Stephen Coon, the brother of yesterday's school shooter, Asa Coon, was arrested at his home Thursday, October 11, 2007. Asa, a student at SuccessTech Academy, shot four people yesterday before turning the gun on himself.
Fellow students say they and school authorities didn't take Asa Coon's threats of violence seriously before the 14-year-old's shooting rampage at his Cleveland high school on Wednesday.Coon killed himself after wounding two teachers and two other students at SuccessTech Academy. The youth had a history of violent confrontations and had been suspended after a fistfight on Monday.
A student who said he was friends with Coon said Coon had warned him a month ago that he was going to snap someday.
"He said if he did shoot up the school he'd let me and some other dude he knew go and all that, but I didn't think he actually meant that," the friend said. "I thought he was just kidding around."
Other students said Coon was a "Goth" who usually wore black clothes and a trench coat and strapped an empty gun belt to his leg. He was an atheist and a devoted follower of Goth rocker Marilyn Manson.
A schoolmate said Coon had been beaten up Monday after saying "F--- God" during an argument.
Some of the kids called him Jack Black, the loud, chubby, long-haired actor in the movie "School of Rock."
He could be loud sometimes, all right, and his appearance cried for attention: his shock of wavy brown hair, his fingernails painted black, the dog collar around his neck, his faded rock concert T-shirts under a trench coat.
But there was another Asa Coon, an Asa Coon far more menacing than the loopy kid with the unkempt hair and faux Gothic look. This was the Asa who always seemed to be in fights at school. This was the Asa who slapped around his mother. This was the Asa who talked about suicide. And it was this Asa, authorities say, who walked into SuccessTech Academy Wednesday with a satchel full of guns and ammunition and opened fire on teachers and students.
"In the end, you never know who is going to snap," classmate Aaron King said while heading home through a cold afternoon drizzle. "You have to watch who you make mad."
9 comments:
"This was the Asa who slapped around his mother."
If I were a school official, this would have made me look a little closer.
I'd like to see an honest assessment of the link between the increase in anti depressant subscriptions to our youngsters and school shootings. If pharma companies continue to lead the business community in ad spending you won't find much communicated in mass media about the link. Marilyn Manson is not the problem.
"If you can get them to ask the wrong questions..."
Ummm ...
Interesting point Anonymous. So what. He had a couple of a Marilyn Manson albums. He was also on prescription drugs. Which one are they going to blame?
I was wondering (if the kid was Black)!
I'm interested in seeing more about the make up of this 'alternative school.'
Does 'alternative' as used in this story meaning "full of under achievers" or "cutting edge?"
Why does this violence keep happening. What is wrong with kids today there is no value to life. I am truly sad that I had to look for something out there because I am afraid for my own kids safety in school. What did the people who made MY Childs Pack know that we do not know Why does my child need a bullet proof backpack to go to school with God be with us all and stop the violence
"Why does this keep happening"? It's obvious, despite the fact the government stooges keep themselves distanced by shrugging their shoulders. 1: kids have the worst PARENTS in history, thanks to the baby boomers and hippies. 2: Kids have an impossible standard to live up to. You have to have it all by the time you're 12, at least that's what the rap videos say. 3: People are too stupid to think that death threats might mean something serious! Hey, if someone says they are going to blow up the school, hey, that's a signal!
Our society today values nothing but a good consumer. If you can't hang, if you don't have cash, if you're not one of the beautiful people, YOU DON'T COUNT.
Tell me, why don't cute people do this stuff? Why is it only dorks and social outcasts? Hey! Did we just make a connections that even the FBI/BATF said they couldn't figure out?
If you want to stop the violence than you have to stop the things that PUSH people to violence. If all you do is take away the tools (which the anti-gunners will crow about) than they'll turn to bombs. That will make them feel better, though.
The school is a technology/ entrepreneurial magnet school and in the top 5% of public schools in the state of Ohio performance wise.
Goth Asa Coon had to be about as remotely outsider in the adolescent social order at a predominantly Black high school as it's humanly possible to be. Every day had to have been a stone litany of threat/contempt displays.
What did they arrest his brother for DV?
Does this really keep happening or is it just overblown in the news?
Perhaps this media campaign to panic us over this alleged epidemic of school shootings has more to do with rationalizing why each school is going to be turned into a mini-prison, getting parents to not just support it but demand it, and desensitizing children to spending their days behind metal detectors and barbed wire.
Dina, it keeps happening.
Are you familiar with John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education?
If not, check it out.
I came to political Black partisanship by way of a stretch of cognitive activism. Thanks to a lengthy correspondance and collaboration with a great programmer focused on issues of mind and culture and how some people come to resist or be naturally immune to dopaminergy - I came to the realization that the Black cultural aesthetic is in large measure a defensive adaptation against cultural and psychological predation by dopaminergic culture (which is almost identical with western culture). In fact American Black culture it is the strongest and most durable bulwark against dopaminergy in the world.
Our cultural aesthetic, while quite thoroughly western in many regards, and clearly in this world - is not entirely of this world, n'ahmeen? Ishmael Reed prolly came closer than anybody else to narratively distilling and capturing the essence of the thing.
(Dumain's critical flip-flop on Reed is equally fascinating and well worth considering for what it represents, as well)
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