The Underside of the Umpqua School Shooter

Oregon shooter: New details emerge about Chris Harper-Mercer | OregonLive.com:

This article isn't particularly informative, but one of the comments was!

I'm going to include the entire comment (from someone who knew the freak as a child) because I think it serves a purpose:  it gives us an insight to the warped personality from his earliest years.

This is an article, authored by "BENJI", a self-identified name in the comments section.  I don't know if it's true, or made up.  But it's chilling.

And it may be applicable to this incident.

Note that the author doesn't claim that the child described here is the Oregon School Shooter.

19 hours ago

Asperger's is evil.  My son grew up with a boy who had it and almost paid dearly.  We were naive.  We believed the propaganda that Asperger's is not linked to violent behavior.  I can say now, having watched an Asperger's child develop from birth to age 8 (when we had to cut off contact for reasons I will explain), this is a dangerous mental condition with strong antisocial and violent tendencies.  Let's the call Asperger's child Casey.  Casey was a handsome boy with pale blue eyes.  He and my son met as infants and played together regularly.  It became clear by age 3 or 4 that Casey had some sort of developmental issue.  He seemed emotionally detached and would have sudden outbursts his mother would struggle to quell.  Also odd was it didn't seem to matter how often our son played with him or how kind he tried to be, Casey remained a little distant, a little cold.  He seemed incapable of connecting on a personal level.  It was like playing with a stranger, but one you had known since birth.  At age 5, our son began to tell us he didn't want to play with Casey anymore.  He said that Casey made him uncomfortable.  He couldn't really articulate exactly why.  At age 6 or so, he started to tell us (warn us) that Casey was mean.  This took us completely by surprise.  Remember, we had known Casey since he was a month old.  We had spent countless hours around him and had a very good sense -- we thought -- of who he was, good and bad.  We had seen the detachment but never any mean-spiritedness.  We asked our son to talk more and what he told us was chilling, particularly coming from a child.  He told us Casey was mean when people weren't watching.  He hid it from the grownups.  He waited until he was alone with our son to reveal this darker side of his personality.  I say it was chilling because it suggested a degree of malevolence and calculation that I would never have guessed was there or even possible in a 6-year-old.  Again our son told us he didn't want to play with Casey anymore.  I still haven't forgiven myself for not listening.  But we thought it was an important life lesson for him to learn to be accepting and kind toward people who were different.  We were also very close to Casey's mom and knew how hard she was trying as a single parent to raise her son in a loving socially-engaged environment.  So we continued to encourage play dates between the boys and monitored the interactions a little more closely.  I would keep one eye on them when they played, looking for signs of the mean streak our son said Casey was hiding from us.  One day I saw it.  It was discreet and I never would have noticed it if I hadn't been watching.  They were sitting on the floor in my son's bedroom playing with Legos.  I was outside on the deck and could see them at angle through the screen door.  They were quietly building as boys do when Casey, for no discernible reason, reached over and very deliberately took hold of my son's hand and pushed his thumbnail into the underside of his wrist until my son finally cried out.  There it was.  After nearly 7 years, I had finally seen the mean streak.  The dark side of Casey's personality.  My son showed me the mark on his wrist after Casey had left.  You could still see the indentation his thumbnail left in the skin.  I suggested to my wife we take a break from Casey.  This was upsetting because it felt like a betrayal of our friendship with Casey's mom.  Were we being over-protective?  A few months later, my wife and Casey's mom had coffee and reconnected.  Casey's mom was upbeat because she had gotten him into a top-notch special needs school and he was doing better academically and socially.  We invited them over the following weekend.  We promised our son we wouldn't leave him alone with Casey.  It would be a pool day which meant we could all sit on the deck and supervise with the boys in plain view.  For two hours they played together.  Casey seemed more animated and more communicative than before.  There was no coldness.  None of the outbursts we had grown accustomed to.  I asked my son privately how things were going and he said great.  We were relieved and happy for Casey and his mom.  Maybe it was just a matter of finding the right school environment.  Maybe Casey had turned a corner.  It was time for lunch and the moms went inside to make a salad and chat.  I stayed outside on the deck.  My wife called from the doorway asking if I could help carry the drinks.  Dutiful husband, I said of course and went in to grab them.  The boys were sitting happily in the jacuzzi.  What could go wrong?  I was gone for no more than thirty seconds.  And when I returned I saw something that sends a chill through me four years later, as I write this.  Beside our pool was a large decorative concrete fish.  It was heavy, beautifully detailed, about two feet long.  And as I turned the corner I saw Casey, standing on the side of the pool, lift this concrete fish over his head with both hands and turn menacingly toward my son who was sitting, back turned, in the jacuzzi below.  It was a perfect July day.  Not a cloud in the sky.  And Casey was preparing to crush my son's skull.  I dropped the tray of drinks and screamed NOOOOOOO!!!  Casey turned and looked at me, blank-faced, concrete fish raised above his head -- I will never forget the surreal horror of this moment.  He seemed to be registering, calculating as I ran closer, that I could not reach him in time to prevent what he was going to do.  Without a word he turned to my son and with all his strength heaved the fish down at his head.  My son barely managed to jump aside.  The concrete fish hit the edge of the pool like a sledgehammer and split cleanly in half where his head had been moments before.  It sounded like a gunshot.  The moms heard the commotion from the kitchen and came running outside to see what had happened.  The look on Casey's mom's face was heartbreaking.  She looked ill.  She didn't know what Casey had done but she knew it was serious from my reaction.  It was as if you could see all the hope and optimism leave her in that moment.  She was angry and sad and trying very hard to manage her emotional response, trying to communicate with Casey using what felt almost like a script from therapy.  You know that isn't how we treat other people, don't you?  You could have really hurt him and he's your friend, etc.  Casey sat down quietly in the jacuzzi, ignoring her.  When she demanded his attention and demanded he apologize he finally looked up at us with his blonde hair and shining blue eyes and for the first time in all the years I had known this boy he smiled.

end of comment