Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - SHOCKING DETAILS OF 2 MASS SHOOTINGS IN TEN HOURS EMERGE, AMERICA MOURNS

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Within 24 hours dozens are dead and even more injured in two mass shootings. Nancy Grace looks at the shocking details that emerge, from a manifesto in one case to a rape/hit list in the other. Discussing the case today: California prosecutor Wendy Partrick California prosecutor, Psychoanalyst Dr. Bethany Marshal, active shooter response expert David Katz, forensics expert Karen Smith Forensic Expert, and Crime Online reporters Ellen Killoran  and Dave Mack. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. We heard the shots ring out. At first it sounded like fireworks. It was just like, do, do, do. And then it went closer together, do, do, do, do. So he asked me if that was shots, and I told him yes, because when I had looked out, people were coming in, crouching down, screaming there was a shooter. And so we took off running. We went towards the back because employees were telling us to go towards the back

because there was a shooter. And when we did, they held open the doors because there was elderly. We were trying to help them out while trying to run ourselves and kids. And when we finally got towards the stock room and they told us to exit the building, when we did, we went into the freight containers, the steel containers that come on the back of the trains. And they told us to hide on there. And when we did, it was about 20 minutes of pass-bys. And then we were trying to come out because the elderly and the kids were getting hot and sweating.

So when it came out, we heard more shots. The employees told us to go back into the freight containers. And then when we went back in, then they told us like 10 minutes later to come on out and hurry and go on the side of the building. So when we went on the side of the building, then we took off because we didn't know what to do from there. So we started walking down the side of the road. We went to Acura to go relax and try and get everything situated because the cops were barely coming at that time. Our country in mourning

after mass shootings rock so many. Victims of the El Paso Walmart massacre include an Army veteran, a hero mother who dies shielding her baby boy, her husband who had been building them a new home. Across the country, in Dayton, another mass shooting. Dayton gunman Connor Betts, just 24 years old,

had apparently created a hit list of people he wanted to rape and murder in school. This started years ago. What are we going to do? You just heard the sound of Keanu Long, a survivor. What about the others? What about the others that died? And what, if anything, can we learn? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. I want to go straight out to Dave Mack, syndicated talk show host, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. Dave, in El Paso, what happened? We had a young 21-year-old man show up at this Walmart anchor store of a mall and starts shooting people in the parking lot, Nancy. We actually have witnesses from inside the store saying they could hear it at a distance.

They could hear the shooting taking place in the parking lot. He comes straight into the store. He's got the headphones on. He's got the gun pointed, and he levels it at the first person he sees walking into that store. And then indiscriminately goes aisle by aisle shooting and shooting and shooting. It went on for so long. I want you to take a listen to our friend at ABC, Marcus Moore. Gunshots, one shot hurt.

The first call of an active shooter coming at 10 o'clock this morning at the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, Texas. The store packed with morning shoppers. Witnesses say a man wearing cargo pants and carrying a rifle begins shooting as he makes his way through the parking lot and into the store. As we're running, you can hear, because he's in the parking lot, so he started running to that. You can hear gunshots change from outside, like you clap outside, you go inside, you start clapping, and like that change, outside to inside, so he's coming inside. The gunman targeting his victims one by one in cold blood.

One witness telling ABC News it was like the gunman was on a mission. Police racing to the scene, unsure if there was one or several shooters. This person trying to get out as first responders rush in. Panicked shoppers recording their escapes. Again, the nation in mourning today after two mass shootings. Straight out to Ellen Kaloran, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. We're talking about what happened in El Paso and the Walmart shooting. But what about Dayton? Nancy, it's unbelievable. Less than 24 hours after the carnage in El Paso, around 1 a.m. Sunday morning in Dayton, another shooting happens again. In the entertainment and arts district where people are going out to enjoy themselves for a night, a gunman opens fire outside bars and restaurants and kills nine people.

