He was Almost a School Shooter. What Stopped Him?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: We’re going to turn to America’s gun violence epidemic, with our next guest providing a unique perspective inside the mind of a potential school shooter. Aaron Stark was stopped from committing that horrific act 25 years ago as a teenager, revealing why in an article for “The Washington Post.” Today, he’s a mental health advocate and consultant for those contemplating suicide. To discuss his past and what can be done to prevent these attacks, Aaron joins Michel Martin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Bianna. Aaron, thank you so much for talking with us.

AARON STARK, WRITER AND PUBLIC SPEAKER: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: You wrote this incredible piece back in February of 2018, saying that you could have been a school shooter yourself. What possessed you to write that piece? What encouraged you to speak out in that way?

STARK: It was the shooting in Parkland High School that gave me the impetus to come out with my story. The day after the shooting, me and my wife and my oldest daughter, we were watching the news. And we were watching a report specifically of a reporter asking a kid who has just left the school — I believe they still had blood on them from the shooting. And the reporter was asking, how do you feel? And, to me, that was the most dehumanizing and depersonalizing thing. They were just turning that victim into a commodity. And it really — it made me — I went to the back of my house, and I wrote literally a Facebook post. And in that, I came out with my story.

MARTIN: Talk me through it. What brought you to the point where you could envision killing your classmates? You wrote this in 2018 that the two places you thought to go were a school or a mall food court. And, as we are speaking now, just recently, a young man with a high-powered weapon tried to kill a bunch of people, in fact, did kill some people at a mall food court. And this, of course, was just days after another devastating shooting at the school in Uvalde, Texas. So what is it that brought you to that point where you had so much rage that you wanted to kill people you didn’t even know?

STARK: Well, I was — I grew up in a really violent and aggressive house. From early on, from my birth to about 5, I describe it living like a Stephen King movie, really extreme violence, every kind of abuse you can imagine, very nomadic lifestyle. And then, after that, when my — when we left my birth father and got my stepdad, it moved from Stephen King to “Scarface.” So it went from extreme violence to crack cocaine and crime and stealing. And growing up, I went to about 40 different schools. We moved every six months or so. Every couple of months, I’d be — we would get evicted or run from the authorities, or a social worker would try to intervene, and we would escape. I was always the new kid growing up, always had a new set of bullies at every new school I went to. I was dirty and smelly. And as a young kid, growing up in that toxic environment, I really adapted that as my personality. And I became toxic myself. Really early on, when I was about 9, 10 years old, I became just offensive and disgusting. And I was a very toxic young kid. And that got me bullied. And I was bullied when I was growing up. And then, as I became a teen, I became the bully. And I decided that, if I’m the worthless one, and everybody in my life tells me I’m worthless, then I’m going to be the best worthless one I can be, and I will show you what a monster is. And I was 15 years old. I was homeless, had been homeless for a couple of months at the time, was sleeping in my friend’s shed. And I was — had been — it was middle of the night. I was cutting myself so bad, a pool of blood was forming underneath me. And I thought, I have to get help. I’m at the bottom. So I tried to get myself to help with social services, called social services on myself. They had tried to intervene a couple of times in my life. And they were the reason why we had left a couple of houses, so I knew that might be a source to go to. And when I to social services, they not only brought me in, but they brought my mom in, who was my — one of my biggest abusers in my life. And that time, even though I produced a bloody razor blade, and I told them that the reason I was there was that I was — felt like I was nothing and I felt like I was worthless, I was at the bottom, they believed my mom in saying that I was just doing it for attention, that I was just making it all up. And then they sent me home with her. And when they sent me home with her, her response was to tell me that I should have done a better job, and, next time, she will buy the razor blades. So that — that sent me on a year, what I called my scorched earth time. For about the next nine months, I was just burning down every bit of support that I had, every positive thing. And after about nine months of destroying every positive relationship I had in my world, anybody that was nice to me, I was going to prove to you that you shouldn’t be. And I tried for help — to get help again. I was at the bottom again, tried to go to social services one more time, thinking that, if I didn’t — I warned them last time, and that was toxic. So, this time, I’m just going to show up. And so I went to a place that just said mental health on the sign. And I don’t really remember that conversation, because all I remember is the end of it. And that is when the young lady who saw me said: “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t help you.” And as I walked out of that door, my brain just shattered. And I discovered what was under that tsunami of anger. When you finally go underneath all that pain, it gets really quiet and it gets really still, because when you don’t really have anything left to lose, then you don’t have anything left to care about.

