Questions For Nicholas
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, poet and philosopher.
I should have died in 1988. I would have died on December 16, 1988 if the gun hadn’t jammed. That’s what I learned from schoolmate-turned-inmate Nicholas Elliot when I visited him in prison last year. I hadn’t seen him since the morning the shy, small, bespectacled, black sixteen-year-old became a murderer in 1988.
I wanted an answer from Nicholas to several questions that chased me for well over two decades, the first of which is answered above: ‘Would you have killed me too?’
That day, back when I was 12, my mind had split into the world I had known and a world I am still struggling to understand, though this process brought me full circle in more ways than one.
In the past year, I began to see 88s everywhere. December 16th popped up often — The Captain America movie said it 4 times, and it was a major plot point. I looked up the quote that started this story and found out the Author was born on December 16th and died at age 88.
A friend sent me a song because she knew I was obsessing over numbers and dates, and she had no idea the only thing in the middle of all those dates was the word ‘Nicholas.’
Atheists call these connections coincidence or confirmation bias — if one’s subconscious is dwelling upon something, the mind will find examples more often. The religiously devout call these signs from God — if one seeks out their God for answers, one may receive them as signs from above. December 16th, 1988 was perhaps the most instrumental moment leading me to wonder if such moments might not be the same thing — both confirmation bias, the mechanism, and signs from God, the metaphor.
For years, I’ve been crashing through an emotional loop, untying one knot only to reveal three more in three different directions. But everything seems to be circling back together in a way I’d never imagined. It begins and ends with a twelve year old’s connection to a violent and tragic death in 1988.
I have been trying to write or film some version of this for well over a decade. Perhaps it was not yet time.
I went to visit then 16, now 43 year old Nicholas Elliot at Nottaway Correctional Center in November of 2015 to find out the answers to several questions. I wanted to hear the story from his perspective. There were many “whys” left unanswered over 27 years. Unlike the seeming majority of mass shooters who commit suicide, Nicholas is still alive to answer the ones he could, and he told me something about myself I didn’t want to know.
On the ride to Atlantic Shores Christian School that nearly-winter morning, in the back of the bus, Nicholas opened his backpack, reaching past the Molotov cocktails he’d made and loaded most of the two hundred twenty five rounds of ammunition he’d brought into the five high capacity magazines that fit his Cobray Mac-10, a black sheet metal handgun designed to resemble an Uzi.
He loaded more than 2 bullets per student at our tiny, private Southern Baptist secondary school where everybody knew everybody. His anger was focused broadly on the teachers and students of eighth through twelfth grade packed into four trailers in the rear courtyard of a church.
One specific person, however, stood alone as the primary target. I realized later that I’d never asked him if he’d written a list.
I wanted to know if he would have killed me not just out of personal morbid curiosity — I wanted to know if our not-quite-a-friendship would have spared me, or if worse —somehow I’d contributed to his pain to cause him to want to kill me intentionally. Time blurs the truth.
In the best way my human brain can, it rewinds my fragmented mental filmstrip to the day I could have died, to the way I would have died if the gun hadn’t jammed, under my desk in Bible class, folded into a ball; this duck and cover was not a drill.
It took twenty seven years to work up the courage to contact Nicholas in prison to ask to visit. It took another eighteen months to get through this. In the end, fate, God, the universe or chance intervened to force my hand in a way I could never have imagined. It’s all perspective.
Having met with Nicholas, I hope this essay is the last time I will write at length about that day — referencing this piece if the subject arises. At some point, I’m just reopening old wounds unnecessarily. I set out this time to write so I may finally have an amount of closure, and hopefully offer some answers — the scale of which and to whom yet unknown.
Many people have experienced far greater and far more personal tragedy than I, not the least of which the close friends and family of the victim in 1988. I’d never worked up the courage to contact them myself, but as I finish this final revision, someone else has.
I hope my perspective in between those who have experienced direct violent trauma and those who have never felt it will be the key to bridging something much bigger, yielding a more global understanding, deconstructing our denial.
Arranging the prison visit through the Virginia Department of Corrections in the late fall of 2015 was surprisingly easy with my ‘credentials’ as a video producer, though I was limited to notepad and pen to record my conversation. When contacted through email, Nicholas seemed grateful for a potential visitor.
