freddy
.308 Win
Six days before he allegedly opened fire on an elementary school playground, the eighth-grader returned to his Instagram group chat to fixate, yet again, on his most intense interests: guns and bombs and the mass murder of children.
"My plan," wrote Jesse Osborne, who had turned 14 three weeks earlier, "is shooting my dad getting his keys getting in his truck, driving to the elementary school 4 mins away, once there gear up, shoot out the bottom school class room windows, enter the building, shoot the first class which will be the 2d grade, grab teachers keys so I don't have to hasle to get through any doors."
He had been researching other school shooters for months and, determined to outdo them, learned exactly how many people they'd murdered: 13 at Columbine High; 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary; 32 at Virginia Tech, reports The Washington Post.
"I think ill probably most likely kill around 50 or 60," Jesse declared. "If I get lucky maybe 150."
On Valentine's Day, at the same time police say another angry teen, Nikolas Cruz, slaughtered 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school with a semiautomatic AR-15, Jesse was sitting in a South Carolina courtroom, waiting to find out if he would be tried as an adult for a 2016 rampage that left his father and a 6-year-old dead.
The two teens have much in common. Both, investigators say, tortured animals, obsessed over guns and bragged of their deadly intentions on social media.
And in the hours after Cruz's alleged killing spree, as the nation began, once again, to ask why, a group of detectives, prosecutors and psychiatrists were providing answers about Jesse, now 15.
Nikolas Cruz, accused of murdering 17 people in the Florida high school shooting, appears in court for a status hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photo / AP
He'd detailed his motives in dozens of online messages, in his 46-page confession and in lengthy interviews with doctors who evaluated him, offering extraordinary insight into the mind of an American school shooter.
For Peter Langman, one of the country's leading experts on the subject, the teen's calculated approach and lack of empathy called to mind Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers Jesse idolized.
"The coldbloodedness, the callousness of the attack - not only before but afterwards," said Langman, who was not involved in the case but has reviewed Jesse's confession. "Even having done it, he's not struck with horror or guilt."
In fact, James Ballenger, a psychiatrist who interviewed Jesse for a total of nine hours, found that the teen reveled in what he'd done.
"He wants to talk about how dangerous he is," Ballenger testified. "He wanted people to know."
At the five-day hearing that began Feb. 12, prosecutors pushed for Jesse to be tried as an adult because if he remained in the juvenile system, he could only be held until age 21.
Jesse's defense team, meanwhile, tried to portray him as a lost but misunderstood child, alleging that he had been bullied by kids at school and mistreated by his father at home.
Jesse, who had grown up on his family's chicken farm, liked to shoot guns, but so did many boys his age in Townville, a rural community 40 miles southwest of Greenville.
He camped with his grandparents, whom he adored, and watched the movie "Frozen," one of his favorites. An avid reader of history, he told his family he wanted to fly to space when he grew up.
At odds with that portrait were Jesse's own words, captured in dozens of messages he'd exchanged in his private chat group, which the teen claimed included users from around the world.
"I HAVE TO BEAT ADAM LAZA . . .," he wrote nine days before the Sept. 28, 2016, shooting in a misspelled reference to the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. "Atleast 40."
Two days later, he debated whether he should attack his middle school, from which he'd been expelled, or his elementary school, just up the road. He decided on Townville Elementary, because it was closer and had no armed security.
Jesse, who considered himself the victim of an unfair world, announced online that he would kill kids he didn't know and had never met "before they bullie the nobodys."
"Itll be like shooting fish in a barrel," he wrote his friends, whose identities remain unclear, along with whether the FBI has tracked any of them down. The agency declined to comment, citing Jesse's open case.
In the chat, he said he had researched police response times for the area and found that it would take them 15 minutes to get there, and maybe 45 for SWAT. He said he would throw pipe bombs into each classroom before he got in a shootout with police and killed himself with his shotgun. He said he had been planning a massacre for two years.
A detective later discovered that Jesse, then a 6-foot-tall, 147-pound wispy-haired blond with a voice that tended to crack, had used his phone to Google these terms: "deadliest US mass shootings," "top 10 mass shooters," "youngest mass murderer," "10 youngest murderers in history."
Seven hours after he was pinned to the ground outside Townville Elementary by a volunteer firefighter, Jesse acknowledged in an interview with investigators that he'd shot far fewer kids than he'd intended.
The problem, he explained, was the weapon. He'd only had access to the .40 caliber pistol his father kept in a dresser drawer. It had jammed on the playground, just 12 seconds after he first pulled the trigger.
The weapon Jesse really wanted, the one he'd tried desperately to get, was, the teenager believed, locked in his father's gun safe: the Ruger Mini-14, a semiautomatic rifle much like the gun that, 17 months later, was fired again and again at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, during one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.
His obsession began, he said, with a song that mentioned Columbine.
Jesse wanted to know what it meant, so he asked his father, who told him about the April 20, 1999, attack that became a seminal moment in the evolution of modern mass shootings.
"And so I researched more," he said during his confession. "Then I looked up all these other ones."