I'm just overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed with what is happening. I want you to take a listen to our friends over at Fox News. We got shots fired. We got multiple people down. We're going to need multiple medics. I got everybody coming to you. 26 now confirmed hurt after that gunman opened fire outside a popular bar right around 1 a.m. Eastern time. Police say the suspect had a long gun and wore body armor. Officers shot him within one minute of that first shots fired call.

The mayor of Dayton commending first responders just moments ago. Well, this is a terribly sad day for our city. I am amazed by the quick response of Dayton police that saved literally hundreds of lives. This morning, the FBI is on scene. So far, no word on a motive. It's almost too much to take in. Either one of these is overwhelming, but two in the space of just a few hours. Back to Dave Mack, syndicated talk show host and CrimeOnline.com investigative

reporter. Dave Mack, it's hard to go back and forth between these two shootings. The closest thing I can compare it to is a mass shooting at the Fulton County Courthouse where I worked. And we actually had to close down part of the courthouse. And it took days and days and days to process the scene. To process each individual murder, it's hard to know really where to even start. But I'm going to start back at the Walmart. Take me back to the very moment that gunfire broke out. What do we know, Dave Mack? What we know is that about 1040 or just before that, on a day when they had a back-to-school

shopping extravaganza, where they have like a tax-free day. So thousands and thousands of people shopping for back-to-school. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. You just ran a chill down my spine. Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst joining me out of L.A. Dr. Bethany, when John Davy gets ready for school, he throws his magic tricks, a ball, a soccer ball of some sort, a bunch of horrible snack food. I don't know where that came from. Down his backpack, and he's ready to go. Lucy

writes exhaustive lists, plans days ahead, gets her outfit out, the whole shebang, and most important, makes her back to school shopping list. Even though the school says you don't need supplies, that's all she's focusing on. I'm just thinking about what Dave Mack just said. Everybody's doing their back to school shopping. Did you hear what he just said? Nancy, yes, this is a back to school shopping day, which meant the Walmart was crowded. It also means that families are enjoying themselves. It's a happy moment. Mothers with babies and children. You know, one of the victims was holding a two month old baby. And when she was shot, she fell on the baby, died, and the baby had broken bones. And that is just such a tragic, horrifying image to me. But don't you think, Nancy, this shooter knew this? And what we know about mass murderers is that they always have an ax to grind against society. They feel bullied at some pathological level. They feel that everybody has something they don't. They want to go down in infamy.

They want their crimes to bring notoriety to them. So what better way to do that than to go into a happy place where people are preparing for a happy event, which is going back to school. Dr. Bethany, you're so right. Take a listen to our friend at NBC. This is Miguel Almaguer. At about 1040 a.m. on Saturday morning, we are told a lone gunman walked into that parking lot and began to open fire. There was some 3,000 people, upwards of 3,000 people inside that Walmart when he made his way in and began to open fire. There was some 3,000 people, upwards of 3,000 people inside that Walmart when he made his way in and began to unload on families who were doing back to school shopping. The suspect, we're told, was armed with an AK-47 style assault rifle

and just began to unload bullet after bullet on anyone he could see. In all, some 20 people were killed and at least 26 people were wounded. Police say that the suspect then eventually surrendered to officers without incident. Police did not fire a single shot at the gunman. The gunman has been identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crucias. Police say he left behind a racist manifesto. They are investigating that this was perhaps a hate crime. That certainly seems to be a possibility at this point. Crime stories with Nancy Grace. We heard like shots, like three shots, boom, boom, boom, one, two, three.