MARTIN: Where did the idea of getting a gun and shooting a bunch of people come from? Like, had you seen that somewhere? Or how did that come to you?

STARK: I didn’t really have friends at the time, but I had people around me. And I called them — I call them now disaster groupies. We were people who — kids around me that kind of wanted to live vicariously through my damage. It was basically like an in person YouTube group or a social media group where it was just like they would push me further into the dark to see how far I would go. And in that group, while I was homeless living and hanging out with those friends, instead of talking about girls or sports or movies, so we would talk about killing people. And we would talk about, if you’re going to kill 10 people, what would you do? If you were going to shoot up a school, what would you do? And it was just like the fiction of the group. It was — it was our version of, like, a dark fantasy football. And when I hit that spot where my brain shattered, all the plans just crystallized. I knew what I was going to do. I had already planned it all out. I was going to go either through the school, the doors to the food court or to the mall food court. And the only difference of that would have been the time of day I got the weapon. And…

MARTIN: Why there? Why were those your two choices? I mean, school, I guess, because that was kind of one of the sources of pain for you, is that that’s where the bullies were? Like, why those…

STARK: Honestly — honestly, it wasn’t — neither one of those places where because of the bullies. I hadn’t really been at the school long enough to acquire that many bullies from that particular school. It had — it was really that my goal was to cause immense damage and destruction and make my parents deal with creating me. I wanted to make them deal with making a monster. And the school and the mall were both ripe targets, in the sense that I could cause mass damage and at the same time die by suicide by cop, because neither of those locations were what we consider soft targets. There were armed — uniformed officers stationed in the school at all times. And in the mall, there was literally a police station like four or five doors down from the food court. That was just part of my plan. I was planning on committing the act and then dying by suicide by cop.

MARTIN: Why is that what you wanted? Did you think that would, like, take the pain away, or what? You wanted to — why is that what you wanted?

(CROSSTALK)

STARK: I don’t think taking the pain away was even an option in my reality. I felt invisible when I was at that age. I felt like when I was — between like 13 and 16, I would literally ask the people I was around, do you remember me when I leave the room? If I walk away, do you know who I am? And I thought I was invisible. I thought that I was the worthless one. When I would stand up off a couch, I thought people would walk back on me and scrub the spot that I was — would get off up, because it was so filthy, and that I was — I was like a void. And, at that moment, when I was in my darkest spot, I didn’t feel human. I felt absolutely inhuman. I felt like I was just destruction, like I was — I had lost all sense of humanity. And, in that time — so, I walked out of that room with my brain shattered. I’m — all the plans crystallized. And part of that plan was, I knew where to get a weapon, because there was gangbangers that — it was mid-’90s. Gangs were really prevalent. And there were some gangbangers that brought guns to school all the time. They would flash handguns and stuff at school. And they would talk about having rifles. And they sold drugs to my family. They knew me. And so I walked up to him and said, hey, can you get me a gun, hopefully one that shoots a lot of bullets? And the guy’s like, yes, sure, get me an ounce of weed. And that was the easiest part of the whole thing, because I just walked in my mom’s house, stole an ounce of marijuana off the druggie sleeping off her floor and one of my brother’s friends and took it to him.

MARTIN: Why — forgive me, but why — you had the means. You had the motivation. But you didn’t do it. And, obviously, we’re all really thankful that you didn’t, but why didn’t you?

