I have been away, so have just caught up on the reporting on the Dayton shooter from the last couple of days:
Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”
Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.
It’s a banal point to make at at this point, but there obviously hasn’t been the same focus in the media on his politics and religion as there would be if he had been a right-wing Christian. Indeed, the press has been scrupulous about attributing a motive to him, taking an appropriate care it doesn’t show in other cases.
Politics aside, he was obviously deeply disturbed:
During his senior year of high school, Connor Betts seemed to always have caffeine pills in one hand and an energy drink in another. He was unable to sleep, he told his then-girlfriend Lyndsi Doll, because of dark, animal-like shadows that tormented him at night.
Seven years after they dated, Doll recalls Betts as a serious and reserved kid who wrestled with hallucinations and menacing voices in his head.
While they were in high school, Betts told Doll that he had suffered from psychosis since he was young and feared developing schizophrenia.
“He would cry to me sometimes,” she said, “saying how he’s afraid of himself and afraid he was going to hurt someone one day. It’s haunting now.”
There were frightening incidents at his high school:
The former classmates told The Associated Press that Betts was suspended during their junior year at suburban Bellbrook High School after a hit list was found scrawled in a school bathroom. That followed an earlier suspension after Betts came to school with a list of female students he wanted to sexually assault, according to two of the classmates, a man and a woman who are both now 24 and spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern they might face harassment.
“There was a kill list and a rape list, and my name was on the rape list,” said the female classmate.
A former cheerleader, the woman said she didn’t really know Betts and was surprised when a police officer called her cellphone during her freshman year to tell her that her name was included on a list of potential targets.
“The officer said he wouldn’t be at school for a while,” she said. “But after some time passed he was back, walking the halls. They didn’t give us any warning that he was returning to school.”
The male classmate, who was on the track team with Betts, said Betts routinely threatened violence toward other students.
“Most people avoided him,” the man said. “He would say shocking things just to get a reaction. He enjoyed making people feel scared.”
Then, there’s this detail:
The discovery of the hit list early in 2012 sparked a police investigation and, according to a Dayton Daily News story at the time, roughly a third of 900 Bellbrook students skipped school one day out of fear of a planned attack.
This is a common thread in the backgrounds of many mass shooters—people were afraid of them and thought they were capable of horrific crimes, but they were allowed to go on their way and to purchase weapons. Obviously, a common area of focus of everyone who wants to stop these massacres should be more robust mental-health interventions and red flag-type legislation.