We need taxi unit units to go ahead and start responding to the health support of Walmart, get people at doorways, get people holding hallways. The wounded ranging in age from just two to 82 years old. Some of the injured seen here being rolled out on carts to get medical help. Customers in other stores at the Cielo Vista Mall quickly rushed out while officers worked to find the shooter. I hear them closer and louder and that's when I realized I'm like okay this is like serious. The suspect who allegedly drove more than 600 miles from Allen, Texas taken into custody just over 20 minutes after the first shots rang out. The person that

was taken into custody was taken into into custody wi and no law enforcement pe weapons. Law enforcement the alleged shooter is 21 crucius of Allen, Texas, assault style rifles simi and several magazines wer scene and that after he w the suspect allegedly tol

wanted to shoot as many m Oh, it just breaks my heart. It just breaks my heart to hear it. That's our friend at NBC, Miguel Almaguer. Everyone trying to absorb what has happened over the last 72 hours. I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. I want to go straight out to David Katz, active shooter response expert, former DEA, and the CEO of Global Security Group. David, thank you for being with us. I'm overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed because I'm in my mind being taken back to so many crime scenes I've helped process and analyze of mass shootings. And when I say mass shootings, I'm talking about maybe seven or eight people. Nothing on the scale of what we're talking about today. What can you tell me, if anything? I hardly know how to divide

these two up, but I at the moment happen to be, because we started on school supplies talking about the walmart shooting i'm just thinking about out of the blue this happening um what can you tell me about the shooter dave katz well they really haven't released so much other than the manifesto which gives which gives his his racist ideology okay wait wait wait, wait, wait, wait, right there, right there. When we talk about, you say they haven't released that much. Well, you know what? Said the same thing about Unabomber. We didn't know much about him. Well, you know, I know you're the expert, but I know this technical legal term, BS. When somebody writes a manifesto in writing, it tells me a lot about the person with every word they write. We know his age. We know where he's from. We know everything he's divulged in his manifesto. I'd say we've got a

pretty good idea of who he is, David Katz. Well, the more critical facts that I would say relate to either this case and the failure to stop it would be what type of behavior manifested itself prior to the attack. For example, even if law enforcement had access to the manifesto, okay, you go to the police, you go to the FBI, you go to any law enforcement agency, say, look what this guy's writing. He gets a visit. There is no action that at this point in time we can take. Our figure a way as a society to say, okay, someone like this doesn't have access to a firearm. Someone like this has perhaps some sort of forced intervention because we know they're taking time bombs. And that's the problem. We do not deal with the mad dogs in our society. We did not deal with the psychologically impaired in the society. We just say, well, I guess we can't do anything until they do something. And that's the problem. That's why these things happen repeatedly. And without exception, I know they say it's only 80 percent. Forget it. Without exception, when you look at these incidents, you go back and somebody is saying, you know, yeah, my gosh, you know, like what they say about the Dayton shooter. They said right away, they said, well, he looks like there's no way to

predict it. We couldn't stop it. He's a normal guy. No, he wasn't. Now we find out about the about the murder list, the rape lists. The question is, what could we have done about it? This is what I know about the El Paso shooting. 19 minutes before the first 911 call was made about the mass shooting at a back-to-school cell at Walmart, an anti-immigrant manifesto appears online. Of course, all the victims in the shooting are not immigrants. The manifesto speaks of a, quote, invasion of Texas, and it details a very offensive plan to separate America into territories by race. I'm just going to let that soak in just for a moment.

Authorities now scrutinizing the nearly 3,000 word manifesto to try to figure it out, whether it's written by him. It is. Same guy who killed 20 people and injured over two dozen. Now, police were interviewing this guy, 21-year-old Patrick Crucius, a white male from Allen, Texas, almost 10 hours away from the Walmart. Now, what brought him to that shopping center? That's one thing investigators want to know. The manifesto, I don't know why we always call it a manifesto. It's just a hate rant. It says things like, if we can get rid of enough people, our way of life can be more sustainable.