STARK: Because, in that time, after I had planned to get the gun, I went on what I thought — I didn’t look at it now, but, at the time, I was saying goodbye. I was giving away my belongings and kind of closing off relationships in a much more peaceful way than before. I wasn’t being antagonistic. I was just kind of closing off friendships. And, during that time, I went to my friend Mike’s house. And I met Mike when I was 12 years old. He was 10. We bonded over comic books. He had the exact opposite life that I had. He had a very loving family, very supportive. They — his parents still live in that house to this day. They — it was — his dreams were very encouraged. He got read into all the clubs he went — loved. And any activity he got into, he was encouraged, very, very loving and stable house. And over the years, he was my home base. So, when I was moving, nomadic and moving from place to place and living on the streets, he never moved. So his place was like home base. So when I was in my darkest spot, when I was homeless and living in the fields and living on free samples, I would live in his shed. That’s the night when I went to school services was from his shed. So, in that time, I went and knocked on his door. And I was saying goodbye. And he opened up and saw me, and he didn’t know what I was planning, but he saw the pain that I was in. And he knew the hell that I had been living in. And he brought me in and treated me like I was a person. And I was absolutely inhuman at the time. I was nothing but destruction and death. And he treated me like I was just a kid in pain. And he brought me in. And we had food. Gave me a shower. And he would tell me always I’m a good kid in a crap world, is what he would say. And I stayed with him during that time. Being treated like a person when you don’t feel like a human will literally change your world. And it was the most powerful thing that ever happened to me. And he’s still my best friend to this day. He’s still uncle to my kids. So, today, I’m a happy family man, father of four.

MARTIN: You have given us so much to think about, but is it really that that one intervention at the right time was enough to keep you from killing people?

STARK: It really was. At the time, everybody else in my world, every other person I was encountering, I was either a monster or a project. I was either something to be feared or something to be fixed. I wasn’t a person at all to anybody. And I — even to myself, I was just not — I wasn’t human. And being reminded that that pain is temporary, and that I was actually a good person all the time, I was just dealing with this massive amount of trauma that I had been going through. And, at the time, I still — I didn’t see it. It took years of personal recovery to fully get out of that depression. But Mike at — in that moment, he diverted it, and it went from an outward kind of push to — it was really much — a lot like a splash of cold water. It was like the grounding. It was like resetting the clock back to being a person.

MARTIN: If you had been able to get your hands on a gun — I mean, you said at one point you could have gotten a gun from one of your gang- involved associates at school, right? You — did you actually get it?

STARK: I didn’t. My — going to Mike’s house, I was set to get the gun in three days. I stayed at his house for about a week-and-a-half. I never ended up going and getting the gun.

MARTIN: If you had been able to get your hands on a gun when you were in that heightened state, right, would you have used it?

STARK: Yes. Yes. The incident would have been in my hands. I would have used it. That was — it would have just been the tool of destruction. And, mind you, this is in ’96. So this is pre-Columbine. The pain and destruction was still there. It’s — the guns, I believe, are just the tool that we use now because it’s — you can cause the most damage with it. Like, for example, we have these couple of recent school shootings, and I see a lot of parallels in my story with the most recent ones, specifically the ones in Uvalde and this last one in Highland Park. I see a lot of similarities. The story of the kid in Uvalde, seems like he went down almost exactly my path. Like, it looks like he spent his early years in a very abusive, restrictive and oppressive house, with a lot of aggression and violence in the home. And then that turned to where he became toxic, and adopted that as his persona. And even right before his shooting, he showed up to the school a couple weeks before with his face covered and slice marks, just razor marks cutting his face, from the reports I heard. That is like the most visible sign of, I’m hurting myself, someone, see it. And that — none of that’s an excuse. It’s not an excuse for any of the destruction whatsoever. It’s not whatsoever to excuse that. But it is the reason why that slide happens. And it’s more just to look at the slide itself, that that’s the path that we go down, that you start with self- loathing and self-hatred. You end up metastasizing that to your own personality, and then expressing that to the world, because, when you think you’re worthless, you’re going to do everything you can to make the world agree with you.

MARTIN: Guns, getting access to these kinds of guns, on the one hand, people are saying, look, there are a lot of people with pain all over the world, but, in the United States, we allow people to pick up a high-powered — a battlefield weapon and kill a bunch of people at once.

STARK: Yes.

MARTIN: And the obvious answer, people say was, make it harder to get these guns or don’t sell these guns to civilians at all. And other people say, well, it’s not the gun, it’s not the gun that — it’s the people. What do you say to that?

