The Perfect Crime [ABANDONED]

What Makes a Mass Shooter

This is the true story of what happened at the Lawrence, Kansas high school party shooting. And this is the story of what signs we need to look out for in youth. 

By: Anonymous

His name was Austin Randalf. He was a Senior at Lawrence High School. He had two loving parents, a little sister in middle school, and a job working at the local hardware store. On weekends, he worked, studied, hung out with his family, and played in a band with a couple of his friends. 

Two months ago, he walked into a party and shot four people. Two died en route to the hospital. One is paralyzed from the waist down. The other is now, according to medical staff, suffering from muscle spasms and headaches after being shot in the head. 

Two weeks ago, Austin Randalf's family made the decision to pull the plug, after the young man shot himself following his spree. 

Now, the only one who could explain his actions is dead. 

The question remains, how many young people are out there, walking up and down the hallways of schools with their classmates, who are plotting out something as horrible as this? Are capable of something as horrible as this? 

This is an editorial that attempts to answer that question with the story of a different boy. 

And this boy's name is Lucifer. 

Michael's eyes shot up from the paper to look at Dean. Dean had brought it into his room, hands shaking and eyes wet with tears. Michael had hardly ever seen Dean so emotional. And the fact that he had then handed him a newspaper as if this was the thing that pushed him to that point, made Michael chuckle. Until, of course, he had gotten to this part in the article. 

"Why the fuck is this article about Lucifer?" Michael asked quietly, already feeling sick to his stomach. 

"Please just finish reading it, you're going to need to talk to him..." Dean trailed off and attacked his thumbnail viciously with his teeth. 

Michael sighed and then turned his attention back to the paper. 

Lucifer Novak. I asked him whether his name was really Lucifer. He flashed a bright smile and mused his light blonde hair. And then he said that yes, his name was Lucifer. His parents had been religious nuts. 

It wasn't long before I started drawing connections between Lucifer and Austin. The first was the most obvious. They had both been there the fateful night of the shooting. Lucifer had luckily left before the shooting started. His younger brother, Gabriel Novak, was shot through the back. The bullet clipped his spinal cord and has left him paralyzed. It was the first link between what seemed to be two very different boys. While it may have been the first, it was far from the last. 

The next connection was the band. As a recent arrival to Lawrence, Lucifer Novak had quickly made friends with Charlie Bradbury, who was part of an alternative cover band. She quickly asked Lucifer, a talented singer, to be the new lead singer of her band. She didn't ever explain to him who the old lead singer was. 

His name was Austin. Austin Randolf. She surely didn't tell him that she and her other band members (except for their pianist, who had quit the band after going blind following a car accident in which both his parents were killed) voted for Austin to leave the band. Charlie, in an interview, told me that she and her bandmates had become scared of Austin's mood swings and anger behavior. "He seemed angry at everything and everyone. And he would break stuff sometimes, yell and scream....other times he would be really nice, but we didn't want him on the band if it was upsetting him like that," she told me.