Okay, I want to go straight. I need to shrink in a major way. Out to Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst. Help me out, Bethany. Well, with these hate manifestos, actually, I agree with you. Manifesto is a very fancy term for a hate rant. What we see is something that we call in my field, trite, rehearsed, and stereotyped speech. And what that means psychologically is that the person acts like they're writing something deep, as if there's a deep emotional valence, as if they have a point to make. But in fact, it's very shallow. It's like a thin veneer of verbal sophistication that really covers a hateful personality type. And the hate usually stems, as I said earlier, from this pathological

conviction that everybody is against them, that they have been given a raw deal in life, that finally, through a mass murder, they can bring notoriety to all their grievances against society. And I think one of the reasons we're seeing this increasingly is that there is a very strong copycat quality to all of these mass murderers. They are really incited by watching the news, by going online, looking at other crimes, and it gives them the courage and emboldens them to carry out their hateful mission. Joining me right now, a veteran California prosecutor, author of Red Flags on Amazon, Wendy Patrick. Wendy, I've been taking a long, hard look at what we're learning from this guy's manifesto,

which to me is like a nearly 3,000-word confession. Very often you hear experts say, well, you can't tell. You had no idea this was coming. I disagree. I think that there are signs, just like the Florida school shooter. There are so many signs. I agree with David Katz. So often we just don't want to look at the signs. What do you make? I'm talking right now about the Walmart shooter. What do you think? out. But the signs that are left in writings like that are more than simply trying to deduce motive

after the fact. They're often what in the threat assessment community we call leakage. You can read these things and pretty much see that many of these shooters say what they're going to do before they say it. Remember the Santa Barbara shooter, Elliot Roger, actually the night before videotaped himself saying what he was going to do the next day. The problem, and many of us know this having done this type of work, is how do you connect those dots before it happens instead of doing what we're doing today and everybody across the country reconstructing what happened after the fact. So in terms of red flags, I think you've nailed it. A couple of you have already talked about

some of these things. Grievance collecting, pathological narcissism, writing these manifestos. They don't write themselves overnight. But what we also see is plagiarism from prior manifestos. So when you have this sort of celebrity worship of people that have done this before, all of this strung together, Nancy, could relate to some of these red flags that we can, in fact, see before the fact if we're all looking and listening. Over the years, I have investigated, prosecuted, and covered literally thousands of cases. And over those years, some cases just stick with me. Some cases have affected me so deeply. I believe I have to help the victims and their families. Our new show, Injustice with Nancy Grace, is coming to Oxygen to investigate cases,

bring to light what's been buried in all the chaos. Our show brings attention to families that deserve to tell their story, to cases that deserve to be heard, and to victims that deserve a voice. Join us as we untangle what went wrong, what went right, and what can still be done. Injustice with Nancy Grace. Watch now on demand only on Oxygen, the true network for crime. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. There was a horrific scene outside the store. Days customers recorded the aftermath of the mass shooting. Dead bodies could be seen near cars. People gunned down as they loaded groceries

and other items into their vehicles. Terrified customers took cover as shots rang out. El Paso's police chief says the 911 call came in just before 11 a.m. local time. Sources tell CBS News Crucious posted an online manifesto which may point to a motive. In it, he rants about the changing demographics of Texas in a plot by Democrats to conspire with immigrants. He also blasted Republicans and corporations. You are hearing from our friend at CBS, that was Jeff Nguyen. Before we could even absorb what was happening at the Walmart shooting at the height of the morning shopping for back to school, we hear about another shooting. At least nine dead, dozens injured after a shooting in Dayton, Ohio. We got shots fired. We got multiple people down.

We're going to need multiple medics. One man capturing the sound of gunfire as he sat in his car. Police say the shooter, wearing body armor and armed with a long gun and high-capacity magazines, opened fire just after 1 a.m. as people were out at restaurants and bars in a popular area of downtown. Officers already patrolling nearby quickly responded, blocking off roads. We had first medic and med teppers right now. We got several down. Paramedics rushing to give first aid to some victims out on the street. Most of us can't get to our cars because there were bodies scattered all over across the street from our cars. So we can't, people that were shot hit innocent people. Police killing the gunman.

