From a Taller Tower by Seamus McGraw

Author:Seamus McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

If You See Something, Say Something

THE SILENCE BETWEEN gunshots was deafening, and the cops taking cover where they could find it at the bottom of the stairway tried to fill it, almost pleading with the boy to throw down his weapons and come out.

The echoes of gunshots, rounds fired by the boy, rounds fired in return from the cops, still rang in the hallways of the hundred-year-old school. Smoke and the stench of spent powder hung in the air. It had happened so fast. It hadn’t even been ten minutes since the central dispatch in Richmond, Indiana, had gotten a frantic phone call from the boy’s mother, telling them that her troubled son had armed himself with a .45-caliber handgun and a Remington 700, just like the one the killer in Austin had used decades earlier, that he had taken her boyfriend hostage and had ordered him at gunpoint to drive him to the Dennis Intermediate School.

It’s not that there hadn’t been warning signs. Counselors had warned her that her son was dangerous, that he heard voices and was possibly suicidal, potentially even homicidal, that he had expressed a desire to go to his old school and take revenge on classmates who he believed had bullied him. Seven months before he stormed into his old school, he had been held under psychiatric observation for ten days, but his mother took him out when her insurance ran out. She’d later be called to account for that decision. In October 2019 authorities charged her with a raft of offenses—five felony counts of neglect of a dependent, one felony count of dangerous control of a child, and one misdemeanor count of criminal recklessness—for failing to prevent her son from storming into his own school with the intent to commit murder.1 But on that day in December she told authorities that she couldn’t believe that he intended to hurt anyone, no one other than himself, at least. The two hundred rounds of .223 ammunition he carried with him for the rifle, the fifty or so shells for the pistol, and the Molotov cocktails he had fashioned out of old water bottles and rags told a different story. As did the detailed plan for the attack that he had written around the time he posed for pictures with his weapons and posted them on social media.

The boy had planned to do “maximum damage,” police would later say. Later, perhaps, investigators would have the luxury of time to parse the clues the boy had left, the signals he had sent, the warning signs that were missed or misunderstood. Later there would be time to wonder whether the nearly friendless boy who had never really been able to fit into the school—he was now being schooled at home—could have been identified as a risk to himself or others earlier.

But not now.

Now there was only one objective: to neutralize the boy with the guns before he could unleash havoc on the roughly 650 fifth- through eighth-graders and their teachers at the school.

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