Later that month, an hour southwest of Richmond, I passed through the outer doors, and then through security, not unlike an intense TSA screening. Then, I was given a legally mandated sit-down briefing, requiring my signing an agreement to report any signs of prison rape I observed.
As I walked through the gates of the 16 foot tall fence topped with razor wire, a bird flew from its small house on post in the yard over the fence, almost mocking those other residents without wings.
Delayed at the second security checkpoint due to an internal mixup, I sat for half an hour, contemplating whether the submissions to the ‘Warden’s suggestion box’ were ever taken seriously.
I was led through a ‘sally port,’ a giant metal industrial elevator of an airlock that keeps the felons safely sealed away from the world. The CLUNK-CLUNK, WHIRRRRR CLUNK cycled every few minutes until a prison administrator came to take me through the portal.
It had never occurred to me I’d be trapped inside a prison full of muscular murderers with not so much as a fence to protect me. The tension in the air was far more intense than the Netflix dramedy Orange is the New Black, to say the least.
Inside an administrative office, slumping on a bench, 43 year old Nicholas suddenly seemed so small, wearing thick glasses and overalls that seemed to swallow him up. He’d aged into a diminutive man in his mid 40’s, hair specked with gray, yet somehow maintaining a teenage ‘aw-shucks’ demeanor.
He seemed so much less mature than the boy who hid under his jacket in the back of a police cruiser, raising his middle finger to the cameras glaring at him from a distance.
We sat alone in a small office with the door closed talking for two hours.
We began with chit chat; he asked me about what I did. When I said ‘Video Producer,’ he lit up and told me he thought he saw my name on an episode of X-Files years ago and thought it might be me. I’m sure I’d have been thrilled to be that Corey Kaplan for a day or two instead of the Cory Caplan who’d made hundreds of local car commercials.
I asked Nicholas to tell me the story of December 16th as he remembered it before asking him specific questions.
He was deferential and straightforward as he ran down his recollection of the events. Humble but not emotive, he interjected seemingly genuine apologies and regrets throughout, each time he bumped over a moment he recognized he’d shattered someone’s world. If it was an act, it was an amazing and subtle performance, and I’ve lived my life surrounded by, then editing and directing actors.
When he was through, I asked him directly. Along with the Bully at the top of his list, would have killed me too?
He thought for a moment, not as if to think about how to answer the question, but as if to recall the event. He receded into memory for a minute before seemingly answering the question as openly as he could. He couldn’t remember deciding about me personally at all, and this was somehow a relief.
He remembered far less of me than I did him — but he answered with a self incriminating assumption:
Along with the person he killed, he would have continued to shoot all of the other secondary school teachers and students indiscriminately, if only his gun hadn’t jammed for a few crucial seconds.
He was planning to kill everyone.
That gray day in mid-December dramatically shapes the universe as I see it, rendered in a blurry flashes of PTSD-obscured vision. I relive it every time I see the exact same patterns play out the same story out again and again.
How could this have much different than any mass shooter or militant Islamic suicide bomber? Each story is so eerily similar — the disaffected outsider. The body counts go up, yet it seems to me that our understanding grows more distant and our contemplation ever more brief.
The visit with Nicholas gave memories more shape, sharpening that grainy filmstrip in my mind; clarity comes at the cost of revelation, though.
Personal realizations along this journey have made me curl up into a ball on the floor and cry more than once, and more recently than one might expect. My back, now curved with scoliosis and kyphosis, curves into my balled up form, hiding under my desk in 1988, before that big adolescent growth spurt. In May of 2015, I lay on the floor of my ex-girlfriends apartment sobbing as I realized this.
Nine days before Christmas in eighth grade, I was the youngest and most overweight in my class already, deemed most talkative through my silver braces; I was the obnoxious, loud, know it all. In many ways I still am.
I was teased to tears in my algebra class in 1988 by a Johnny-from-Karate-Kid surfer type kid named Jake who’d been expelled from public school for selling drugs, so the story goes. The bully spat venomous insults in many directions, seeming to know exactly how hard he could push back on our tiny private school without being expelled.
Unbelievably, this event didn’t seem to change Jake’s MO. He autographed my yearbook six months after the shooting.
In prison, Nicholas told me something I’d never considered: He resented not just that the teachers didn’t intervene, but it seemed one teacher in particular, Mr. K, “wanted to look cool to Jake.” As strange as it sounds, there was certainly something very ‘alpha’ about Jake’s devil-may-care persona. People are often mesmerized by those who can say what they want, when they want, I’ve learned. Maybe some of the teachers at this Southern Evangelical school wished they could just say what they felt.