We're working on identifying the suspect, see what the possible motivation might have been. I can hardly take in what I'm hearing. That was our friend ABC reporter Maggie Rooley. That moment when brave cops save hundreds by confronting the Dayton gunman, 24-year-old Connor Betts. I hate to even say his name. And what we are learning about the Dayton shooter is that he has long had plans to shoot up a school, that he bullied people, that he was once suspended for drawing up a hit list on the bathroom wall of girls he wanted to kill, making lists of girls he wanted to rape, people he wanted to torture. Now, of course, this morning, and you know how I hate politics, I never get

involved. I think all politicians are lying, every single one of them, whether a Democrat or Republican or a Green. I just, I don't like to politicize crime. This morning, everybody's blaming Trump for the shootings. Well, this guy had a hit list years ago. So what am I going to do? Blame Obama? Do I have to go back even further and blame Bush? I mean, I can't blame anybody but the shooters. I can't, unless somebody can explain to me how I can.

To Ellen Kaloran, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. Okay, we're just trying to absorb what happened in El Paso, and then we hear about another mass shooting. What happened in the Dayton shooting? That's right, Nancy. Just, you know, just hours after the Walmart shooting, it's a Saturday night. It's around 1 a.m. Friends, family, couples are out having a Saturday night out on the town in a nice neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio, filled with restaurants, galleries, clubs, bars. People are walking up the sidewalk. People are inside restaurants. It's a warm night.

And then it had to have felt like out of complete nowhere to the victims and the witnesses, this man whose wearing body armor, wearing a mask, just opens fire. He starts on the sidewalk. He's trying to make his way into a bar called Ned Peppers. He opens fire. He manages to shoot several people. Nine people have died. But police were able, because there were officers already patrolling the area, police were able to stop him in 20 seconds, but he was still able to kill

nine people. Back to expert David Katz, active shooter response expert, former DEA CEO of Global Security Group. What can you tell me about this guy? We talk about the police response for a minute. Here in New York City, police officers are getting water thrown at them and listen to what the cops do under these circumstances. They take the shooter out. So we know from what little has been released so far that this guy, what they say, he has a dark energy about him. That's nonsense. What they meant was he was frightening to people. He threatened people. They knew with certainty that he had intent to harm not only one or two people, but many people. And yet, we as a society cannot figure out some way to stop these people from getting access to firearms,

to monitor these people. When you go to a gun shop, for example, and you purchase a firearm, when you go through your checklist with the ATF form, they ask you, have you ever been arrested? Have you ever been taking any sort of drugs that are associated with psychological conditions? You could check no, no, no, no, no. The criminal background check will divulge that you have been arrested and you will not get access to a firearm. How do we make sure that someone like a school psychologist or psychiatrist or someone who has encountered people like this during their school years, during employment, during some period of time in life to say, look, we need to we need to make sure these people don't get access to a firearm or at least, you know, to make sure everyone has due process rights to make sure there is a second look before we complete those sales. You know, one thing I can't get away from one important fact to Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst out of L.A.

His first victim was his own sister, Bethany. Nancy, I have been thinking about that all morning. I keep wondering, was he so indiscriminate? He shot at everybody and didn't care if it was his sister? Or if I think of the psychological profile of these mass murders, they have such a history of feeling victimized. And again, I keep using the word pathological because not every victim becomes a shooter, right? But shooters always feel like victims and like as if everybody in society is against them. And did he have an ax to grind against his own sister? Was this where the sense of being at an inferior level and bullied and persecuted, did it begin in the context, in the matrix of his own family? And Nancy,

he was wearing body armor and he drove with his sister to the spot with his sister and a friend. Can you imagine she was sitting in the car with her own brother who had an intent to murder? I mean, the whole, it's such a frightening thought to me. And the panel is talking about how do we know that these men, they're always men, are going to become mass murderers. They always write about it, Nancy. They always have manifestos.

