“They told me to stop worrying. I asked if I should get a restraining order, and they said no,” she recalls. “I told them he had access to guns, but they were brushing it off.”
Around the same time, Perpetrator B went to see a social worker at a local outpatient treatment center, which was part of his discharge after-care plan from his hospital stay. We found the social worker through trial transcripts, and she invited us to fly down for an interview.
We meet her first thing in the morning, before her other clients, in her small private-practice office within a larger multiuse office building in an industrial part of town. We’re seated on a comfy couch, as though we were patients, while she sits across from us in an office chair. She’s friendly but guarded. This story is a difficult one for her to revisit.
She was only two years out of graduate school, working at a local community clinic, when Perpetrator B came in for a discharge appointment, scheduled as part of his release. He was suicidal and depressed, and the social worker noted that he had been in the hospital longer than a usual stay. “These are typically thirty-minute ‘screening’ appointments,” she explains, “but this one lasted about seventy-five to eighty minutes. Off the bat, something was off. It was in the air, it was palpable, that something was really, really wrong with this guy and his world.”
“What was it, exactly?” James probes. “Can you describe what you noticed?”
The social worker remembers what Perpetrator B told her—his obsession with the Columbine shooting, his anger at his father for being controlling, his perception of his mother as a victim. He talked about how the military had been an abusive situation for him. He also talked about a picture of a woman in a bathroom that moved when he looked at it. The social worker wondered if he was psychotic, but it was more than that: “He scared me. But . . . he didn’t seem like a bad boy. He was a rule follower. He felt like a boy, a vulnerable kid who was fragile. I couldn’t hospitalize him because there was nothing to hospitalize him on. He wasn’t suicidal.”
She made a follow-up appointment with him and then went immediately to a psychiatrist colleague for advice and assistance. She decided to contact an inpatient treatment program for psychosis, but they wouldn’t take Perpetrator B on because they didn’t think he was truly psychotic.
When Perpetrator B didn’t show up for his scheduled follow-up appointment, the social worker tried calling him multiple times, but she couldn’t get him on the phone. She even wrote him a letter. “There was nothing legally I could do. . . . I was a very small cog in a very big wheel,” she laments.
A couple of weeks after his meeting with the social worker, Perpetrator B woke up and tried to die by strangling himself with a seat belt. When that didn’t work, he decided it was time to commit the school shooting he’d been fantasizing about for so long.
The day of the shooting, Lacy got a text from her younger sister, who was hiding in the basement of the high school. “As soon as she told me there was a shooting on campus, I knew,” Lacy says. The next day, another letter arrived. Perpetrator B had mailed it to her right before going to shoot up the school. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to shoot your sister,” he’d written. Lacy describes the letter as self-loathing. He also sent another video, but she didn’t watch it. When she handed it over to the police, their response was “There’s no way we could have known,” she says angrily. So many opportunities to intervene had been missed.
Lacy’s experience with Perpetrator B was “super traumatic.” She spent years in therapy and is still “fearful of men in general.” She thinks about the experience all the time—mostly, of all the opportunities for intervention that were missed. The experience certainly shaped Lacy’s life trajectory: She now works as a special education teacher for children afflicted with emotional and behavioral disorders. She runs groups for high school kids who feel lonely and disconnected. She often thinks of the irony in Perpetrator B meeting all the criteria to be in the programs she now leads. She wonders what diagnosis he might have had, with his cyclical thinking and false impressions. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder? Borderline personality disorder?
There is a calm about Lacy as she describes her current work—a sense of strength and resiliency: “I use the experience every day in my teaching practice. I’m intensely passionate about unstoppably advocating for students. What can we do to reconnect the disconnected to our community? We can’t brush off brokenness.”
—
The first time we meet Missy is at a small local coffee shop on a chilly November afternoon. She heard Jill talking on a local news station about our project, which had just begun, and reached out by email. Missy is in town for Thanksgiving, staying with her parents, who are watching her kids this afternoon. She arrived early and is sitting at a table with a large cup of coffee, a huge smile, and a pile of handwritten notes in front of her. She recognizes Jill instantly and jumps to her feet.
Missy is originally from Arkansas and has retained her country charm and Southern wit. She is warm and funny and easy to connect with. She taught high school math in her home state for two years before moving up to Minnesota because of her husband’s job. She took a high school math teacher’s position on the Red Lake Indian Reservation near where they moved. In her Upper South accent, she describes the community as small and close-knit: “Everyone knows each other,” but “it’s like a third world country; there’s so much poverty.”
Missy met the 2005 Red Lake school shooter during one of her first years teaching ninth-grade math. She still struggles to talk about him, her anger and pain cutting through her cheery and upbeat demeanor.
