that doesn’t work, we send the other students in the class into the hallway, so we can talk to the student alone. Lowering the lighting and reducing noise and distractions also de-escalates. Helping someone through a crisis takes a bit of time, which often means pausing what was previously scheduled in order to be truly present.
• Step 3: Use nonverbal communication. When someone is in crisis, what we do with our bodies is significantly more important than what we say. Having an open body position, a soft tone of voice, leaning into the person, and sitting down are all helpful. Place yourself at eye level or lower than the person in crisis; looking down at someone can be escalating. Sitting down to talk, or even kneeling next to them, is effective. Mirroring is something we all unconsciously do: We mimic the body position and posture of the person we’re talking to. So, if we want someone in crisis to sit down and open up, we must do so first.
• Step 4: Actively listen. The final step is what we say, but rather than saying anything in particular, it’s most important to listen. Active listening involves deeply and authentically listening to another person, with respect and without judgment or advice. A crisis is not logical. Although a person in crisis may be upset about something specific, trying to reason through the details of the situation is not helpful. The important part is focusing on their feelings. When someone is in crisis, naming what they are feeling—whether it is fear, anger, or hurt—is the most proven de-escalating strategy we have. For example, “It sounds like you’re feeling really upset right now.” When we understand what someone is feeling, they feel seen and heard.
Another component to verbal de-escalation is to provide two options to the person in crisis, so they are allowed to make a choice about what happens next. When Jill recently had a student in crisis in her classroom, she got her into the hallway, they sat down, and the student immediately began to sob and shake. Jill gave her two options, “Would you like to go into the classroom and get your backpack, and then we walk to the counseling office? Or would you like me to go get your backpack, and then we can walk to the counseling office?” Either way, the student was going to the counseling office. The student chose to have Jill get her backpack.
When someone chooses an action, they feel more in control, and they are more likely to comply. Being told what to do is escalating; providing agency and choice is calming. However, more than two options can feel overwhelming. Knowing what two options you have is part of preparing and training.
Many of these same principles apply when trying to de-escalate someone experiencing a psychotic episode, says
Professor Diane Reis, a psychiatrist and innovator in behavioral health care. That is because a psychotic episode is itself a crisis. “The definition of a delusion is a fixed false belief,” Professor Reis told us. “That means they can’t be talked out of it. I don’t argue with someone over the delusional nature of their belief. Instead, the goal is, again, to focus on their feelings: ‘Wow, that sounds like a really scary thing to be experiencing. That must be really hard. What’s that been like for you?’ You don’t negate or affirm the perception. If someone is delusional, we won’t agree on the nature of the distress, but someone is in crisis, discomfort—we can agree on that, join with them in their distress. Acknowledge and witness it.”
These principles also apply when talking to children and young adults in the aftermath of a mass shooting. It’s only natural that young people would want to process the terrible events they have been exposed to by the media, social media, and overheard conversations about the shooting, but doing so as a parent or teacher can be tricky.
First, do not focus on the shooter, or the “bad man,” because this will only increase the child’s fear and threat perception. Focus instead on the needs of that young person and of the family, classroom, school, or community.
Similarly, do not say “Everything will be okay” or focus on “resilience” and how to recover, because this could come across as you not listening to the child’s worries and fears. Instead, using language they can understand, calmly talk about your own feelings and thoughts about the shooting and about the positive coping strategies you have used that have been helpful during past stressful times. The goal is to avoid lecturing. Just try listening. Wait for the child to volunteer a question or thought, idea or fear, and then go from there.
Similar rules apply for someone in a suicidal crisis. When Jill trained to work on a suicide hotline in New York City in her early twenties, she was surprised by how simple and effective the training was. First, you have to specifically and directly ask the question “Are you thinking of hurting yourself? Are you thinking of suicide?” This can be a hard question to get out of our mouths to a neighbor, friend, student, or coworker. It can feel awkward. We’re afraid that if we bring up suicide, we might put the idea in that person’s head, but experience and evidence tell us that’s a myth—you can’t plant what was already there.
If someone says no when you ask the question the first time, explain why you asked: “Sometimes people going through what you are going through think about suicide.” Then ask again, because you may get a different answer the second time. And you have to truly want to hear the answer. Sometimes we word the question like we don’t want to know: “You aren’t thinking about suicide, are you?” We have to be unafraid of hearing “yes.”
If someone says they are thinking about suicide, there’s no need to panic. We don’t have to try to talk them out of it. We don’t have to try to solve it. We need only remain calm and listen. Truly, deeply listen. Ask what’s going on, and keep the person talking. Pose open-ended questions—questions that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”—and speak without judgment, again focusing on feelings. Unless it’s an acute emergency—e.g., the person has already swallowed a handful of pills—you just need to be present for them and witness the pain they’re experiencing. Let some air out of their full-to-bursting balloon.
Anyone can do these things for someone in crisis. The right person to reach out is the one to whom the person in crisis has revealed their crisis or who has noticed the other’s crisis. It doesn’t have to be the person with the right letters after their name. We have a tendency to think crisis intervention can be done only in a counselor’s office. But the right person to step in often has a previous relationship with the person in crisis—a teacher, coworker, neighbor, pastor. In one averted school shooting we studied, it was the janitor who stepped in to de-escalate the student.