Jake went straight for the jugular — he knew exactly how to push our buttons.
We lowest on the chain of freaks and geeks called our bully ‘Jake the Snake,’ and his method of dominating the betas was incessant ridicule, and it worked. He was to a degree powerful and feared.
In southern Virginia in 1988, convicted juvenile delinquent Jake the Snake drew offensive cartoon likenesses on the chalk board called Nicholas ‘Niggerlips’ openly. It wasn’t seen as a scandalous back then, even at a Christian School.
Nicholas was one of only a small handful of black students at Atlantic Shores, but he wasn’t originally from the inner city. His parents had divorced and Nicholas moved with his mother from a blended and safe neighborhood in California, where his father had remained. After moving into a lower-income neighborhood in Norfolk, Nicholas spent a year in a largely black public middle school but his mother enrolled him in Atlantic Shores to give him a better education and keep him away from the ‘dangerous’ kids at the public school. The irony seems almost too painful to believe.
Atlantic Shores was tiny. It was easy to assume teachers would keep a closer eye on the students.
In prison, Nicholas drew me a diagram of the school to illustrate his deadly path that day. He’d skipped 2nd bell prior to the 3rd bell Bible class to visit his locker, then into a bathroom inside of the church to get the contents of his backpack in order before starting his third period assault.
My memory of this otherwise unremarkable day begins when class was interrupted by a loud ‘POP’ sounding outside the classroom followed by more. For a moment, my class excitedly thought someone was setting off firecrackers in the courtyard, a break in the boredom; but when the teacher and a handful of students moved to the window, the tone in the air changed instantly. The teacher, Ms. B turned and yelled at us to get under our desks.
Nicholas had run down the courtyard between the four trailers which composed the entirety of the secondary school classrooms. He was chasing Ms. A, our algebra teacher, while firing 9mm rounds from his semiautomatic pistol
Ms. A was spared when Nicholas fired as she turned a corner and slammed face first into a utility shed, falling to the ground as the bullet pierced the tempered glass at the far end of the sidewalk leading to the church sanctuary.
Nicholas had already shot the vice principal, Mr. Marino, in the classroom opposite ours, from which Ms. A fled. After the near-miss, Nicholas ran back down the sidewalk, shooting Mr. Marino a second time as he’d crawled out onto the steps outside the trailer. Nicholas turned around to the steps up to the trailer where he would find ‘Jake the Snake.’
Nicholas shot his way through the large pane of glass on the trailer door which had been pointlessly locked by the teacher, Mr. Armstrong. That door was adjacent ours, that report the loudest we would hear.
From the floor in that trailer, I heard muffled voices, shouts, a gunshot, and a thunderous pounding against the wall of my classroom, which buckled and shook in my hazy recollection, as I was curled into a ball pressed into the much-larger basketball player, Brian.
Nicholas had entered the 9th-12th grade Bible class of about 40 students, demanded to see Jake, hidden or hiding behind the rest of the class. Nicholas said he had “tunnel vision” to fire on Jake, who’d pleaded “Don’t kill me.”
Nicholas lined up his target and pulled the trigger, but the round in his gun had jammed. While Nicholas momentarily struggled with the gun, Mr. Armstrong lunged forward. The Mac 10’s slide having re-chambered a bullet, the gun fired.
Mr. Armstrong later said he felt the bullet’s shockwave pass right by his left ear as he tackled Nicholas. Other students joined in and pinned Nicholas to the ground; The rumor went that Jake had opened and jumped through a window in back of the class.
As sirens approached, all the students were evacuated to the church Sanctuary, its name never having been more appropriate.
I seem to remember asking several students what had happened, many staring blankly in shock, until one said, “It was Nicholas, man.” Word spread quickly between students. Mr. Marino had been shot twice, and Jake had been Nicholas’ target.
After some time, maybe an hour, the pastor of Atlantic Shores Church, George Sweet, picked up the microphone to address us. He was distraught. His shiny, moist face is one of the images of that day emblazoned in my otherwise sketchy memory. Pastor Sweet told us mostly less than we already knew but that changed quickly as he began to sob.
