Peter Langman - School Shooters

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN 978-1-4422-3356-0 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-1-4422-3357-7 (electronic)

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

The place of honor in my acknowledgments goes to my late agent, John Ware. John represented my previous book and was in the midst of promoting this book when he became ill and died. This was a profound loss.

In the wake of Johns death, a friend and colleague of his, Leah Spiro, came to my rescue. She believed in this project, worked hard to help me refine the proposal, and was tireless in pursuing and obtaining a publisher. She has my deepest gratitude.

Thanks also to my editor at Rowman & Littlefield, Suzanne Staszak-Silva, for seeing the value in this book and shepherding me through the process from manuscript drafts to publication.

A special thanks to Birgit Laramie for translating German articles and documents on Robert Steinhuser and Tim Kretschmer and to Iury Roger Painelli and Danilo Franoso Tedeschi for translating Portuguese articles on Wellington de Oliveira.

Thanks to Dr. Brian Van Brunt for serving as a sounding board regarding issues of campus safety.

Thanks also to Dr. Dian Williams and Forensic Digest for allowing me to adapt my article School Shootings: The Warning Signs for use within chapter 9. The article appeared in the 2012 Winter/Spring issue of Forensic Digest and is reprinted with permission of Forensic Digest.

I have also adapted material from several of my own articles that are available on my website, including Luke Woodham: The Search for Justification, Adult School Shooters, Expanding the Sample: Five School Shooters, Two Finnish School Shooters, and School Shooters: Nine Brief Sketches.

Thanks to Dr. Mary Ann Swiatek, who read drafts of several chapters and provided feedback.

Thanks to my daughter, Anna Langman, for her reviewing and editing of the manuscript.

Thanks to my son, Joshua Langman, as well as Dan W. Barron for their work on my website, www.schoolshooters.info, which is something of a companion to this book and the repository of many of the documents I used in my research.

Finally, my utmost gratitude to my wife, Dr. Madeleine Langman, who provided in-depth proofreading and editorial feedback, as well as ongoing support and encouragement.

In December of 2012, while I was deep in the writing of this book, there was another shooting, more horrific than most, due to its magnitude and the fact that the killer was an adult gunning down six- and seven-year-old children. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed his mother at home and then massacred twenty-six staff and students at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Even after years of studying such attacks, I find that I have not become hardened to the horror. Instead, I seem more vulnerable to the suffering of others, my heart sinking with the heaviness of No, not again, as we as a nation and a world community one more time are left to ponder the causes of rampage attacks and what can be done to prevent large-scale violence in our schools.

I have grappled with these issues since April 30, 1999, just ten days after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked Columbine High School, when a sixteen-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric hospital where I worked. He was considered a potential school shooter, and it was my job to assess his risk for mass murder. Not long after this, another potential school shooter came through the hospital, and then another, and so on for more than ten years. There wasnt a flood, but a steady, disturbing trickle of these cases.

I kept a file of these potential school shooters, studied what they had in common and how they differed, and compared them to the cases I read about in the news. Over the years, I have studied dozens of school shooters, compiled charts and graphs, and looked for patterns among the data. Out of necessity, I became a reluctant researcher of mass murderers in order to do the best job I could in working with patients, recommending appropriate treatment, and keeping themand their communitiessafe.

Preventing rampage attacks, however, is a complex task. Despite the facts that schools are more safety-conscious now than ever before, and that the perpetrators often leave a trail of warning signs, school shootings continue to occur. If we are to be more successful in preventing these attacks, we need to understand who these shooters are, what drives them to kill, and how we can spot them before its too late. This book is the culmination of many years of research and is my attempt to answer these urgent questions.