In his viral TED Talk,7 Aaron Stark describes almost becoming a school shooter. He wanted to do a shooting at his high school, he planned to do the shooting, and he was suicidal and wanted to take others with him. But one night, a friend invited him over, and the friend’s mother had baked a blueberry-peach pie in his honor. She had no idea what he was going through or contemplating doing, but they all sat together and ate the pie. And that human connection and act of thoughtfulness were enough to get him through the crisis. The problems in the lives of mass shooters feel so massive and overwhelming, but sometimes it’s the smallest act that can get someone through a moment, let enough air out of the balloon so they can breathe again.
CHAPTER 5
RELATIONSHIPS
Perpetrator B, a school shooter, began suffering from anxiety around the time he entered high school. By age seventeen, he had developed severe depression and paranoia. “Toward the last years of my adolescence, I was determined to commit suicide,” he tells us. “I tried to kill myself when I was fifteen, seventeen, and eighteen.”
However, a bright spot in his high school experience was meeting Lacy, a kind student who made it her goal not to let anyone sit alone at lunch or be bullied in the hallways.
We meet Lacy at a loud coffee shop in a Southern state; the place is full of twenty-somethings eating avocado toast and bowls of popcorn. We sit with Lacy at a small table and drink overpriced iced tea. Lacy is confident, engaging, and genuine. She speaks slowly, choosing each word carefully and never breaking eye contact.
She and her friends, “a strange group of people . . . nerdy, weird kids,” by her own admission, let Perpetrator B sit with them at lunch so he wouldn’t have to eat alone every day. “There were twenty of us or so who would gather kids who were being bullied. We were a protective place for kids who were treated poorly, like garbage, by the jocks,” she tells us. “We offered to let [him] sit with us so he wouldn’t get picked on.”
Lacy worries, though, that this group could have contributed to Perpetrator B’s problems. Some of those friends were “troubled teenagers spiraling down,” “anarchists” who joked about school shootings. Others “tried to be edgy” by talking about Adolf Hitler and checking out as many library books about him as possible. “We had a lot of fire and bomb threats,” she remembers, “a record number in eleventh and twelfth grade. Kids figured out that if you called in a threat, it killed at least thirty minutes of the school day.”
She recalls Perpetrator B back then: “He seemed young and smaller than other boys his age. He didn’t drive or have a car.” She notes that she only ever hung out with him at school, “never outside of school.” She explains: “I chose never to be alone with him. He asked me to prom. I said no, then asked someone else to cover for me.” Lacy just had a bad feeling about Perpetrator B. “He wasn’t a safe person. He didn’t understand his own emotions or boundaries. He couldn’t feel when people were trying to connect with him. He didn’t understand when someone was trying to help,” she tells us.
Lacy was probably the “first girl he’d ever talked to or he knew,” and Perpetrator B quickly became infatuated with her, she thought, although he kept his feelings to himself until after graduation. After high school, he enlisted in the army, where he served for a year before being deemed unfit to serve.
“I began to suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts,” Perpetrator B told us. “Then I tried to kill myself with a shotgun and spent a week in the psychiatric unit. I did not receive mental health treatment in the army. I felt relieved when I was asked to leave.”
After his discharge, his mental health continued to unravel. He is brief in his letters; it’s like pulling teeth to get him to elaborate. So we exchanged letters with him for months, to tease out more information:
How was your mental health prior to the crime?
Not good. I was paranoid, depressed, anxious, obsessive, homicidal, and suicidal.
You said you developed paranoia. What types of paranoid thoughts did you have?
Pictures were staring back at me and that there were cameras or recording devices in the air v
ents.
Did anyone know how bad your mental health was prior to this crime? Did family or friends notice?
No. My family knew I had begun to suffer from mental health problems but not how bad they were.
What did you think would happen to you after the crime?
I would either be killed by the police or myself. Or I would be executed.
During this time, Perpetrator B became obsessed with studying other high school shooters and thought that God wanted him to commit this crime to “send others to heaven” and “end their pain and suffering.” At a retail chain store, he bought himself a gun, which his mother eventually found. His parents agreed that he could keep the gun if he gave them the ammunition to hold.
Perpetrator B began sending Lacy letters telling her he loved her. She was a college student now, so her mother received the letters at their home. Eventually, Perpetrator B sent Lacy a VHS tape of himself holding his gun, saying he was going to kill himself because she didn’t return his love. Lacy remembers that her little brother, who was thirteen at the time, called her that day “dying laughing”; he had the video playing in the background. But as the video went on, her brother’s demeanor changed, and his laughter turned to tears. “He’s saying he’s going to kill himself. There’s a gun in the background.” Lacy was scared. She stayed with a friend overnight, thinking that Perpetrator B might try to find her. Her mother reported the incident to the police, and Perpetrator B was taken to a state psychiatric hospital.
The police told Lacy and her family not to worry, giving the impression that Perpetrator B would be hospitalized for a long time, that he would be cured of his problems. But as it works in our mental health care system, once Perpetrator B was stabilized and no longer deemed a threat to himself or others, he was released. He was far from “cured.” A month later, Lacy was visiting home from college and bumped into him at the local movie theater. “He walked up to me and said he was sorry. His lip was bleeding, like he’d bit down on [it].” After an awkward exchange, Lacy went back to the police and asked for help. I was “super freaked out,” she tells us, because he “knew my address and where my sister and mom lived. My mom even thought about moving.” The police told Lacy that there was nothing they could do. Perpetrator B had committed no crime, and the hospital had released him.
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