They always confess. They're blabbermouths. They blab to their friends. They write letters. They go on YouTube. They go online. It's pretty easy to know when somebody's going to become a mass murderer because they're always talking about it. To Karen Smith joining me, forensics expert and founder of Bare Bones Consulting, I keep going back in my mind to mass shootings that I've handled or helped process or analyze. How do you make any sense of it? Let's just start with the Dayton shooting. How do you make sense of it forensically and what can you learn? You know, Nancy, I'm trying

to wrap my head around this. You know, at the nightclub in Dayton, you know, you start, you make the crime scene as big as you can. If it's a city block, it's a city block. You know, you're dealing with an AR-15 rifle. Those projectiles travel fast and they travel far. They can penetrate multiple surfaces. So, you know, you're not going to be reconstructing every trajectory. You're not going to be reconstructing every bloodstain like you would in a domestic related homicide in a house. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

It was a lot of people downtown. It's usually a live night on Saturdays. By the time we got to the end of the line, once we got to the end of the line, which is near the corner, you heard one gunshot. You heard boom. So we're looking around. We didn't know what it was. It didn't sound like a familiar sound. And the buildings around here made it kind of echo off. And then you hear a second boom. And then after that, it's complete rapid fire just for like one minute once the gunshots are like coming rapidly you

just see the crowd running West we run it down towards to get out of the Oregon and you can just see as I turn around my friend was behind me wasn't with me so when I turn around I'm looking for him and I see he was stunned and that's when I can see the people in the line that was in the line and their peppers you can see the bodies actually start to fall. So then we knew it was like bigger than just even a shootout, and we just continued to run, and we just yelling to people and just telling them, like, run, it's a mass shooter, run, it's a mass shooter.

You're hearing our friend Anthony Reynolds at NBC Today speaking to witnesses there, survivors of the Dayton shooting, before we could even absorb what had happened at a back-to-school sale at a Walmart, 11 a.m., we hear of another mass shooting in Dayton. How can we not only absorb what happened, but make sense of it so that we can learn something from it. And in our jurisprudence system, even if we learn from it, what under the law can we actually do about it? Joining me, Dave Mack, CrimeOnline.com investigative reporter. You know, I'm understanding that the Dayton shooter had a plan, an earlier plan to shoot up a school. He had a hit list and a rape list. One girl, a former cheerleader, says in her freshman year, she got a phone call from cops who tell her her name was on his list of potential

targets. And she says the officer said he, the shooter, wouldn't be back to school for a while. He had been suspended. Some time passed and then he was back walking down the halls. They didn't give any of the potential targets any warning. He was coming back to school. The discovery of the hit list, that was all the way back in 2012. How long had that been going on? Prompt the police to investigate him, and it caused about one-third of the students to skip school out of fear for their own safety.

Now, that's according to the AP. Now, I was according to the AP. Now, I was thinking about what David Katz, our active shooter response expert, was saying. He had no apparent criminal record as an adult. Now, we also know if he had been charged as a juvenile, all those offenses would be sealed. We wouldn't know about them.

But this goes way, way back, Dave Mack. I mean, this guy's planning to kill and rape people all the way back seven years ago. Yeah, at the age of 17, he's writing on a bathroom wall his rape list, okay? At 17, he could have been tried as an adult for that type of a crime. And this is something we actually were talking about before we started the show, Nancy, because what can be done about somebody who, look, a normal person doesn't have a hit list? Well, it's the same thing as in the Parkland shooting. To Dr. Bethany Marshall, psychoanalyst joining me out of L.A., a former middle school classmate,

told the local paper that this guy, Betts, had an obsession with killing and death, and once told her he had fantasies about tying her up and slitting her throat this is in middle school she said she knew that he knew he the shooter knew it was not normal and talked about him getting help she and her parents told the bellbrook police what was going on and they all say they were not taken seriously. This guy would also do writings about all shall be annihilated, absolute carnage, bloody massacre. I mean, if that's not a red flag to steal Wendy Patrick's title of her book, I don't know what is. Well, Nancy, we have a term in the field. It's called catathymic homicide. And that's a fancy term to mean compulsion, that these men actually have a