The police had checked the trailers and found beloved math and typing teacher, Mrs. Farley, dead on the floor of her trailer. Nobody realized she was missing immediately, as she regularly left the building during her free period.
The previous year, I’d spent an hour every afternoon at one of the six brown IBM Selectric typewriters learning the very skill I’m presently using, taught by the teacher who would be killed in that same room by the boy sitting at his own typewriter, between me and Mrs. Farley’s daughter.
Mrs. Farley had been my homeroom teacher, twice my math teacher, my typing teacher, the editor of the yearbook and also the school newspaper for which I’d ‘written.’
At the very least I spent more time with her than any other middle school teacher, and I feel like I’d had a bit of a crush on her. That memory is blocked, however. At the weird beginning of male puberty, she shared the brown hair and blue eyes of my early TV crushes, and well, she resembled my mother a bit before we’d moved to Virginia and dyed her hair blonde.
In situations like this, I understand victims are often made to sound angelic, and even if she wasn’t universally and absolutely beloved, she was unquestionably considered by many to be the kindest, most caring teacher in school.
Nicholas had killed her in her otherwise empty trailer, shooting her a second time on the floor, then closed and locked the door behind him before entering the classroom across from ours. On an already inexplicable day, no one could answer the question, ‘Why Mrs. Farley ? — and why her first, of all people?’
In November 2015, I saw a poster hanging on a coffee shop cork board with hand drawn art advertising a December showing of the 1988 action film-turned-holiday-favorite ‘Die Hard’ at the local art house theater. The prominent image on the poster was one of the most visceral in the movie — the moment when Bruce Willis had killed the younger blonde terrorist and sent his body down on the elevator, wearing a Santa cap on his head askew.
I felt chills as dormant synapses fired, remembering the time Nicholas and I tried to sneak into the R-Rated Die Hard together a few months before the shooting. But this image of the blonde terrorist killed by vigilante hero Bruce Willis seemed to connect Nicholas and Jake in a way I’d never considered.
Fifteen year old Nicholas was unable to get the tickets, so we ended up seeing a movie you’ve never heard about, ‘Murphy’s Fault,’ the title of which makes me shudder. Nicholas told me he had seen Die Hard shortly thereafter.
Nicholas’ details filled in the my fragmented memories, and much of our conversation was peppered with details I wouldn’t have considered — Of course Nicholas has never driven a car.
He told me his story of moving from California where he never remembered hearing the word ‘Nigger’ or even ‘Nigga.’ He said “Before Jake came, I had no problems with anyone.” (at Atlantic Shores)
He told me in the buildup to the shooting, the confrontations had become physical.
He said “I never saw any light at the end of the tunnel.”
He told me close to the shooting, Jake said “You ought to kill yourself.”
Nicholas told me he’d tried.
He said he was home alone, he’d put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger again and shot a hole through the floor of his closet, like the one we later found on the floor of Mrs. Farley’s classroom.
He told me that when he was put in juvenile detention after the shooting, Jake’s incarcerated friends beat him up.
He told me he was beaten up much worse later on in Prison.
He told me he’d tried to kill himself once while in prison soon after the shooting with a sharp object, but he learned that if a prisoner survives a suicide attempt, they are sent to a worse prison.
Nicholas says he understands all of this is his responsibility and he probably deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, even though he has been eligible for parole for more than a decade.
“People like me don’t get parole in Virginia,” he said.
If the 43 year old Nicholas could go back, he would ask himself what exactly he was trying to accomplish. “A baseball bat would have been better.”
He said when a few people like me have come to talk to him, “You realize how we’re all connected and all the people you hurt,” caught in the blowback. His older cousin, who’d bought the gun for him went to prison for several years, and he’s never spoken to Nicholas again.
I asked him if he remembered that part of Die Hard with the blonde terrorist — he did not — but he did get the gun right around the time he saw the movie.
He told me why he’d killed Mrs. Farley first.
He actually had visited another classroom next door to hers, belonging to Mr. K. I recall Mr. K irritating, but I not hating him. Nicholas perceived Mr. K as not only not intervening with Jake, but actually trying to “seem cool to Jake.” In Nicholas’ recollection, Mr. K made a racist joke and even said ‘nigger.’
It turns out Mr. K was actually his first target, but was not in his classroom at the time. I wonder if Mr. K knows this. I wonder if he will see this. I wonder how his memory stored these events.
