At the institutional level, we can curb opportunity through situational crime prevention, by establishing systems for checking in on the people entering our schools, workplaces, and churches, such as employing trained greeters to welcome people as they walk through the door.
At the societal level, we can elect policy makers who acknowledge the American roots of mass shootings, who condemn the violence in no uncertain terms, and who will pass the commonsense gun laws that the majority of Americans agrees will make it easier to keep guns away from people who shouldn’t have them—like the fifteen-year-old high school student in Caitlin’s small town. We can push for policies such as red flag laws; close legal loopholes through universal background checks or permit-to-purchase laws and mandatory waiting periods; recognize the risks posed by ghost guns; and enforce safe storage.
This same tiered approach applies to stopping the social contagion and hateful rhetoric that embolden angry, rejected young men and encourage violent retribution. As individuals, we can avoid clicking on, “liking,” or sharing news stories that show the perpetrators’ faces, provide details about their crimes, or include personal writing or videos that the perpetrators were hoping would be widely distributed. Our institutions can teach media literacy to young people, starting in elementary school, so students know how to stay away from hateful rhetoric online and identify false claims. Mainstream media can follow the No Notoriety protocol and avoid turning mass shooters into celebrities, and advertisers can divest from the networks and newspapers that do. Government can hold social media companies responsible for acts of mass violence that are organized and disseminated on their platforms, and we can lobby those companies to de-platform and disrupt online hate groups.
—
We fly out to meet with Ann and Valerie, the mother and sister of a perpetrator of a recent mass shooting. Ann sent us an email after reading about our work, wanting to get involved. We sit in the conference room of an upscale downtown apartment building. In the common room next door is the Friday night reception for residents of the building: wine and cheese plates. Laughter and conversation are muffled through the wall of windows separating the two spaces. Our room is quiet. Ann and Valerie are both nervous, guarded, and scared. Their pain, guilt, and shame are palpable. They speak slowly and quietly.
“I just drove down the highway the other day, driving past the last place that I saw [my brother],” Valerie, the sister of the perpetrator, tells us. “I get overwhelmed and emotional every time. Even years later. We had dinner there days before it happened. I’ve gone over that dinner so many times: Was there a sign? Was there something I could have said? A question I should have asked? Should I have known somehow? I feel like he was settled at that point. His plans were impenetrable. Everything seemed so normal.”
“It was all so rushed. We were all so busy,” Ann adds, trying to comfort her daughter, to ease her guilt. “I was so focused on work. I should have paid more attention then. I should have spent more time. He wanted love. He wanted kindness. He wanted compassion.”
Ann’s voice is pained, her eyes brimming with tears, “In elementary school, they said he needed help. But financially we couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know that if we got him evaluated, he could get resources for free. We didn’t know about any of it. We need good mental health care in this country. It has to be accessible. We need to help mothers and fathers know where to go when they are worried about their child.”
“Did you have any sense that something was wrong in the weeks before it happened?” Jill asks.
Ann nods and takes a deep breath: “Before the shooting I was worried about him. I called the mental health crisis line to go check on him, but they sent the police. The police didn’t ask him anything. They basically knocked on the door, he said he was fine, and [they] asked me, ‘Why did you call us?’ ”
Valerie cuts in, her voice more frustrated: “What if a social worker had responded? Would it have gone differently? Would they have discovered something was terribly wrong?”
—
Mike shared similar sentiments when he spoke with us at Jill’s office. He had also seen news coverage about our work and had reached out wanting to know if he could help.
Mike is visibly emotional when he arrives to tell us about his son, Bobby. He hesitates at the door, too nervous even to sit down, and leaves to get a drink of water before coming back in. He is carrying a piece of paper and visibly shaking.
He explains to us that Bobby grew up in a chaotic household. His mother, Mike’s wife at the time, was violent and unpredictable, suffering from undiagnosed serious mental illness. (Mike now believes it was schizophrenia.) Bobby’s maternal uncle went to prison for murder after stabbing a man forty times and rolling him up in a carpet. When Bobby was eight, his uncle was released from prison and moved in with his sister, Bobby’s aunt, down the street from them. Bobby would spend a lot of time at their house, which Mike describes as a “crack den, where everyone was always high and drunk.” Mike thinks Bobby might have been sexually molested in that house, but he’s never been sure.
Bobby was bullied throughout school. He was always fascinated by weapons and carried a screwdriver with him to school every day to “feel safe.” In eighth grade, he posted a threat of school violence on his Facebook page that a teacher saw. The police showed up at their house, arrested Bobby, cuffing him and putting him in the back of a squad car. The cops eventually decided not to charge him, and he was transferred to a local hospital for inpatient treatment. At that point, Mike found out that his son had been hearing voices, and Bobby was placed on suicide watch. After a week in the hospital, he was diagnosed with “major depression with psychotic episodes” and then released.