compulsion to kill. And it's a compulsion that waxes and wanes over the lifespan until they actually commit the act. So when you take a compulsion, a compulsion at its very core is a buildup of feelings outside of awareness that can only be neutralized by an act. So some people, you know, compulsively want to have sex or binge and purge or shop. We're all familiar with the idea of what a compulsion is like, but in this case, the compulsion is to kill. And when somebody has a compulsion, there's a buildup of agitation, restlessness, there's an urgency to commit the act. And that's why as the panel is talking about, how do we detect these people? How do we stop them? You know, what are the red flags? You have to think of it in terms of a compulsion that is leaking out all over the place. So you start with their writings,

and you also start in their own homes. I do think that a diligent parent can know if their child has a compulsion to kill. You look at what they're writing, you look at what they're reading, you look at what they're talking about, you look at their Facebook accounts. It's going to be there, Nancy. People cannot hide compulsion. To Wendy Patrick, California prosecutor and author of the book on Amazon, Red Flags. You know, so often we hear, we didn't have a warning, there were no, quote, red flags. Here, in both of these cases, there are tons of red flags. Yeah. And you also, in addition to looking, you also listen to what they say. Part of the problem here is many of these people do talk about what they're feeling in terms of the compulsions. Sometimes we talk

about it being a pathway to violence. So the releasing pressure at the very end, sometimes it's totally logical to them. We say senseless violence makes perfect sense to them. So in order to figure out where they are along this pathway, and if we want to call it a compulsion, I like that too, because I think that really captures the buildup and it's the listening to the kids and taking it seriously. But then again, the problem at the end, Nancy, as many of us have talked about, is how do you then separate those from actually are suffering from this buildup of tension, from this compulsion, from those that are just talking, or maybe think this is somehow going to glamorize their existence and making themselves seem dangerous. It is that

that we need to pay most attention to as a threat assessment community, separating those two. Sometimes we say hunters and howlers. Hunters are the ones that we don't see coming. Howlers are the ones that make a lot of noise but don't actually graduate. To Karen Smith, forensic expert, founder of Bare Bones Consulting, what do you look for in the home, in their room, on manifestos, the drawings, sometimes they'll make drawings, they'll have notes, they'll have hidden places in their desk, in their closet, in boxes, anywhere inside. Their room is their hubble, their place where they plan, where they plot. So that, and I don't want to say treasure trove because it's not the appropriate thing, but that's what it is really. Forensics are going to go in there. They're going to find possibly, you know, research on guns, research on how to carry this out on the computers,

research on past shooters like we've heard from the experts on your show. All of these things come together, and they're going to do a top-to-bottom search. They're going to collect pretty much, I would think, boxes and bags of pretty much everything from this shooter's bedroom because I think every single thing in there is going to be a clue. To David Katz, founder, CEO of Global Security Group, active shooter response expert, former DEA, what, if anything, can we learn, David? Well, I mean, I keep going back to the same thing.

All the guests have made the really important points that we know these people, they tell us what they're going to do. The part we have to figure out that I don't know if we've not getting there yet is, okay, we have someone like this who at an early age in middle school has these fantasies, has these desires. We know people have, Dr. Bethany mentioned pathological narcissism. The Secret Service goes into that in detail, and there are some of their studies. Aggressive narcissism, they call it. We know these people exist. They are around other people who are terrified by them. But that doesn't lead us to, okay, now we know who they are.

They've made people uncomfortable, even frightened. How do we stop them? And that's the point that I think we need to grapple with because until we can stop these ticking time bombs, these incidents are going to replay, replay, replay, and we're going to be having this conversation ad infinitum. That's what we have to do. We have to figure out as a society how to interdict and not just respond.

At this hour, prayers go on for the victims and their families. Nancy Grace, Crime Stories, signing off. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.