The Myth of Monsters

My son was a shooter. Here’s what blinded me to danger.

From the get-go, my son, Noah, was a skeptical kid who took little at face value. When I would tell him, “There’s nothing you could ever do to change how much I love you,” he would take it as a challenge. “What if I robbed a bank, Mom? What if I punched Nathan in the face? Would you still love me?” 

I assured him that I would.

Once he asked, “What if I ran away from home?” We’d recently read Where the Wild Things Are. 

I told him, “I would be so sad if you left. But I would still love you.”

I don’t remember if my son ever asked, “What if I killed someone?” At five or six, Noah probably couldn’t conceive of murder. But if he had asked, I would have said yes, never dreaming that someday he would put me to the test. 

Someday came October 31, 2015. 

On that Halloween Day ten years ago, Noah walked out of his apartment in Colorado Springs, Colorado, armed with an assault-style rifle. Then he went on a shooting spree, killing the first three people he encountered before being killed by police. His victims, none of whom he’d met before, were Andrew Myers, 35, Jennifer Vasquez, 42, and Christina Galella-Baccus, 34. Each was a parent of two. 

At the time, my son was 33 years old, and we lived in New York City, two time zones away. But in the critical days leading up to the shooting, my husband, Dave, and I were in almost daily contact with him, mainly through long texts because he kept hanging up on us. We knew by then that he was in a mental health crisis, undoubtedly triggered by his going off his bipolar medications in favor of cannabis and, later, a stimulant called modafinil, which he ordered from overseas.

Naturally, we were extremely concerned, and during his final two weeks, we begged him to get help and tried our best to intervene. We took certain steps; we failed to take others. But in light of the tragic outcome, we will always live with sorrow and regret that we didn’t do more, and sooner. 

Which leads directly to the mystery I want to address here: Why do even loving, well-intentioned parents so often miss the signs of a troubled young man’s slide toward violence? To personalize the question: Why, especially given that Noah owned guns (he’d owned three for many years), did it not occur to us that he could be capable of harming others?

I propose that a big part of the problem is hiding behind a single word. 

Whenever I heard about yet another soulless gunman murdering innocent people, I muttered to myself about monsters. We hear the same sentiment echoed in the news and on social media. And who can blame us? What Noah did was, indeed, a monstrous thing. A heinous act that made him less than human in that moment. 

But I’ve come to see that when we label perpetrators monsters, we unwittingly propagate a false picture of what a would-be shooter looks like. And it’s the exceptionally rare mother (or other loved one) who is ever going to look at her troubled son and see an evil creature capable of senseless murder. 

I certainly couldn’t. 

In a painful bit of irony, it’s not a stretch to say that in the lead-up to the shooting, my son’s general good-guy reputation was the most dangerous thing about him. It convinced us and those around him, probably including his coworkers, that he was not at risk of unleashing violence despite his troubling changes in behavior and mood. 

While research shows no single profile of a mass shooter, there are clear, recurring patterns that loved ones can know and act on. This is the story of my journey to learn the truth about shooters and what we should be looking for.  

Of course, I understand that nothing I could do or say will undo the damage my son unleashed that morning in Colorado. But if just one other mother or other loved one of an at-risk young man sees themselves in our story and recognizes danger sooner, our effort will have been worthwhile.

~~

In so many ways, Noah was the antithesis of the guy you expect to go on a shooting rampage. Yes, he had struggled with alcohol before getting sober at 26. And at 27, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (which runs in our family the way cancer does in some others). But he had never been in trouble with the law, had never hurt anyone, or threatened to. He had a great work ethic, cared about his health and fitness, had plenty of friends, and—best of all—was extremely close with his family. 

In the aftermath of the shooting, I clung to this picture of Noah to the exclusion of any other. Since I still believed that shooters were monsters, I decided that Noah was a complete anomaly—a glitch in the universe. He could have nothing in common with those soulless killers we see on the news or read about online. 

It took years of therapy before I was ready to question this convenient assumption. 

One day, I decided to do my own research on mass shooters. At first, not objectively, I’ll admit. My heart still led the way. In all the stories, all the data, I had my eye out for any shred of evidence that my son was unique in the pantheon of multiple murderers—that there had never been a less likely shooter.

But that’s not what I found. While there is no single profile of a shooter, experts point out commonalities that appear across cases. Commonalities include being a white male; owning an AR-15; having a victim mindset; being angry or aggrieved; having had a recent crisis in a relationship, finances, or at work; having serious, untreated mental illness or psychosis (which it should be noted is not a risk factor for violence on its own); and being suicidal. 

Right away, I felt the data stalking me.

