There But For the Grace of God

I went to school with a crazy person.

Well, OK, that in and of itself is not surprising, given the amount of schooling I have, and the subject I majored in. I almost certainly went to school with a lot of crazy people, and I can easily come up with several people who probably count as crazy in one way or another.

I can only think of one guy who was crazy in the manner that's on everybody's mind this week, though. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, back in the mid-80's.

For a little while in seventh and eight grade, there was a group of kids in my school who used to regularly get together play D&D. Yeah, I know, I'm a gigantic nerd-- look at what I do for a living. We mostly did this at the town library, but a few times, we played in my parents' basement (as is traditional), and one of the guys who played really coveted my chemistry set.

He was, as I said, a couple of years ahead of me, and he was one of those kids who get obsessed with things that go boom. He read Soldier of Fortune and could identify any gun used in any tv show or movie, and as a bonus, tell you what the producers had done wrong regarding the way the gun was used. He used to play with guns a lot on some land his family owned, and make little gunpowder bombs and the like. He wanted the chemistry stuff because he thought that with that, he could make some really good explosives (this was before the Internet, but he had paper copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook and that sort of thing.

He also had his share of issues, and on one occasions had threatened to blow up a teacher he didn't get along with. If I remember correctly, he was going to rig the guy's car so it would blow up when he started it, which probably doesn't show the best grasp of the actual explosive potential of gasoline, but then again, he was in sixth grade at the time.

Why my parents let me play D&D with this guy, I'm not sure.

Anyway, despite the sixth-grade threat, he stayed in school, and we used to play D&D a few years later. The regular games only lasted a year or two, before a couple of the guys moved away, and the game fell apart. After that, we more or less went our separate ways, because we were in different grades.

He remained fascinated with explosions all the way through high school, but to the best of my knowledge didn't actually get in any more trouble. After graduation, he enlisted in the military (I forget which branch), which seemed like a great use of his talents, and everybody was happy.

After a few years, though, he was booted out of whichever branch of the service he had joined, for trying to send himself explosives through the mail. They take kind of a dim view of that sort of thing.

A little while after he moved back to town, the old grange hall on the county fairgrounds burned down. It was an old wooden structure, and was a little rickety, so nobody was terribly surprised. It's since been replaced with a characterless aluminum barn, but what are you going to do?

Not long after that, an abandoned factory outside of town caught fire. The fire was sufficiently hot and fast that by the time the fire department got there, all they could do was watch it burn. In a slightly ironic note, they built a new firehouse on the land that was cleared by the burning of the factory.

A short time after that, they found some homemade bombs attached to the propane storage tanks in the village proper, and, well, everybody knew where to send the investigators. Last I knew, which was quite a while ago, my old D&D buddy was in prison somewhere, doing a good long stretch for arson.

What's the point? I'm not sure, other than that my town got lucky. He didn't do anything really bad while he was in school, and when he finally decided to act on his destructive impulses, he started out practicing on empty buildings. If the propane tanks had blown up, that could've done some major damage, but as it turned out, nobody got hurt.

Who's to blame? Nobody, really. He was a little crazy before any of us heard of D&D, and we didn't have violent video games, unless "Space Invaders" counts. I don't recall anything about his tastes in music, so I suppose it could be demon heavy metal, but, really, I doubt it.

Wasn't his path obvious in retrospect? Yeah, but that doesn't mean it should've been anticipated. It's a rural area, after all-- lots of teenagers there like to amuse themselves by setting things on fire, and most of them grow out of it. Lots of people have guns, and read gun magazines-- the first day of deer season was an unofficial day off in my high school, and an official one in some of the smaller neighboring districts. Yeah, he was a little crazier than most, but he kept a lid on it through high school, and those who thought about it at all hoped that the military would straighten him out.

I hadn't thought about this whole thing in several years, but some passing comment about the Virginia Tech shooter reminded me of the story. I don't want to make it sound like this kid was walking around with "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on his forehead, though-- by the time we were in high school, I doubt most of the students remembered the threatening incident in sixth grade at all, and those who did, had the facts all wrong. He was just a kid, more or less indistinguishable from a dozen other kids in the school. It's really only in retrospect that he stands out.

And isn't that always the way?