“He was not reactive. He was very difficult to bond with. He never made eye contact, and he didn’t want to be touched,” she says, though it’s hard to imagine her unable to bond with someone. “He dressed goth; lots of kids did,” but he liked to style his hair into devil’s horns, she says. “He didn’t really try in school; he just sat there; just took up space. He wasn’t scary, just quiet. I just had a teacher gut feeling about him. I knew enough to leave him alone. There were kids that I would push; I would get in their face if they didn’t do their homework. But I knew enough not to push him.”
“Teacher gut”—that’s what Missy calls it: that sixth sense that teachers sometimes have about their students that something just isn’t right.
“Were there any warning signs?” Jill asks softly. “Anything you saw beforehand? When you had him as a student?”
Missy pauses; this story is difficult for her to tell. “One day in class, he said to me, ‘Did you know Hitler liked math?’ ” The Hitler reference caught her attention. “Then he quietly slid up his sleeves to reveal the cut marks running down his arms. I sat down and told him that I was a mandated reporter,” Missy says. “Then he said that he wanted to see [another teacher in the school]. I can’t remember if the other teacher wrote it up or if I did.
“I realize now that he was asking for help,” Missy goes on. “I can’t remember if he ever came back to class after that day. But that was not abnormal there,” for students to cut themselves, she says. Just a few months before, another student had died by suicide, so the faculty had been told to watch for cutting and to report what they noticed. But they had never been coached or trained in what to do in these situations, what to say or how to help.
What Missy didn’t know was that the cutting incident was, in fact, just one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of information. For example, she wasn’t the only teacher who had trouble bonding with this student, about whom she had a “teacher gut” bad feeling. Other teachers felt it, too, but there was no forum or mechanism for them to share these concerns with one another.
Some of them suspected that the student had called in a bomb threat that once forced the school into lockdown. Others were alarmed that the student was writing admiringly about Nazis and Hitler in class, and drawing pictures of guns and death, but when one of them escalated it to the school counselor, they were told n
ot to worry. Perhaps that’s because the counselor didn’t know that the student’s father had died by suicide in a standoff with police; or that the student’s mother was physically abusive and an alcoholic and had been permanently consigned to a care home owing to life-changing injuries sustained during a car accident; or that the student’s grandfather had instructed his grandson to kill himself outside so he wouldn’t make a mess on the floor; or that the student was being bullied and was failing classes; or that he had previously been treated for depression and suicidal ideation and on social media was posting stuff like the following: “16 years of accumulated rage suppressed by nothing more than brief glimpses of hope, which have all but faded to black. I can feel the urges within slipping through the cracks, the leash I can no longer hold.” In a blog post, he had written that his “favorite thing” was “moments when control becomes completely unattainable . . . times when madden [sic] psychopaths briefly open the gates to hell and let chaos flood through.”
The FBI investigation into the Red Lake massacre states that at least thirty-nine people knew the student was thinking about shooting up the school. Some students who suspected his plan even notified school authorities, but no one believed he would really do it.
Even though he had obtained a map of the school.
Even though he was obsessed with school shootings, so much so that he screened a movie about one in class and checked out from the school library a young adult novel centered on one, called Give a Boy a Gun.
Even though he loved firearms, had access to them, and used to “target practice” in the woods.
Even though his last online journal entry read:
So fucking naive man, so fucking naive. Always expecting change when I know nothing ever changes. I’ve seen mothers choose their man over their own flesh and blood, I’ve seen others chose [sic] alcohol over friendship. I sacrifice no more for others, part of me has fucking died and I hate this shit. I’m living every mans [sic] nightmare and that single fact alone is kicking my ass. I really must be fucking worthless. This place never changes, it never will. Fuck it all.
All Missy knew was that a student was cutting himself and that she had to report him to the counselor. She wishes only that someone had put all those little puzzle pieces together to see the bigger picture before he entered the school three years later and killed five students in her classroom.
—
The vast majority of mass shooters signal their intentions in advance, which is easy to see with hindsight but difficult to appreciate at the time. In fact, nearly half of all mass shooters tell someone that they are thinking about violence before they do it—again, something that threat assessment experts call “leakage.”
Eighty-six percent of mass shooters aged twenty and under leak their plans in advance. Relatedly, K–12 school shooters are most likely to leak their plans and do so most often to their peers, increasingly online, in chat rooms or on social media—which makes sense when you think about how children and young people communicate. Shooters who leak their plans are more likely to be suicidal and to have been in previous counseling than shooters who do not, which suggests, importantly, that by leaking their plans, prospective mass shooters are in fact crying for help. Still, their mass shooting events show a high degree of planning, and the shooter is more likely to have studied past mass shootings. Shooters who leak are also more likely to include in their crimes an element of performance, such as a costume or a live video stream, which suggests leakage might even be a part of the act.
How do mass shooters leak their plans?
Who do mass shooters leak their plans to?
