commentary by Patrick H. Moore
We all have folks that we look up to. In some cases, that respect may evolve into adulation and the desire to emulate. For example, how many latter-day schoolboy rock musicians grew up admiring giants such as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton? The answer is: lots of them. As a fledgling singer-songwriter, in my youth, I admired Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Van “the Man” Morrison. I still do today though my admiration is no longer white-hot.
In the case of John LaDue, the 17-year-old Minnesota wannabe mass murderer, it’s too bad that his natural teenage desire to find and acknowledge heroes was not limited to guitar greats.
He certainly appears to have had a least a modicum of talent and was apparently considered a friendly, albeit shy, kid.
“John was normal in every aspect,” his guitar teacher, Ryan Lano, told the Star-Tribune. “He loved music and his guitar and did really well. He was polite and said thank you after every lesson.”
Although apparently no one has come forward with the names of the musicians LaDue admired, we know precisely which mass school murderers this enigmatic fellow looked up to.
His 180-page “Mass Murderer in the Making” journal is full of details from other school massacres like Sandy Hook and Columbine and it reveals how much LaDue revered Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. And, we should not overlook the fact that Klebold and Harris cut rather rakish adolescent figures with their cool hair and clothes and generally anti attitude.
Maybe it’s a good thing LaDue wasn’t way cool and with it in attitude and appearance – if he had been it’s entirely possible that Chelsie Schellhas, the mother who turned him in after spotting him crossing her backyard somewhat mysteriously on his way to his storage unit carrying a backpack, might have thought he was simply the slightly weird loner with the good hair that nobody could quite figure out and that crossing her backyard on his way to the storage unit carrying a backpack was just the sort of thing weird cool kids did to be different.
Officers nabbed the unhinged 11th-grader Tuesday after a tipster reported seeing LaDue skulking in and out of a storage unit where he kept many of his materials.
The caller, Chelsie Schellhas, told the Star-Tribune she had been washing dishes when she looked up and spotted the teen lugging a backpack through her backyard.
“He walked through the puddles when there was a perfectly good road he could have walked on,” she told the newspaper.
“It just didn’t seem right to me because we see people come and go with their trucks, and they don’t come on foot and cut through people’s back yards. It was like he was blatantly trying not to be seen.”
Schellhas said she called the cops after LaDue took a long time opening the unit, leading her to believe he was breaking in.
Three cops found LaDue at the unit at about 7:30 p.m.
A search of the storage unit revealed ammunition boxes, explosive chemicals, a pressure-cooker, steel ball bearings and gunpowder.
It is reported that the 11th-grader said he planned to go to Waseca Junior and Senior High School during lunchtime, where he would toss Molotov cocktails and explode pressure-cooker bombs.
LaDue later told police he would have shot at the officers if he had a gun on him.
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During a press conference Thursday, Waseca Police Capt. Kris Markeson said LaDue was “fully prepared” to carry out the massacre at Waseca Junior and Senior High School and had amassed an arsenal of bombs, assault rifles, handguns and ammo, the Mankato Free Press reported.
Capt. Markeson said that he believes LaDue would have carried out his murderous plot “just because of the amount of preparation and thought he put into this.”
Pat Pfeiffer of the Star Tribune writes:
LaDue had reportedly planned and practiced for 10 months, refining the chemicals in his bombs to try to find a more lethal combination. He set off “practice bombs” on various playgrounds. Some of those bombs were found in March, raising concerns.
The criminal complaint said LaDue told police that he originally planned the attack for April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre that killed 13 people in Littleton, Colo., in 1999.
That was thwarted because that day was Easter Sunday and there was no school.
Markeson said police believe the attack would have happened “within the next few weeks” if it hadn’t been for an alert 911 caller who grew suspicious after she saw a tall, white male wearing a backpack open a storage unit, go inside and close the door.
During the search, the following items turned up:
three completed bombs,
an SKS assault rifle,
a Beretta 9-mm handgun,
hundreds of rounds of ammo and
a safe with several other guns.
In chilling detail, a notebook detailed the plan:
first he would kill his parents and
then he would start a fire in a rural area outside of town to distract first responders.
And of course the obligatory Murderer’s Handbook, in this case a 180-page journal dedicated to his Colorado heroes and the events they spawned and participated in — Sandy Hook and Columbine.
Locals in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca were either nonplussed or scared. His guitar teacher described John LaDue as a polite boy who did well in school and had plenty of friends.
“It’s just too scary to put in words,” said a local Waseca parent to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
“Everybody in town feels sick to their stomach. Scared,” said the mother, who didn’t want her name used. “There were tears today.”
As the photos of the boy began to trickle out Thursday, the whole thing seemed unlikely yet all too real. He appeared to be a typical Minnesota teen who liked deer hunting and playing the guitar. In one photo he’s posing with a gun and what appears to be a live deer.
LaDue was apparently good at hiding the kiss of death that had invaded his being. He was described as a nice kid, on the shy side, who got good grades and had plenty of friends,“normal in every aspect.”
LaDue is being held at a juvenile facility in Red Wing.
The felony charges include attempted murder and bomb possession. The authorities believe that he sought to spill the blood of “as many students as he could.”
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What was once simply unfathomably bad is now an unfathomably bad habit. “Monkey see, monkey do” reigns supreme among a small number of supremely disaffected youth. There could be one of these lethal specimens in any of our towns. The curse of Klebold and Harris has infected their acolytes; Lanza was the most successful among them.
LaDue was infected by this curse.
What is fascinating is the way these peculiar anti-social beings, whose inclination seems to be to hate both themselves and others, are in a sense compelled to follow a long slow trajectory of building up to the supreme sacrifice of the mass killing. It takes time to build the arsenal piece by treasured piece. This peculiar fetishistic aspect of the mass killer’s vision is evident as he constructs his plan brick-by-brick – in his mind and on his computer and in his Handbook, and most importantly, in his collection of instruments of human destruction.
LaDue’s plan was approaching its climax but it was stopped because a woman in her kitchen tipped off the police that a suspicious looking fellow was crossing her backyard walking through the mud buddles carrying a backpack on his way to the storage facility. This was a lucky break for everyone and in a sense it was lucky for LaDue also. Despite everything, there is no blood on his hands.