TAMPA, Fla. – Police in Tampa, Florida arrested 17-year-old Jared Michael Cano on Wednesday for planning to blow up Freedom High School on the first day of the new semester. This is a disturbing trend, teen mass murderers, and it seems to be escalating with frightening speed.
The first thought that comes to mind when we hear of another senseless and deadly teen rampage is Columbine.
On April 20, 1999, two high-school seniors – Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris – engaged in an all-out massacre on fellow students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado during the middle of the school day.
After hearing such news one tries to comfort them self by assuming that these kids come from broken or abusive homes. It helps us if we can blame their unexplainable and deadly behavior on something we can understand, something that will help us make some sense of the utterly incomprehensible. But the discomforting truth is most of these kids come from homes just like most any other home.
The Columbine shooters, Klebold and Harris, killed twelve students, one teacher, and then themselves. Both were intelligent. They came from solid homes with two parents and siblings. In elementary school, the boys engaged in sports like baseball and soccer and they enjoyed working with computers. They worked together at a local pizza parlor and worried about finding a date to the prom.
For all outward appearances, the boys looked like normal teenagers with normal teenage thoughts. So what went wrong?
According to Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, and the FBI’s lead Columbine investigator and a clinical psychologist, Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, it isn’t so much why they did is it was what they were doing, Slate reported. While school shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage these acts are generally not motivated by resentment of their victims in particular. Their vision is simply “to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.”
Dr. Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience and one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine told Slate that, “Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.”
For the psychologists, the mental state of Dylan Klebold was “easier to comprehend, a more familiar type.” He was “hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal,” and he blamed himself for his problems.
Eric Harris was another matter entirely. Harris appears to have been the mastermind behind the plot who enlisted and encouraged Klebod’s participation.
On the outside, Harris was seen as “sweet-faced and well-spoken.” Those who knew him described him as “nice.” But inside, Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal.
“Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people,” Fuselier said. Eric Harris was not merely a troubled kid, he was a psychopath.”
So, how do we defend ourselves from a psychopath; the sort who walk among us undetected until it is often too late, the sort Wednesday Addams chose to be for Halloween in the movie, The Addams Family, yet wore no discernable costume.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
According to Tampa Bay Online, Jared Michael Cano of Tampa, Florida was charged with “threatening to throw, project, place or discharge a destructive device” and “faces additional charges of possession of bomb-making materials, cultivation of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of marijuana.”
During an on-air telephone interview on FOX News, Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor said Jared Michael Cano planned to plant bombs in Freedom High School. His motivation seems to have been his anger over having been expelled last year. But while Cano’s primary targets were to be “administrators” that included two specific principals, what of the random student casualties which would have come from exacting his revenge upon school officials?
Cano wrote in his manifesto that he wanted the day to be “more spectacular than Columbine,” which seems to support the theory of Ochberg, and Fuselier that such acts are not necessarily motivated by resentment of their targets in particular but more out of a desire to provoke fear through demonstrations of “their power.” In the end, those who die in their acts of violence are simply a convenient quarry; what Timothy McVeigh described as “collateral damage.”
In his room, the Tampa Bomb Squad found everything needed to construct the explosive devices; “fuel sources, shrapnel, plastic tubing” as well as “timing devices”.
Also found was a manifesto, “that gave a minute by minute timeline of what he planned to do.” Jarred also “described where he planned to place the bombs.”
Sadly, Jarred Michael Cano was not the only disturbed teen planning to kill his fellow students on their first day back to class this fall.
On Aug 5, the Associated Press reported that authorities in suburban New Orleans, Louisiana uncovered a plot by three 15-year olds – who call themselves “Day Zero” – to conduct “an incredible and devastating” attack at their high school during the first day of classes.
According to Sheriff Jack Strain, the teens had two specific targets; a faculty member and a fellow student. Completion of the killings, added Capt. George Bonnett, a spokesman for the sheriff, was to be followed by “indiscriminate shooting” that would include “any sheriff’s deputies or other officers they saw and taking their weapons.”
“Like many other cases similar to this, they fully intended to end this episode with taking their own lives,” the sheriff said.
On Wednesday morning, Tampa police thwarted what could have been another “catastrophic” event, FOX News reported.
This is a disturbing trend and it seems to be escalating with frightening speed.
The haunting question is why?