First, you speculate that this killer “probably tried to fight getting in trouble.” I guess my picture is less humanist and more, maybe, behaviorist: if he grew up in a crime culture, he may have teethed on the idea that being tough and mean is good, getting in trouble is no deterrent but a validation. Not a good foundation, true. However, some of his peers no doubt have questioned this notion, although nothing I have read suggests he was one of them.

Even if no one in his previous life had thought to mention the possibility of using free will and common sense, he had been in trouble before. He must have been reminded at every stage of criminal justice proceedings (not to mention school) that he could and should make a different choice next time—but his decision was otherwise.

And remember what happened: A girl who wanted someone to be violent on cue went to him—which says a lot: it says she knew he would be willing, even pleased to be called out as an “enforcer.” And he was–apparently neither background nor education nor previous arrests nor his own native intelligence was called on to advise caution, to cool his desire to commit unnecessary harm, to warn him to stay at home.

He found at the scene no threat and no deterrent to departure. He found a readily available and easy victim. There is no evidence to suggest that he considered alternatives (like walking away!), but joined the girls in the work of enraging themselves to the point of initiating violent action. When he saw that the victim was not his physical match, he failed to pull his punches; when he struck the victim, it was with force that he (an experienced bully and street fighter) knew was not limited to reasonable harm or deterrence, and knew or should have know was likely to result in serious injury or death.

In sum, then: There were no exigent circumstances, no risk to any of the three; obvious alternatives; no split-second decision under pressure; and a clear understanding of the likely consequences of his actions; no apparent mitigating circumstances.

Unless you have information to which I am not privy, I don’t see where you find the conclusion that he has “basically a good heart.” Looks to me more like a vicious and unrepentant nature.

Fiona’s droppin’ jewels as usual.

When I’m angry, I AM ANGRY, and if you’re smart, you won’t stand around and analyze why—it’s too easy to get in the line of fire. So for the moment, I’m thinking less of why people are angry, more of how it works, what it achieves, and how it is that all people get angry but only some “become” their anger.

We are angry at someone, or we are angry at no one. We are angry at circumstances, or we are angry at ourselves for how we have dealt with circumstances. We are angry at things that could have been changed, and angry at things that could never have been changed. Sable is angry because her baby was sick and she couldn’t help him. I am angry because I walked into my doctor’s office one day last fall without a clue and walked out without fifteen or twenty years of life that I had figured on. You may be angry because the job you would have loved went, for whatever reason, to someone you knew wanted it less and wouldn’t do it as well as you. We are furious when we hear that the father of our children is a “great dad” to his girlfriend’s kids, while he hasn’t seen our own since February. An adolescent may be angry because everything was fine the way it was–she was fed when hungry and tucked in when tired, her mom held and comforted her when she was ill or disappointed, the world at home and school and on the playground was all about her. She sees now that it will all be gone very soon, she will never again be the center of the universe, before long she will be the mom struggling to do it all and serving a child who lives in the safe and innocent world that is lost to her forever–and it pisses her off. Appropriate anger, all of them, not adaptive always but rational and understandable.

There is a broad chasm, though, between being angry, and having one’s compass stuck at angry.

Some people are angry because it suits them—because when they get up in the morning and look in the closet of their emotions, the one that fits just right, and looks good, and makes the boyfriend jump to please them, and kind of scares the teachers, and presents them as mysterious and intriguing, that emotion is anger. So they put it on and go to school. We hear it in their rudeness. They draw it on their faces and their Facebooks. It is validated by their peers, who mistakenly think they are “deep.” Their explosions of rage momentarily freeze the room with all eyes on them. Best, that simplest of emotions, anger, defines them, and enables them to evade learning the complex and difficult balance of emotions that is maturity.

Enables them also, sadly, to perceive another human being, not as someone who, like them, is just trying to get through the day, a person like them with his own hopes, fears, feelings, burdens, and rights—not even as someone with the right to live. Almost surely, if they notice him at all, he becomes another focus for their free-floating anger. Their compass has stuck at anger, inappropriate anger, unmitigated by reason and balance. And ultimately, it enables a tragedy like this.

I wish I had answers, but I don’t. We can reach someone who is legitimately angry with reason, as Sable has illustrated, but I have no idea how to reach someone who has adopted anger as a personal style.