Soon after that incident, Mike divorced Bobby’s mom. He was proactive about keeping Bobby in regular therapy. They did weekly father-and-son therapy sessions with a psychologist, and Bobby had a separate therapist individually; he also took medication. When Mike remarried, to a woman who had her own son about Bobby’s age, Bobby decided to move up north to the rural area where his mother lived.
“The problem was that there was no access to mental health care up north; the nearest therapist was a one-hour drive away,” Mike recalls. “I would drive up Wednesday to drive him one hour to a therapy appointment and then drive home on Thursday. The doctors up north wouldn’t prescribe medication for his hearing voices, and he never told his new therapist about them. And the school up there was ill-equipped—no mental health resources at all.”
Bobby eventually got kicked out of school for “writing things that scared people.” He moved to the next state over and quit mental health treatment altogether. He bought a “cache of weapons—pistol, shotgun, Mace, brass knuckles” and told Mike to “stop digging around in my business.” Mike says he was walking on eggshells, but at this point Bobby was an adult.
“I was terrified he was going to kill himself,” Mike says. “I couldn’t take the risk of hurting him or pushing him over the edge.”
At the age of twenty, Bobby took his own life by shooting himself. He left his dad a long note. It’s the piece of paper Mike has carried with him into our meeting. He’s never shown it to anyone before:
Dear Dad,
I’m gone. Some may say too soon, but I feel like it was past overdue.
We have very few things in common. We both have our own set of morals, principles we live by, but we’re coming from such different schools of thought, I’ve felt like every day that I’ve learned a new lesson, we’ve drifted more apart. But that may be the case with everyone in this life. With every day, each passing hour, I’ve drifted further and deeper into this void, one too dark for this world. That’s why I need to go. Why I am gone now. My ideas are too archaic. A disgusting barbarian has lived inside my head and taken over. He’s ruled my mind like occupied territory since I was age 6 or age 7. This is me winning the war. I’m not letting him win.
If I had it my way, I would have the heads of my enemies cut off
by swords and anyone who’s done anything to hurt or embarrass me would be on that list. We spoke of monsters recently. I want to protect others but I feel dangerous. Like I’m on the verge of becoming a monster. Something inhuman. I’m ending my life so I can ensure no one gets hurt. Both of my families will be saddened by my passing, but there will be an unknown number of families spared the pain of losing loved ones to a bogeyman.
Mike’s eyes fill with tears as we read it. Like Ann and Valerie, Mike lives with a lot of what-ifs: What if Bobby hadn’t moved up north and, instead, had continued his treatment twice a week in the city? What if he had been able to access high-quality treatment up in that rural area or if there had been mental health treatment available at his school? What if Mike had gotten him hospitalized when he was so worried about him and he had been unable to purchase guns?
—
Addressing trauma and crisis feels daunting, but there are things that each of us can do. As individuals, we can prioritize developing healthy, honest, long-term relationships with young people—our children, relatives, neighbors, and members of our community. We can volunteer as mentors and be willing to walk with children through their hardest moments, listen deeply and authentically, and connect them to resources when needed. We can all be trained in the skills of crisis intervention and suicide prevention. We can know how to recognize the signs of a crisis and intervene with verbal and nonverbal skills to “let air out of the balloon” and help someone in crisis get through the moment. We can become comfortable asking people if they are suicidal; we can learn to listen and validate feelings and know what resources are available in our communities and how to facilitate connections to them.
At the institutional level, we can create warm and welcoming environments where young people feel seen and supported. We can also start screening for trauma in doctor’s offices and schools so that young at-risk people can be identified early on and connected with free, accessible resources. We can establish crisis response teams in schools, universities, workplaces, and places of worship so that the community can report people they are concerned about without the threat of arrest or punishment. We can establish anonymous reporting systems to gather information and referral mechanisms to connect people in crisis to needed resources.
We should offer this care and support to anyone who is struggling, not just because it might avert a shooting tragedy. We need to increase knowledge and awareness of these resources and remove the stigma associated with receiving help. Our schools need funding to provide students with adequate on-site services such as counselors and social workers, and to train teachers to respond to trauma and crisis when they see them in their classrooms. Teachers also need an evidence-based national curriculum focused on social-emotional learning, specifically teaching young boys coping skills, communication, health relationships, and empathy.
Big picture: We need serious investment in the social determinants of health and well-being—the social and economic conditions in housing, employment, food security, and education that have a major influence on individual and community health. We need a stronger social safety net in the United States, so that the loss of a job doesn’t mean the loss of one’s home, identity, or health insurance. Universal health care, paid maternity leave, and access to affordable child care are examples of policies common in other wealthy democracies that reduce the stress and financial strain on new mothers.