Nicholas heard a sound in the classroom door, and, when asked, is very fuzzy on the details of his encounter with Mrs. Farley. He says he doesn’t remember targeting her on purpose, but by that point to him, there was no turning back.
I’d imagine if one has memories of that sort, one might shield oneself from the harsh reality — blocking those violent moments, whether victim or perpetrator. I can’t imagine remembering killing someone so violently when I was so young and having to relive that moment for the rest of my life.
I was in a serious car accident when I was 17. I remember in flashes seeing the car’s headlights illuminating the concrete barrier dividing the interstate, flying by sideways at 50 miles per hour as our car spun out facing the barricade, then smashing against it and flipping over into the bushes between the north and south bound lanes. I remember the car beginning to turn upside down.
My very next memory is sitting on something wet, wondering why the car’s interior light had fallen on the floor. I realized I was sitting on cold, wet grass, as the glass of the car’s hatchback had been shattered, and I hadn’t been buckled in. The intermittent moments surrounding that accident are vivid and packed with detail, but the time between them — the most terrifying and painful — are completely blank in my head — selectively deleted or never recorded.
We will never know whatever happened in those moments passing the point of no return between Nicholas and Mrs. Farley. Nicholas’ story at trial was that he was “going to show her the gun and it went off,” but that seems like a lie a 16 year old would tell, or at least one that skips the most relevant part.
Nicholas walked out Mrs. Farley’s door a 16 year old cold blooded killer. He didn’t stop. He didn’t run. He packed up his gun, locked the knob of her door, and walked down the 3 wooden stairs that would later shoulder the gurney carrying her body into the courtyard with his backpack, and started toward his next target.
Sitting across the desk from the gentle-seeming, pensive man gazing deep into the past some 27 years later, it was hard to imagine him doing anything so coldly calculated or violent as those moments must have been, when his humanity gave way to absolute vengeance.
I find it hard to believe Mr. K was intentionally ‘trying to seem cool’ to Jake, but I’m certain he missed many opportunities to intervene.
More than just rote acting, I fully believe Nicholas is remorseful, and believes he deserves this punishment for his crime, even though he was still two years a juvenile. He said “I don’t think any amount of time will allow for what I did. The guilt never goes away.”
Nicholas had forgotten many of our interactions — that I was even in typing class with him, that we’d traded VHS tapes, and even hung out a couple of times during the summer. He did remember our attempt to see Die Hard together. He also remembered one thing that changed my view this event forever.
Nicholas and I were too young to get in to see the violent, 50 F-bomb laden Die Hard, but he was tall, dressed maturely, and in those days, ticket sellers weren’t that concerned about enforcing ratings.
I’d been saving the Die Hard questions for the end: it’s memory was the spark that led to this meeting. I watched his face make a connection paralleling the click in my brain that brought me there.
He told me that I’d suggested that he pay an older stranger to buy us the tickets. Nicholas said something like, ‘now that you mention it, that’s probably what gave me the idea that I could pay my cousin to buy the gun for me.’
Unlike his other important quotes, I didn’t stop him to make sure I got the words exactly right on my notepad. I’d fallen out of time. The floor gave way under me, the vertigo returned, and In my mind, traveled to the Kemps River United Artist movie theater in 1988, remembering that we’d seen ‘Murphy’s Fault’ in the first theater on the left after your ticket was torn. The office spun and I felt sick.
I’d arrived at the prison worried I might have said something to pile onto the communal weight of his misery, but I’d never considered that such a small infraction might have had such a significant connection to the shooting.
Those to whom I’ve told this story seem overly quick to reassure me, pointing out that I’m not to blame, it’s not my fault, I didn’t kill anyone, I didn’t make the choice to take a life, I shouldn’t put guilt on myself. I didn’t cross the threshold of murder. I understand this, of course, and though I don’t hold myself directly responsible for the events that unfolded on December 16th, 1988, I know now that I was a greater link in the chain than I’d imagined.
There is unquestionably a line between unwitting conspirator and intentional killer, but human oversimplification of our shared complicity is exactly the thing that prevents us from seeing the whole picture. It’s understandable to want simple, straightforward answers: ‘That kid cracked, he killed that woman, end of story.’
