“She wasn’t letting us do much because she felt guilty and threatened. I assured her there was need for neither. We’re happy for her and only want to help and we’d never try to take her child from her. We’re not trying to be his parents, just trying to help her parent him.”
“What do they need?” she asks. “I should go and check on them and get them some—”
“They’re all settled in,” I say. “They’re getting what they need most—sleep.”
“I have the strongest urge to go and wake him up and hug and hold him for the rest of the night.”
“Resist that urge, sister,” I say. “Be strong. Hug and hold me instead. You’ll get a crack at him first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you so much for bringing them home,” she says.
“I knew it would make you happy,” I say, “and I took a chance it wouldn’t make you too sad.”
“Not too, no.”
“Good. So why don’t you slide over here and hug and hold me and let’s get some sleep? I have a feeling we’re about to be getting less for a while.”
After Anna is sound asleep again, I roll back to my side of the bed and begin to look up information about school shootings and the kids who commit them on my phone.
Most school injuries are sports-related. Most school crimes involve petty theft. Most teenage deaths are accidents, followed by homicides, then suicides. The number of teens who die in school rampage shootings is less than one-hundredth of one percent.
Most murders are unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, spontaneous acts—a fear and anger-induced response to a perceived imminent threat. But mass murders, the murdering of multiple victims by a single murder within a relatively short period of time, accounts for less than one percent of all violent crimes. These tend to be predatory, planned, and purposeful, but without emotion.
Kids who kill other kids in mass rampage attacks at school feel persecuted and bullied—whether they actually are or not. Some live a long while under the constant threat of attack and injury and some experience extreme forms of bullying and harassment for long periods of time.
In one study, Catherine Newman, a sociologist at Princeton University, identified five common conditions present in most school-related shooters.
First, the shooter perceives himself to be socially marginalized—whether he actually is or not. Second, he suffers from some form of psychosocial problems—such as learning disorders, psychiatric disorders, dysfunctional families—all of which magnify his marginality. Third, he follows pop culture notions of violent problem-solving—if you’re being mistreated respond with force to retaliate your way to respect. Fourth, he flies beneath the radar. His serious, severe, and problematic behavior goes unnoticed or unidentified by parents, teachers, friends, guidance counselors, school psychologists, and social workers. Fifth, he has access to firearms. Without the availability of weapons, there are no school-related shootings.
Later, when sleep comes, I have the same dream I had so long ago.
It’s interesting. I didn’t have it before John Paul was born, nor even after he arrived into the world. It was only after Carla decided to keep him, only after he was lost to me, that I started having the dream again. But since then I had been having it nearly every time I slept.
A cruelty and simultaneously a kind of salve, it is bittersweet but not unwelcome.
The last of the setting sun streaks the blue horizon with neon pink and splatters the emerald green waters of the Gulf with giant orange splotches like scoops of sherbet in an Art Deco bowl.
A fitting finale for a perfect Florida day.
My son, who looks to be around four, though it’s hard to tell since in dreams we all seem ageless—runs up from the water’s edge, his face red with sun and heat, his hands sticky with wet sand, and asks me to join him for one last swim.
He looks up at me with his mother’s brown eyes, open and honest as possible, and smiles his sweetest smile as he begins to beg.
“Please, Daddy,” he says. “Please.”
“We need to go,” I say. “It’ll be dark soon. And I’m supposed to take your mom out on a date tonight.”
“Please, Daddy,” he repeats as if I have not spoken, and now he takes the edge of my swimming trunks in his tiny, sandy hand and tugs.
I look down at him, moved by his openness, purity, and beauty.
He knows he’s got me then.
“Yes,” he says, releasing my shorts to clench his fist and pull it toward him in a gesture of victory. Then he begins to jump up and down.
I drop the keys and the towels and the bottles of sunscreen wrapped in them, kick off my flip-flops, and pause just a moment to take it all in—him, the sand, the sea, the sun.
“I love you, Dad,” he says with the ease and unashamed openness only a safe and secure child can.
“I love you.”
I take his hand in mine, and we walk down to the end of his world as the sun sets and the breeze cools off the day. And we walk right into the ocean from which we came. A wave knocks us down and we stay that way, allowing the foamy water to wash over us.
He shrieks his joy and excitement, sounding like the gulls in the air and on the shore. He plays with intensity and abandon, and for a moment I want to be a child again, but only for a moment, for more than anything in this world, I want to be his dad.
We forget about the world around us, and we lose track of time, and the thick, salty waters of the Gulf roll in on us and then back out to sea.
268
I could have just gone off and killed myself quietly. Everybody always asks why guys like me don’t. I’ll tell you why. That would have been an even bigger waste. If I go out this way, taking as many of the fuckers who made my life miserable with me as I can, then maybe just maybe it will send a message. Maybe something will change and some other poor miserable kid in some other shitty school will get treated better and maybe find a reason not to do what I’m doing.
I wake up later than I intended to the next morning and reach for my phone.