At the society level, well-resourced social service providers are needed. As Ann noted in her interview, this includes affordable, accessible, high-quality mental health treatment in schools and in the community. For most of American history, people with serious and persistent mental illness were locked away in hospital-like institutions.1 Starting in the 1950s, most of these facilities were shut down due to inhumane treatment and rampant physical and sexual abuse. But only half of the community-based mental health treatment and assistance services touted to replace the old state-run mental health institutions were built, and none of them was fully funded.2 Current options either are difficult to access because we have such a shortage of qualified health care providers in this country, or are prohibitively expensive because they are not always covered by private insurance. For people experiencing psychosis for the first time, one of the biggest barriers to getting treatment is not knowing where to seek help.3
Law enforcement has become the de facto first responder to many mental health crises. But the police really only have two options at their disposal: arrest (though the problems at hand do not call for legal intervention, so that just criminalizes mental illness) or hospitalize. Police officers have the authority to take a person into custody for medical treatment if they are in need of a mental health evaluation and are in danger of harming themselves or others if not immediately detained. However, even this is a temporary fix, because the goal of psychiatric hospitalization is really only stabilization.
There is some misperception among the general population that an involuntary psychiatric hold can cure mental illness. The reality is that hospitals are very limited in what they can impose on people. They can’t force treatment and they can’t coerce patients into attending follow-up appointments. They also can’t medicate someone against their will without safety concerns. Even if an antipsychotic medication is prescribed, it takes seven to ten days before any real effects are felt—long after discharge from the hospital in most cases. The average length of stay in a psychiatric hospital is two to three days in some places and five to seven in others. But admittance is the exception, not the rule. We witnessed this firsthand when we partnered with a suburban police department in Minnesota and spent several days and nights doing ride-alongs with police responding to crisis calls.4 Police would send people experiencing a mental health crisis to the hospital in an ambulance, but within hours that person would be home again, redialing 911. We interviewed the doctors and nurses at the largest psychiatric emergency department in town, and they told us they turned away over 80 percent of people who were sent to them, either because the patients were not in acute danger of hurting themselves and others or because the hospital didn’t have the bed space.
Within our current system, people are cycling in and out of hospitals, with only a large ambulance bill to show for their trouble. The hospitals are frustrated, the police are frustrated, the people in crisis and their families are frustrated. This is a systemic problem that needs systemic solutions. We need to actually deliver on the promise of the Community Mental Health Act and the enduring vision of President John F. Kennedy, who signed it one month before he was assassinated in 1963: to build and fund affordable, community-based mental health treatment and assistance services that can be easily and readily accessed by the people who need them.
—
Missy, the former math teacher and survivor of the 2005 Red Lake school shooting, has vivid, terrible memories of that day. The perpetrator was suspended at the time of the shooting, on homebound services, and not allowed in the school. His grandfather was a cop, and the perpetrator used his grandfather’s guns, bulletproof vest, and squad car the day of the shooting. He entered the school at 2:50, during seventh period. First, he killed the unarmed security guard at the front door. He came to Missy’s room then. Missy was having trouble with students walking into her classroom who weren’t supposed to be there, she recalls, so she had locked the door earlier in the day. A student ran up to her locked door, screaming that there was a shooting taking place at the school. Missy assumed it was gang related, because some of her students had gotten mixed up in that violent way of life. So she turned off the lights and lined her students up against one wall.
She had a window next to her locked door with her name on it. When she saw the familiar face of the perpetrator standing on the other side of the glass, the student who three years before had told her he liked Hitler and who had been cutting himself, “I knew we were in trouble,” she says. He was wearing a blue bandana, a bulletproof vest, and combat boots. Missy saw his eyes reveal a sudden
flash of insight: that he could shoot out the glass. Three shots, and the glass was out. To this day, the sound of glass crunching underfoot still triggers Missy’s PTSD.
The perpetrator entered her classroom and asked a few people, “Do you believe in God?” There were fifteen students and three adults in the room, all lined up against the wall, praying for salvation. He just started shooting down the line. Guttural screams filled the room.
“I heard pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” Missy describes, the pain palpable in her voice.
Then the shooter pointed the gun at Missy and fired, but there were no bullets left.
“He looked possessed during the shooting,” Missy tells us. “There was a dead look in his eyes. I saw evil that day.”
During the break in gunfire, a sophomore named Jeff May, one of Missy’s favorite students and her “hero,” lunged at the perpetrator with a No. 2 pencil, then tried to wrestle him to the ground. The perpetrator shot Jeff in the face point-blank, but Jeff’s selfless actions shook the perpetrator and seemed to “wake him up for a bit.” He fled Missy’s classroom.
When he left, it was “total chaos,” Missy says. The lights were off, and the smoke alarm was blaring. “I froze.” The perpetrator had left one rifle in her classroom, and he came back in minutes later to get it. He pointed the rifle at his head and shot himself.
After the shooting, students and faculty converged on Missy’s house as a gathering point. Without having to ask, everyone knew who the shooter was. “Everyone knew it had to be him. You know the kids. We knew,” Missy reflects. She went back to her classroom later that day, to help the FBI identify the bodies lying on the floor. “My babies,” as she calls them.
The Violence Project Page 20