Paradoxically, the story of the angry, vengeful murderer is in itself a straightforward, acceptable answer, yet how deep do we dig to find the root of the vengeful anger in the first place? So much of what is labeled ‘terrorism’ is exactly the same, if one simply fills in the ghoulish madlib of whatever particular disaffection felt sets a similar series of events in motion time after time after time.
I cannot understand how the word Terrorism has become so simplified, associated with foreign nationals and opposing religious doctrine. Every single act of violence committed by those who feel oppressed is the same, even if the details and the scale differ. It’s all terrorism; it’s all blind emotional rage.
There is rarely an full accounting, a reckoning, an inquest, a complex explanation.
America seems to have grown almost bored of this story; the world and the news move ever exponentially faster. The 2016 nightclub shooting in Orlando where 50 people died — the largest mass shooting in US history —almost flew right by with no larger national introspection, just various politically motivated accusations of terrorism and calls for gun control, lumped in with a more and more diffuse and generic explanations.When I returned to school after the shooting, my 12 year old counterpart was interviewed for the local news, and I said something to the effect of ‘It wasn’t my friend Nicholas who did this, this was Satan.’
It’s far easier to say “It was Satan.” or “It’s their fault.” or “It’s because of too many guns,” or “It’s because there aren’t enough guns,” rather than “It is all of us, and we can make it better if we dig deeper.” I saw that last part far more clearly than I’d ever expected when I began this journey.
Our shame and guilt shifts to blaming others as a distraction from our own shortcomings — perhaps even now I am subconsciously elevating Jake’s culpability above my own. We shame and blame others to feel less of the burden ourselves, whether the in the classroom, within our religious or non-religious groups, within our respective political parties, now more isolated than any other time in my life.
Mr. Marino demonstrated amazing empathy and Christian forgiveness for Nicholas days after he’d been shot twice. This should not be forgotten in the aftermath of this event. At the same time, had the teachers intervened before the incident, perhaps such a show of forgiveness and love would not have been necessary. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement of all our imperfections that inspires such forgiveness itself.
My very last note from my visit to Nottaway Correctional Facility that day is this quote from Nicholas. I stopped him to get the wording right:
“It’s the being targeted and tormented that makes you feel despondent.”
Eleven years later, the Columbine shooters saw ‘The Matrix’ — a movie where the a protagonist seems to kill a bunch of cops right at the beginning of the film—just a few months before dressing up in trenchcoats and assaulting the shool. Before their rampage, shooter Dylan Kleibold left almost the exact same message.
“The pain multiplies infinitely. never stops. Yet im here, STILL alone, still in pain.” … “Nobody will help me.” — quotes from the diary of Dylan Klebold, Columbine student and shooter, 1999
I used the quote above long before TED released the talk given by his mother. It seems almost inhuman to be angry at her. I can’t imagine what its like to have a child commit such an act, but I am angry nevertheless. In HER twenty minutes, she spoke primarily of mental health.
Having witnessed a nearly identical chain of events, having watched Nicholas’ lawyers attempt an insanity plea, I am furious.
Yes. Dylan Klebold unquestionably suffered existential depression and feelings of isolation. Yes, mental health professionals would unquestionably label him as ‘diseased’ but this is the point. This is everything. What causes the disease in the first place? Is the cure being more sensitive to the symptoms so as to prescribe medication sooner, or to dig deeply into the causes of the symptoms in the first place? Pills let sleeping dogs lie.
Like seeing the Die Hard poster, her Ted talk finally motivated me to complete this long chapter. Maybe it was not yet time for me to speak.
It has taken me many years to release the resentment of the conservative evangelical part of this equation. I have not completely, but I have more understanding. It was easier to be cynical.
Six years after the shooting, Pastor George Sweet would run for congress as a conservative Republican, at the same time that party fought hard to protect the sale of high capacity magazines in guns. Three years later, he would resign Atlantic Shores Church in the midst of a scandal, only to immediately become involved in another one.
As an adult, I’ve rebelled hard against a simplified storybook satan bogeyman in lieu of nuanced explanation. I still reject blaming externalized evil as anything other than an expression of a metaphorical monster within all of us. Every school shooter — every terrorist is reflecting the pain they feel back at the world they hold responsible — their target also a bogeyman they are no longer capable of enduring.
Blaming ‘The Media’ is another Bogeyman, yet Nicholas saw Die Hard and the Columbine shooters saw ‘The Matrix,’ each just a few months before their rampages. We all have skin in the game, and we also have blindspots.