Of the perpetrators who leak their plans, school shooters were most likely to tell a classmate, workplace shooters were most likely to tell a coworker or supervisor, and retail shooters were mostly likely to tell their wives or girlfriends. The implication here is that most mass shooters told someone, and the majority told someone they knew on a personal level. The question is: If someone told you that they were contemplating a mass shooting, would you know what to do and who to tell?
—
The former principal of a rural high school that very nearly suffered a mass shooting spoke to us about the scariest day of his life. He recalled that it was a crisp fall morning when a six-foot-five-inch, 350-pound seventeen-year-old brought his father’s 12-gauge shotgun to school in a duffel bag and assembled it in a boys’ restroom. The student then changed into black clothes and a ski mask. When another student entered the bathroom and said the gun did not look real, the perpetrator fired a shot into the ceiling. No one was hurt, but the sound and recoil of the shot reverberating around the small tiled bathroom caused panic. The scared student ran out of the bathroom and to the principal, who happened to be nearby, doing his morning rounds.
Without thinking, the principal entered the bathroom alone. Standing outside the stall where the perpetrator had hidden, he convinced the shooter to put the gun down and then restrained him until police arrived some eight minutes later. “I just kept saying [his name], you’re not going to do this today. We’re not going to do this today,” the principal tells us.
This was a school that routinely ran lockdown drills. It even had an active shooter response plan. But on that day, nothing went according to plan. The shot was fired at around 7:30 A.M. School hadn’t even started yet. Students and teachers were still filing in and congregating in the cafeteria and hallways. No one had taken attendance. The marching band was practicing on the football field. Nothing was like what they had rehearsed in the lockdown drills they’d run for years. Teachers had no advanced warning, so no one was in their position. Also, the school resource officer was absent that day because he was visiting the nearby elementary school to talk about his career in law enforcement.
“You can’t practice for the unknowable,” the principal tells us. “There are too many variables.”
We ask him what he thinks actually works. How can schools really prepare for mass shootings?
His answer is one word: “Relationships.”
Relationships are key. Relationships enable someone to notice when one of their students, friends, colleagues, or coworkers is in crisis and on the path to violence. Relationships empower people to say something if they see or hear something. A common theme in our research was that people often did see or hear something indicative of violent intent, but there was a reluctance to report because they did not want to be seen as a “snitch”—or, in the case of school shooters, adults did not see threats made by children as viable. People were especially hesitant to call the police, who naturally are front of mind for this, because the police have limited tools in their toolbelt and a criminal justice response has the potential to do more harm than good.
In order for students to report their peers, they need to trust that the adults in the school will handle the situation well. A positive culture and climate, both of which provide time and space for teachers to connect with their students one-on-one and establish meaningful relationships, are critical to this endeavor. Students must feel they have access to at least one trusted adult in the building. Equally important is a centralized reporting mechanism with anonymous reporting options. Students must feel confident they will be protected if they say something, and if they do say something, someone will actually do something.
The FBI receives upward of twenty thousand tips from the public every week, and in the week following the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, where a gunman shot and killed twenty-three people and injured twenty-three others in a Walmart, the Bureau’s National Threat Operations Center received close to forty thousand.1 Just four days after the massacre at Walmart, a thirteen-year-old boy was arrested in Weslaco, Texas, after making a comment on Instagram targeting another Walmart. A few days after that, a man was arrested in New Haven, Connecticut, after making a comment on Facebook about needing “30 round magazines” for a local Puerto Rican festival. Another man, in Tallahassee, Florida, was arrested after posting on Facebook that
he was going to be off probation soon and would get his AR-15 back: “Don’t go to Walmart next week,” he wrote. A high school student in California made threats on Snapchat, sharing a photo of a gun case with the caption “Don’t come to school tomorrow.” And a fifteen-year-old boy in Florida was arrested because he had threatened online to kill several people at his high school.
We’ll never know whether these threats would have been followed by shootings had the police or FBI not acted, or whether the subsequent arrests and criminal charges were an overreaction. The FBI has missed opportunities to prevent violence by not taking seriously past social media missives that promised violence. For example, the Bureau admits that it mistakenly chose not to investigate a credible and specific tip about the 2018 Parkland shooter, even after he posted a number of disturbing items online, including this comment on a YouTube video: “Im [sic] going to be a professional school shooter.”
But we must not lose sight of the fact that in the vast majority of cases, any threat is really just a cry for help, evidence of an underlying personal crisis, so unless violence to self or others is credible and imminent, reporting options that can triage cases and adjudicate the best course of action from a menu of options may be better than reporting directly to law enforcement and funneling people into the criminal justice system. For example, “P3 Campus” is an anonymous reporting system designed for schools that students, teachers, staff, and parents can access as an app on their phones to register a wide range of concerns, from violent threats to signs of a mental health crisis.
The Violence Project Page 9