As Stephen Dedalus might have put it if he lived in the United States of America in the twenty-first century.
In virtually every case of our prolific young demented mass killers, neighbors, friends, and family members eventually emerge to testify to their obvious mental illness, their obvious violent tendencies, the guns their fucked up parents left lying around the house. They encountered it, they faced it — they did everything but tell anyone about it.
[Ethan Crumbley’s mass killing] weighs heavily on [one of his neighbors] now because she wonders what she could have done differently to help her young neighbor-turned-school-shooter.
“This haunts me, big time,” she said. “I will always wonder, ‘What else could we have done?'”
This woman recognized Crumbley was nuts and his parents gunned and ginned up degenerates, but she didn’t contact family services or the police. She tried talking to the Crumbleys and got screamed at for her trouble, and then she shrank away. She’s probably lucky the family didn’t shoot her.
So I understand. Going to the authorities would make drunk, violent people even angrier at her. Yes. I understand.
‘He was never, ever OK … They would go out and drink and leave him home alone. … He was scared. He would come over to my house and say, ‘I can’t be here because I’m going to get into trouble.’
She never spoke to Jennifer Crumbley again after that argument. …
‘Ethan didn’t have a prayer …’
His school, just as aware of the threat he posed, tried feebly to get his parents to take him away, but in the event administrators failed to stand their ground against the scary Crumbleys.