Only now can I see how isolated Jake the Snake must have felt at 17, kicked out of the school with his friends, under-performing a fat little obnoxious 12 year old in the same class. It’s clear he hadn’t processed his role in the events of December 16th 1988.
I have no idea if Nicholas would have taken the same road if I’d never given him the idea for how to acquire the gun, or if his parents hadn’t divorced and he hadn’t lost contact with his father. Or if any of us had stood up for him.
I can’t help but wonder if that gun hadn’t jammed in 1988 — if a dozen or dozens more students had died — what would have happened?
What if there were 20 dead children on Friday, December 16th 1988 in Virginia Beach, instead of 20 dead children on Friday December 14th, 2012 at Sandy Hook?
Before this modern, surface, hyperspeed ADD media existed, before CNN established the 24 hour news cycle somewhere between the first Gulf war and OJ Simpson — Would the country have stopped in its tracks right before Christmas of 1988? Would we have taken the time to find out what really caused this, or at the very least asked ourselves some hard questions? Would the black shooter at a small, mostly white Christian school have only made matters worse?
A widening human disconnect is growing exponentially— in some ways the same as it’s ever been, In others, it’s never been easier to join with like minds to lock out inconvenient truths and amplify our opinions in our own echo chambers; At the center of this black hole of shame and denial, I believe solutions, reconciliations, and shared truth are there. I think it’s time to try to let the truth set us free, if our mutual revelations can help, rather than destroy us.
Two years ago, before I saw Nicholas, I wrote a much angrier article, most of which I stand behind, even though the anger shows through more than I’d like. That opened up the can of worms that brought me here, though.
It was not yet time. I had not seen the Die Hard poster. I had not returned to Hampton Roads. I had not, after experiencing some of the lowest lows of my life found a great job at the biggest TV news station in town. I had not made contact with the senior editor who graciously pulled the tapes from 1988 for me to use. I had not found out that she was the one who was actually behind the camera filming on December 16th, 1988. I had not yet finished the first draft of this. I had not sent her a copy. I had not yet had a visit from probably the most recognizable TV reporter in this area. I had not had the courage to contact the victim’s daughter.
But he did. As I finish this article, I have not yet seen her interview; It airs in only a couple of hours. But I read the script. Mrs. Farley’s daughter and son have forgiven Nicholas. She said she would welcome him into her home.
As much anger as I’ve held for the way in which I was raised, as much anxiety I feel sometimes towards our current global discord on so many fronts, I have been moved by such genuine forgiveness.
Before I had my mental breakdown in 2012, I pushed and pushed against my friends and family to try to explain a single concept, if nothing else: The definition of ‘an apology.’ I believe there are clearly two main parts to an apology — genuine emotional remorse, an acknowledgement of the hurt caused; a sharing of the pain, so the wounds might be mended. But that’s only half of an apology to me. I believe apologies require an examination of the factors leading to the root causes of the discord, so as to learn from our mistakes.
I’m often immobilized by fear that I’m exploiting real human tragedy to promote a crazy theory linking these opposite ideologies, the collision of which instigating my mental breakdown in 2012. Psychologists might call it a temporary psychotic break. Religions might call it a vision from God. Perhaps it was neither or both.
The part I have difficulty explaining is that each of us values one more than the other. I am a person who has, historically been more concerned with the inquest — finding out what went wrong to reach an understanding of the facts and errors that brought us to this painful place.
I acknowledge there are those for whom the emotional exchange is more important. I’d say that’s the majority of Americans, religious or not.
Last night I contacted one of my old friends from Atlantic Shores to see if there was anything he wanted to make sure was included in the story that is about to air on the 6 o’clock news. He did not take my call, and wrote me back a brief message on facebook. He was concerned it would open up old wounds.
This is the bridge to be crossed, and I don’t know how to build this bridge. I understand, perhaps more than most, that digging this deep into the worst wounds is horrifically painful. I am almost a sadomasochist in this respect sometimes. But big things are changing for me — I really do see or feel this connection between these two worlds.
I can’t help but feel like something greater is tying all of this together. Perhaps people will finally be able to hear the words trapped behind so much of my resentment and pain for so long. Perhaps I can finally relax enough that I’ll be able to hear their words. Perhaps the calm will last long enough to catch those words whispered on the wind, “It’s time.”