To my surprise, it’s not on the bedside table next to my gun, badge, books, and bottle of water where it usually is.
I search for it a few minutes before realizing Anna must have taken it—something she does on the rare occasions when I have a day off.
She keeps the phone with her and monitors my calls and texts, waking me if there’s ever anything that can’t wait. This simple, kind act makes me feel cared for and loved and provides genuine, measurable benefits for my mental health and wellbeing. I’m an owl being taken care of by my robin.
I stumble down the hallway to the living room to find Anna lying on the couch, both Taylor and John Paul lying on her asleep.
She looks up at me and smiles.
She has no makeup on, she’s still in her pajamas, and her thick, brown hair is still morning mad—and she couldn’t be more beautiful.
“Morning,” she whispers. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great, thanks to you,” I whisper back.
“Your phone’s on the counter,” she says, glancing back toward the kitchen. “Nothing that couldn’t wait so far.”
I smile. We have differing ideas on what can and can’t wait.
“Carla took my car to get a few things,” she says. “You hungry?”
I shake my head. I’m not a morning eater—no matter how early or late in the morning it is, and though she knows this, she always asks me anyway, a practice nearly as endearing as her taking my phone so I can sleep.
I can’t help but notice that her question was phrased a little differently than it normally is. Clearly, even with the children asleep, she didn’t want to take the chance that I would give her my typical response when she asks some variation of is there anything I’d like to eat.
Before I can point this out, my phone starts vibrating on the counter and I step over to get it.
“You had a chance to look over our lists of names yet?” Kim asks.
“Not yet, but—”
“Why are you whispering?” she asks in a whisper of her own.
I tell her.
“And you really haven’t read the lists and info yet?” she says.
“Plan to as soon as we hang up.”
“What in the world you been doin’?” she asks in mock outrage. “Wait’ll I tell Chip. He’ll probably fire you from his task force.”
I stifle a laugh to keep from waking Taylor and John and walk into the mudroom but continue to whisper.
“LeAnn and I are both meeting with everyone on our lists today,” she says. “Using a variety of excuses so we don’t raise any suspicions. And she’s doing a short safety presentation in their classrooms because it can’t hurt and so she can get handwriting samples.”
“Great,” I say. “That’s—”
“Think you can bring yourself to look at the lists and read the info about the kids on it in time to meet with us about them after school this afternoon?” she says.
“I think I just might.”
“Don’t want to overburden you or anything.”
“What time?” I ask.
“Let’s do four,” she says. “Give faculty and staff time to leave too.”
“See you then.”
“Only if it’s not too much trouble,” she says.
As I’m finishing up my conversation with Kim, I see Dad pull into our driveway in his new pearl Platinum F-150. Slipping on a pair of shoes, I ease open the door as quietly as I can and step outside to meet him so we can talk without disturbing the little sleepers.
He comes to a stop beneath the shade of the three oak trees near the far end of our driveway. I reach his truck before he gets out and he rolls down the window.
“Tried to call,” he says. “Decided to drop by, make sure Chris didn’t get reanimated somehow or Randa didn’t break out of jail.”
“Anna took my phone when she got up to let me sleep,” I say. “Haven’t even checked it yet. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. Glad you got some sleep. You don’t get enough. Just checking about last night, see what Jeffers had to say.”
“I think he might be on to something,” I say.
“Really?” he asks, his voice rising in surprise. “Guess it was bound to happen eventually. What’s the saying about a stopped clock?”
I tell him what Chip, Kim, and LeAnn had to say and about the fragments of the journal notes.
He shakes his head. “Still can’t believe the deputy who cried wolf got one right this time,” he says.
“Well, we don’t know that yet, but I certainly think it’s worth looking in to.”
“Got to do something,” he says, “stop all these kids from getting killed.”
I nod. “Yes, we do.”
“Let me know how I can help,” he says. “I’m in a bit of a bind since I’m not the sheriff anymore. Try not to do anything that looks like I’m trying to do Hugh Glenn’s job or work against him in some way, but . . . none of that matters if it comes to savin’ kids.”
“I’ll let you know, but hopefully we can just locate the kid and intervene, get him some help, keep anything from happening.”
“Certainly hope so,” he says. “Just let me know.”
He cranks his new truck and puts it in reverse.
“And John, thank you. Would’ve been easy to write this off since it was Jeffers who brought it to us. A lazy investigator would have.”
269
High school sucks. It’s one of the truly universal truths. Whoever said high school is supposed to be the best days of your life is a sad, pathetic, delusional fuck. The truly pathetic thing about high school is everyone tries so damn hard to be something they aren’t. Even the staff. Maybe it’s that way everywhere but it’s worse in fucking high school. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t fit in with the popular kids. It was that I didn’t fit in anywhere. I didn’t even fit in with the misfits. I hated high school and I’ve never trusted anybody who didn’t. Show me someone who liked being a teenager and I’ll show you the most fucked up person of all.
