Youth killers warned us; we didn’t act

They emerge from out of nowhere, these troubled, young loners who blast their way into the headlines and our national consciousness on occasion to finally make us see them as we’ve never bothered to see them before.

This time, it’s Jeff Weise, the 16-year-old gunman from a Minnesota Indian reservation who killed his grandfather, the man’s girlfriend, an unarmed school security guard, a teacher, and five fellow students before shooting himself to death.

Now a place called Red Lake is added to that tragically long list of infamous American school-massacre sites that includes West Paducah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss.; Springfield, Ore.; Jonesboro, Ark.; and Littleton, Colo., where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and themselves six years ago at Columbine High School.

And so we do what we’ve done before in the shocking aftermath of these terrible events. We attempt a psychological postmortem on yet another young, twisted mind to find clues that had somehow escaped us, clues that no one seemed to notice until the bloodbath forced us to.

All the talking heads on the TV now suddenly pull away from Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo and baseball’s steroid scandal for a bit to become instant experts on the horrors of teen violence without providing a single answer.

And when this story fades from the spotlight, and we gradually forget the name of this latest baby-faced killer, we probably won’t know any more about why the tragedy happened at Red Lake than we do about all the other episodes in which children kill children for no discernible reason.

Not that Weise’s behavior didn’t strongly suggest that he might be a kid on the edge, troubling behavior that his family, schoolmates and teachers apparently chose to ignore just as Harris and Klebold were passed off as mere oddballs until it was too late.

Forget the taste for the dark, Gothic style that all three killers shared – wearing a black trench coat and spiked hair will draw stares, all right, but they’re not necessarily indications of harmful intent.

But can the same be said of their shared obsession with the lurid trappings of Nazism and violence and the symbols of death?

The students and residents of Red Lake told police they saw signs in Weise that looked, in retrospect, like warning signs. But they warned no one, as it turned out. The boy covered his notebooks with Nazi swastikas, they said, although no one at the Red Lake school thought to question him about it.

At Columbine, Harris and Klebold routinely wore swastikas and hateful German slogans on their clothing. They even spoke adoringly of Hitler at school, yet no one saw those actions as red flags there either.

In English class, Weise casually displayed a sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton accompanied by a caption that read, “March to the death song ’til your boots are filled with blood.”

Harris and Klebold wrote excessively about death, hatred and guns in their English creative writing class, too, yet their depraved rantings, it seems, did not suggest a potential problem to their teachers.

Weise, whose father killed himself four years ago and whose mother lives in a nursing home after a serious car accident, spent hours alone sharing his thoughts on a neo-Nazi Web site, where he went by the name “Todesengel,” German for “angel of death.”

Harris and Klebold maintained a Web site that carried instructions on how to build pipe bombs and they even built 30 explosive devices at home, all without their parents finding out a thing.

In both cases, those students who did know about such bizarre activities apparently never found them worrisome enough to mention to someone in a position of authority who could have intervened.

“It was mental stuff,” a Red Lake student said of the comic books that Weise had filled with drawings of people shooting one another. “It was sick.”

“They were just a little weird,” said a classmate of Harris and Klebold. “They were people to stay away from.”

To the people who knew them, the three teenagers were simply different from other kids – loners and misfits who wore funny clothes and got picked on and laughed at once in a while for their idiosyncrasies.

“We never took them seriously,” said a student at Columbine, echoing the sentiments of the rest of the Littleton community.

But these three teenagers were not just a little weird, not even by society’s most generous standards of tolerance and diversity, and their twisted activities were not just harmless idiosyncrasies to be shrugged off. They were, of course, deeply disturbed individuals, each in his own way, who desperately needed help.

They said as much to everyone around them, with their words and their deeds, but no one paid any attention to those most critical clues until it was too late – again.