SPENCER, Okla. Even on the day Alania Vazquez reported her 14-year-old son to the police, the enormity of the decision hadn’t fully hit her.
She told an officer who came to her apartment that she believed her son was going to hurt people, possibly at school. There was a growing obsession with guns and violence, and she had discovered it while watching videos of school shootings. He got in trouble for making threats at school and bringing in a pocket knife. A teacher had overheard him telling his classmates how to construct pipe bombs. He had had an angry outburst earlier that day which was in September 2019.
Officers searched her son’s bedroom, where they found his diary, later detailed in an arrest warrant. He writes about committing a massacre, calling it “destiny.” He made death threats to his mother, her boyfriend and students and staff at an Oklahoma City school where he once attended classes. He counted who would live or die. He wrote that he would kill himself after that.
Police took her son to a hospital for a mental health evaluation after Ms. Vazquez, a 42-year-old call center manager, signed an emergency order declaring him dangerous. She walked away from the hospital after filling out admission forms ready to shed tears. It was a decision no parent expected to make, and some members of her own family criticized it.
“I had to save all of us from what could happen in the future,” Ms Vasquez said. “I will do anything to make sure my child is safe, and I’m safe, and the community is safe, and I’m not going to apologize for that.”
As mass shootings of young people have become more common, so have the questions asked in the aftermath: Were there signs of potential violence? Could someone have done something? The questions have become more pressing after attacks such as the one at the July 4th parade in Highland Park, Illinois, in which seven people were killed, and at a school in Uvalde, Texas, in May, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers.
For parents faced with troubling behavior, reporting their child to the police for an act they may have committed is an agonizing decision. These parents fear the consequences – emotional, social and legal. Even after making the decision, they often wonder if the police can direct their children to the help they need.
Mrs. Vasquez and her son.
Photo: The Wall Street Journal
Mrs. Vazquez shuddered to think she was missing something in her son’s case. Her son, she said, has spent much of his life in counseling since he began showing signs of emotional problems at age 3. She said he was hospitalized at 7 after he tried to jump from a moving car. More recently, she said, he had been having angry outbursts and punching holes in walls.
He wanted a gun, Ms. Vazquez told police, but she refused to buy one for him. Although he didn’t have a weapon to carry out an attack when she notified police, she said she was worried he might meet others who could help.
Her son, who is now back with his mother, said in an interview that at the time his diary was found he was angry with his life, including poor progress in therapy, a harsh childhood in poverty, feeling abandoned by his mother and bullied at school. At the time, he was not consistently taking medication for his mental health, he said, and his “paranoia was at an all-time high.”
As for the focus on mass shooters, he called it a passing interest.
He said he doesn’t believe his mother needed to get the police involved and is still upset that she did. Some of Ms Vazquez’s relatives also questioned whether she had gone too far with the police intervention.
“Some people thought maybe she turned him in to get him out of the house,” said Susan Tate, Ms. Vazquez’s mother. Ms Tate said she had also observed her grandson’s behavioral problems and fixation on violence.
The diary found by police, detailed in the arrest warrant, contains images of violent scenes, such as people hiding under desks in a schoolroom to escape a gunman, a promise to cause more mayhem by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and call in anniversary of the Columbine school massacre a day to celebrate.
Ms Vazquez’s son said he had changed a lot since the time he kept his diary.
Photo: The Wall Street Journal
“I want to kill and take revenge on the government’s humanity. administration and the other children,” he wrote. “I have few equals. I hate them all! I have been betrayed, this world does not deserve me, they will see that everyone will see.”
Ms. Vazquez hoped that contacting the police would help her son get long-term psychiatric care, something she had found difficult to do. Her son has a separate medical problem, she said, and medical facilities have told her they don’t have the staff to meet his needs.
Instead, she said, he received short-term hospital care. He also received a felony charge of planning an act of violence.
The problem of finding mental health services is a common problem for families trying to intervene before a child becomes violent, said Frank Straub, a licensed therapist and director of the Center for Targeted Violence Prevention, which maintains a database of incidents , where school violence was contemplated were caught before they could be committed. Community services often have long waiting lists, he said, and a shortage of adolescent-focused psychiatrists means families often turn to pediatricians or family doctors who aren’t always equipped to look for warning signs.
In a Justice Department-funded study published by Dr. Straub’s center last year, researchers looked at 171 prevented incidents of school violence since April 1999 — defined as a shooting, bombing, stabbing or other violent incident. conspiracy that is planned to be carried out on school property. Most of the cases involved lone actors with plans to use firearms.
Peers in a good position to hear classmates talking about plots or see social media posts reported violent plans in about 51 percent of the foiled incidents, the analysis found. School personnel, including resource officers, discovered the conspiracy in 18 percent of cases. Parents of suspects report about 4% of cases.
Blake Johnson, a 10-year-old from Hudson, Florida, remembered his mother’s lesson about talking about things he thinks are important when a classmate revealed in a school restroom in 2019 that he had a gun in his backpack. Blake, then 8, initially thought it was fake, but the classmate pulled out a gun to prove it and threatened to hurt him if he told anyone.
“He said he was going to shoot me in the head,” Blake said, adding that a friend who was also there told him not to tell anyone. As the other boys in the restroom dispersed to go to class, Blake told the school security guard what had happened. A search of the backpack turned up a loaded 9mm handgun, according to police.
Laney Johnson, Blake’s mother, said her son had some anxiety after the incident and transferred to another school last year after the student who had the gun returned to campus.
Lainey and Blake Johnson in 2020
Photo: Yves Edelheit for The Wall Street Journal
A 2019 Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly three dozen mass school shootings found that most shooters planned the attack weeks or months in advance. Those who work in the field of violence prevention say that teaching peers, parents and community members to speak up if they see something troubling is key. Several states, including Colorado and Florida, have developed anonymous reporting systems that students are encouraged to use.
A study following the 2018 Parkland, Florida high school shooting that killed 17 students and staff found 69 documented instances of violence or disturbing behavior by the shooter, including killing small animals, posting about guns on social media, and physical injury to family members.
In Centennial, Colo., at least 10 high school students had concerns about a classmate’s gun ownership and anger issues, another study found. One talked to a counselor about it before the classmate shot a student and himself in 2013.
Inaction has led to consequences for some parents, albeit rarely. In December, two parents were charged with manslaughter after their 15-year-old son was accused of killing four students with a gun at his high school in Oxford, Michigan. Prosecutors claimed they bought him a gun even though they knew it was problematic. The shooter and his parents met with school officials to discuss his behavior hours before the incident. The parents have pleaded not guilty, as has their son, who is accused of killing the four students.
Nicole Schubert was at a loss for what to do after she found her son’s journal on a cluttered dining room shelf in September 2019. In it, her then-17-year-old detailed a plan to…
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