Today's NY Times has a very interesting article about the student/killer, Mr. Wiese. He posted frequently and extensively on the
Web, writing and providing pictures and videos about death, killing, and suicide. His posts would give a very strong warning of what was to come. Unfortunately, few people on the reservation had Internet access. If they had read and seen his posts, history might have been very different.

Here is an excerpt from the Times article:

"A loner in real life, Mr. Weise, who also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion and wounded seven people on Monday, found a community of sorts in cyberspace, confiding his problems with depression, loneliness and abuse to people who cheered his macabre short stories and drawings and sympathized with his racial ideologies.

On Wednesday, some of his Internet pen pals lamented that there had been warning signs they missed, including a gory zombie tale Mr. Weise apparently wrote about a school shooting that mentioned Columbine, an animated film he posted in which a killer committed suicide, and an eerie message that, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow his fate.

Things are "kind of rocky right now so I might disappear unexpectedly," Mr. Weise wrote Feb. 6 on a Web forum where members collaborate to write fiction.

Last October, he posted an animated film on newgrounds.com. In it, a man shoots people with a rifle, unleashing flashes of red blood across a simple black and white drawing, then tosses a hand grenade into a police car, puts a pistol in his mouth and commits suicide.

[...]

In another message, Mr. Weise wrote that his mother "would hit me with anything she could get her hands on," and "would tell me I was a mistake, and she would say so many things that its hard to deal with them or think of them without crying."

Most troubling, perhaps, was the story of a shooting spree he posted on a site called Writer's Coven in December 2003. In it, he wrote of a character dressed all in black, a teacher with a Hitleresque moustache, and complaints about how the shooting at Columbine High had led to increased security on campus.

As in Monday's rampage, one of the victims at his fictional school was the security guard - "or what was left of him," the story said, his throat having "been ripped out, replaced by a bloody mass of torn tissue."

It went on: "In the distance, somewhere else in the school, the sound of a blood curdling scream echoed through the hallways."



The Times article has more gory details.