STARK: I personally believe that, when people argue about these two topics, they use the term gun control and then mental health as a kind of catchalls for each side. And I really believe that those terms are diversionary to the extreme. So, if you say gun control, you get lost in the minutiae of the details. You get lost. Is that a bump stock? Is that — what kind of emission is that? Is that an assault rifle? And you lose sight of the fact that the goal of the argument is, you want to keep weapons that can kill a lot of people out of the hands of someone like I was 20 years — 25 years ago. That’s the goal. And there — and if you get lost in the specifics, or you try to find a panacea that is a fix-all for all of it, then you’re not going to make any progress. The perfect is the enemy of good. And so, if we can’t — people always want to have the law that, well, if that’s not going to solve all school shootings, then we can’t fix — we can’t do it. It’s not going to stop all school shootings. It might only stop one, but one has to be enough. And we have to start somewhere. And we have the same problem with mental health. People say that we have a mental health issue. Well, what does that mean? It’s this big, gray, oblique thing, and you can’t really wrap your hands around it. And so you get lost into that haze of what mental health is. So, instead of mental health, it’s, I was depressed and abused and alone, and I felt like I was worthless. And I believe that, if we can move past the bumper sticker slogans and get into the specifics of the details, then I think that we can find a common ground, because there really has to be a common ground, specifically on the assault weapons, that there has to be a gun a way that we can understand that the adult hunter who owns a bunch of rifles isn’t the one that we’re talking about. You aren’t the problem. The problem is the teenager who thinks that blowing up the world is how he’s going to fix himself.

MARTIN: And, to that end, it’s become fashionable in law enforcement and, frankly, in the media to sort of make this big thing, like, we’re not going to say the name of the shooter, because all they want is notoriety, right? And you’re saying, that’s just wrong.

STARK: I completely believe that’s wrong. I think that there’s not a single one that I have seen — and I have been studying a lot of these school shooters. There’s not a single one that I have seen that wanted to have what we consider fame, that wanted to be Instagram famous or have a YouTube channel or have a bunch of followers. They don’t want that. They want to be seen. However, right now, we do have a bizarre phenomenon where we have the mirror social economy going on. We have a negative social world happening at the moment. Back in the day when I was a kid going to school, when I would bounce from school to school, I would have bullies at every school. I would have five or six bullies on one side, but I would have three or four kids and so there had to be a kind of a counterbalance, OK? So — and in real-life terms, that’s always how it shakes out. You always have more bullies than not, but you end up having a kind of a counterbalance in-person saying, hey, leave that kid alone. OK, but now we have social media. And on social media, we have groups that are going to tell the kid how to be a bully, then how to be a better bully, and then give them rewards for being the best bully. And so, at the heart of it, the kid has been searching the entire time for someone to tell them that they’re OK. I really believe, at the heart of it, that we all want for someone to hold us and tell us that we’re OK. And if the person saying that we’re OK is saying, to be OK, you have to be a terror (ph), then you’re going to be terror (ph).

MARTIN: One of the things he said they really got my attention was that there was always a counter balancing force. Yes, there were five or six bullies, but you said there were always like three or four kids who are counter balancing that. I don’t think we hear that story very often. Is there any way that those kids can be uplifted and given the place that they deserve in helping to intervene in situations like that?

STARK: Absolutely, there is. And honestly, in those times, those were some of the most — the little tiny islands of positivity in the ocean of destruction I was living in when I was a small kid, where those kids who, when I would go to a school, they would see me as just a regular kid. You will never know how much impact a simple, hey, how are you doing, can have on somebody who the rest of their world they’re just viewed as a monster or as a birth (ph). Instead of looking at that kid like he is a threat, instead of saying, that kid who is dark and smelly, watch out, he might be a threat, he might shoot up a school. All that is going to do is push them further out into the dark. That’s going to tell that kid that he thinks he’s worthless and thinks he’s nothing, that he’s right. And you need to — we need to break that cycle and remind them that they’re not, that that’s just a phase. That the chaos they’re in is going to pass. And that, eventually, they are going to make it to the light at the end of the tunnel. They can exist in this pain. It’s intense and it’s hard, but they can make it through it.

MARTIN: Aaron Stark, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your story with us. So, thank you.

STARK: Thank you. I really appreciate that. To everybody else listening, just give love to the ones you feel deserve it the least, because they need it the most.