After hours of exploration, and much to my dismay, a likeness of my son kept coming clearer on the page. At least in the last two weeks of his life, Noah shared many of these characteristics. And his step-by-step unraveling, which had seemed to us like a private family ordeal, now began to look like an almost predictable path to tragedy:

• In 2014, Noah stopped taking his bipolar prescriptions and began to self-medicate. Not surprisingly, he started at this time to pull away from a recovery community that had for six years kept him grounded and given him a sense of belonging.
• By late summer of 2015, now using cannabis and modafinil heavily, Noah was noticeably hypomanic (mildly manic). When we saw him in late July for a family wedding and a funeral in the Pacific Northwest, he was overly talkative, optimistic, sociable, and kind. 
• By mid-October, Noah was entering his first full-blown episode of mania. He soon became obsessed with an online anti-government guru who imagined a scary and conspiratorial world. He also became uncharacteristically hostile toward me and his biological father. 
• The following week, his last, Noah at times seemed delusional and increasingly paranoid; he became genuinely frightened of mysterious “evil forces.” 
• On Friday of that week, he exhibited behavior that was bizarre and sexually inappropriate. The next morning, Dave and Noah’s brother, Nathan, flew to Colorado Springs to intervene and get Noah hospitalized—but they were too late. 
• By Saturday morning of Halloween, when Noah emerged from his apartment heavily armed, he had apparently left sanity behind. Outside, he saw a mortal enemy riding by on a bicycle and other hostile targets sitting amiably on a porch around the corner. 

This wasn’t a portrait of a man least likely to become a shooter. It was a picture of a dangerously deluded young man, armed for mass casualties, careening toward a bad end for himself and others. 

The truth was hard to swallow. The implications harder still. 

Up to this point, I had wanted to blame the shootings entirely on the fact of Noah’s psychological breakdown. 

But the more I read, the more I saw the fallacy behind my reasoning. 

Yes, I believed—and still do—that Noah would never have committed his crime had he been in his right mind. But it was time to admit that psychosis was not the only reason it happened. After all, thousands of people experience breaks with reality every day, and they don’t go on shooting sprees.

As psychosis dawned, it mattered who Noah was. His emotional state. His memories. His core beliefs. His preferences in reading and listening. All of his life’s experiences up to this point, including his choices. 

And it was Noah’s own strongly defended but reckless choices that made him vulnerable to a violent psychosis in the first place. 

On another crisp fall day so like the one when my son went on his shooting spree, I made my own choice: To hold Noah morally culpable for the deaths of Andrew Myers, Jennifer Vasquez, and Christina Galella-Baccus. 

Not because he was a monster.

Not because he was evil. 

But because he wasn’t.

~~

A couple of years later, I read the groundbreaking book, The Violence Project: How to stop a mass shooting. Authors Jillian Peterson and James Densley, both professional criminologists, conducted a massive amount of research on mass shooters, including interviewing five perpetrators. Their goal was to help us better understand the path these young men had taken to their crimes and how society can intervene sooner to prevent tragedy. 

Peterson and Densley identify four common patterns among shooters: Trauma in childhood. A story of grievance. Access to guns. And, a serious life crisis. 

It was the last one that really caught my attention.  

The authors write: “Nearly all mass shooters reach an identifiable crisis point in the days, weeks, or months before their violence—something that pushes them over the edge. For some, this is a relationship ending or the loss of a job. For others, it is an interpersonal conflict or mental health crisis.”

The idea that Noah had been in a crisis wasn’t new. But the idea that, for certain vulnerable young men, a serious crisis was a catalyst for most mass shooters was. 

Peterson and Densley emphasize that by “crisis,” they mean marked changes in behavior. They write that “a true crisis is communicated through a change in behavior from baseline—something different or unusual from that person’s norm, something noticeable.” 

Consider the following data from Peterson and Densley’s book.

Signs that mass shooters were in crisis before their shootings (and the percent that exhibited the behavior)

Increased agitation, 67%

Abusive behavior, 42%

Isolation, 40%

Losing touch with reality, 33%

Depressed mood, 30%

Mood swings, 27%

Inability to perform daily tasks, 24%

Paranoia, 24%

One to four signs of crisis, 43%

Five or more signs of crisis, 38%

During his final days, my son demonstrated at least five of these signs. We saw the increased agitation, the paranoia, the mood swings. At times, his angry outbursts at me (“Rot in your chains, Mom”) felt abusive. And, as he lost touch with reality, daily tasks of self-care, such as eating and sleeping, seemed to fall away. 

Of course, it’s important to note that a person could show many of these signs and never harm themselves or others. So while these are not certain indicators of violence to come, they are clear invitations to vigilance, and possibly, intervention.

Noah’s changes were definitely marked, but at the time I didn’t know how to read them. If only I’d had access back then to this kind of information!   

This is why I’ve found the work of The Violence Project so helpful. Their data shows that we should be looking out for vulnerable and troubled young men experiencing a crisis, not just for someone who looks evil or even threatening. 

Which takes us one step closer to dispelling the myth of the monster. 

As the mother of a shooter who failed to see danger coming, it’s a message I want to help spread. If we’re ever going to reduce the number of senseless shootings that leave us all so devastated, we need to understand and accept that before any of these perpetrators picked up a gun, they looked like our fathers, our brothers, and our sons.