Entering my old high school—even when it’s dim and after-hours empty, elicits complex and conflicting thoughts and emotions. Now, unexpectedly, a measure of nostalgia and bittersweet homesickness is mixed in with old feelings of adolescent banality, cliquish confinement, and quiet desperation.
I feel a certain amount of hesitation and trepidation about assisting with an investigation here. Pottersville will always be home to me, Potter High will always be my school, but I’m an investigator in another county, and even though we have a Mutual Aid Agreement in place, I feel awkward and out of place.
The Mutual Aid Agreement has been signed by all sixty-seven sheriff’s departments in the state of Florida and means that any sheriff or deputy can enforce the law and even make arrests in any county. But it doesn’t cover coming into another county and conducting an investigation. There’s a world of difference in being in another county and intervening when you witness a crime taking place versus assisting in an investigation to stop one—especially when the county in question is where your father used to be sheriff until he lost his last bid for reelection.
Kim and LeAnn’s offices are next to each other on the backside of the front offices which include reception, accounting, and administration. And though they have back doors that open into the main offices, their front doors are in the back corner of the commons, between the stage and a bank of microwaves built on surprisingly high shelves along the beige block wall.
I pass the huge built-in trophy case and walk over an enormous seal on the floor that reads PHS Home of the Fighting Pirates encircling a logo of the school’s mascot—a cartoonish pirate with a black eye patch, tricorne hat, and swashbuckling sword—to the brightly backlit glass doors of Kim and LeAnn’s offices.
I find them waiting for me in LeAnn’s office with two students—a pale, pie-faced, blond-haired, heavyset white girl named Sierra Baker and a tall, skinny, light-skinned black boy named DeShawn Holt.
I’m surprised to find students here and shocked when I’m told they’ve been recruited to help.
“Sierra and DeShawn have helped us a lot in the past with valuable information,” LeAnn says of the two kids who are obviously some sort of schoolhouse snitches. “They know the other kids far better than we could ever hope to.”
I shoot a glance at Kim and I can tell she understands and shares my concern.
“Could you two wait out in the commons for a minute?” Kim says. “Let us talk to Mr. Jordan for a moment before we begin.”
The two overly helpful teens are more than happy to comply, and quickly vacate LeAnn’s office.
“What’s up?” LeAnn asks.
“I’m not comfortable discussing possible student suspects with other students,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “Okay. I just . . . They’ve been very helpful in the past and I thought we needed all the help we could get on this thing.”
Kim says, “What if it got out or they said something to one of the suspects or a parent?”
“They’ve never said anything to anyone but me,” LeAnn says, “but I see what you’re saying. I’ll just tell them to keep an ear out for anything suspicious and bring it to me if they hear anything.”
“I think that would be better,” Kim says.
LeAnn jumps up, comes around her desk, shoves her door open hard by the flat metal crossbar, and steps out into the commons, and I am unable to tell if she is angry or if it’s just her normal way of doing things.
“I’m glad you said something,” Kim says. “I was trying to think of how to. Couldn’t believe it when I walked in and they were sitting here.”
“Sorry about that,” LeAnn says when she returns. “I was just trying to give us our best chance at stopping this thing—and I’ve worked with them a lot over the years to get information. Didn’t think about . . . the other.”
Kim says, “It’s no problem. And you’re right. We need all hands on deck. I think the difference i
s between them bringing something to us versus us talking to them about other students.”
“No, you’re right,” LeAnn says. “My bad.”
“It’s all good,” Kim says.
LeAnn moves back behind her desk and Kim and I take a seat in the two chairs across from her, previously occupied by Sierra and DeShawn.
“Where do y’all want to start?” LeAnn asks.
“Why don’t we start with what we’re looking for more broadly,” Kim says. “Then talk about the people on our lists.”
“Sounds good to me,” she says. “From what I’ve read and learned from the training I’ve done, we’re not looking for a girl—think there’s only been one of them—and we’re not looking for a black guy. That’s part of the reason I felt safe involving Sierra and DeShawn.”
Though there may have been other girl rampage school shooters, the only one I had ever heard about is Brenda Spencer—the troubled teenager who in 1979 killed two adults and wounded eight children in a school shooting in San Diego, California. And though there may have been African-American school shooters before, I am not familiar with any.
“So,” Kim says, “we’re looking for a white male—rampage shooters and serial killers have something in common.”
“Based on the statistics I’ve read,” LeAnn says, “most of them struggle with suicidal tendencies and depression. They feel persecuted or victimized, but more in a general way than specifically being bullied. They don’t act on impulse or snap in some way, but painstakingly plan their attack. And most if not all talk about their plans with someone they know before they carry them out. And if not that, then at least their violent fantasies in some way.”
“I read that something like ninety-three percent did something that deeply concerned someone close to them before the shooting,” Kim says.
“Exactly,” LeAnn says. “That’s from the secret service report from a few years after Columbine. That’s why I’m convinced there are signs. We just have to see them. It’s why I thought students could help.”
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