Through much of his childhood, Jesse had seemed no different from any other kid in the Southern community of 4,000 people. Before he attacked Townville Elementary, Jesse had gone there through fifth grade, doing well in his classes and hardly ever getting into trouble. He played catcher on a rec-league baseball team. He got invited to birthday parties.
It wasn't until he moved to a middle school in a neighboring county that his "other side," as one psychiatrist put it, became clear. He pulled the legs off crickets and smashed frogs against the ground and habitually watched a video of kittens being mutilated.
He also posted Instagram videos about Columbine that some at the school considered a potential threat. The teen grew more volatile, insisting that he'd been bullied, a claim investigators later questioned.
After one kid poked his chest, Jesse threatened him.
"When I come back with a rifle, you're going to be the one I shoot," he recalled to Ballenger, who noted in court that Jesse "loved how much it scared the boy."
Then, one day, he brought a hatchet and a machete in his backpack. When another student spotted the weapons and reported him, Jesse was expelled and arrested, serving a brief stint in juvenile detention before being placed on probation.
It was then, as a home-schooler, that he became consumed with violent fantasies, the court evidence showed.
How much his parents knew about them remains unclear, but at least once, the couple came across Internet messages he'd written that they found disturbing, and his mother acknowledged to investigators that he'd become increasingly difficult to raise.
Jesse, whose older siblings had moved away, spent long stretches alone in his room, where he played first-person shooter games for hours and scoured the Internet for information on firearms.
Beneath one YouTube video reviewing guns, The Washington Post found that he'd asked about the quality of a Hi-Point 9mm Carbine, an affordable semiautomatic rifle.
In response to a question about gun licenses on another video, he wrote, "depends on your state. here in south caralina we dont need a lisense for anything except explosives or machine guns which are crazy expensive."
At least once, he commented on a video titled "Active Shooter in the School - Plans and Drills."
Jesse told police that he had also discovered the "true crime community" on Tumblr, where fans of serial killers and mass murderers gather to delight in their shared devotion.
Through that, his fascination with other school shooters, especially Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, bloomed. His Instagram username included "nbk," for the movie "Natural Born Killers," and "kmfdm," for a German industrial band - a pair of pop-culture references that appeared frequently in the writings of the Columbine killers.
The pair's influence over the past two decades has been enormous, said Langman. He noted that Jesse was at least the 33rd gunmen to cite Harris and Klebold as an influence.
"Knowing about a school shooter doesn't cause someone to become a school shooter," Langman once wrote. "For people already at risk or on a path toward violence, however, external influences in the form of other mass attacks may be a factor in spurring them on toward committing their own attack."
That was clearly true for Jesse, who mentioned Lanza and Harris in his messages and Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, in his confession.
On the morning of the shooting, he preloaded a magazine for his dad's handgun, writing to his chat group that he would soon "be on the news." When his dad, who Jesse accused with little evidence of being an abusive drunk, "started fussing" at the boy, he retrieved the pistol, came down stairs and shot his father in the back of the head.
He said goodbye to his dogs and gave his favorite rabbit, Floppy, a kiss, he told investigators, before putting on a vest, packed with more than a dozen extra rounds, and heading to the school, where he arrived at 1:41 p.m.
Inside the mind of school shooter Jesse Osborne
"My plan," wrote Jesse Osborne, who had turned 14 three weeks earlier, "is shooting my dad getting his keys getting in his truck, driving to the elementary school 4 mins away, once there gear up, shoot out the bottom school class room windows, enter the building, shoot the first class which will be the 2d grade, grab teachers keys so I don't have to hasle to get through any doors."
He had been researching other school shooters for months and, determined to outdo them, learned exactly how many people they'd murdered: 13 at Columbine High; 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary; 32 at Virginia Tech, reports The Washington Post.
"I think ill probably most likely kill around 50 or 60," Jesse declared. "If I get lucky maybe 150."
On Valentine's Day, at the same time police say another angry teen, Nikolas Cruz, slaughtered 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school with a semiautomatic AR-15, Jesse was sitting in a South Carolina courtroom, waiting to find out if he would be tried as an adult for a 2016 rampage that left his father and a 6-year-old dead.
The two teens have much in common. Both, investigators say, tortured animals, obsessed over guns and bragged of their deadly intentions on social media.
And in the hours after Cruz's alleged killing spree, as the nation began, once again, to ask why, a group of detectives, prosecutors and psychiatrists were providing answers about Jesse, now 15.
Nikolas Cruz, accused of murdering 17 people in the Florida high school shooting, appears in court for a status hearing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photo / AP
He'd detailed his motives in dozens of online messages, in his 46-page confession and in lengthy interviews with doctors who evaluated him, offering extraordinary insight into the mind of an American school shooter.
For Peter Langman, one of the country's leading experts on the subject, the teen's calculated approach and lack of empathy called to mind Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers Jesse idolized.
"The coldbloodedness, the callousness of the attack - not only before but afterwards," said Langman, who was not involved in the case but has reviewed Jesse's confession. "Even having done it, he's not struck with horror or guilt."
In fact, James Ballenger, a psychiatrist who interviewed Jesse for a total of nine hours, found that the teen reveled in what he'd done.
"He wants to talk about how dangerous he is," Ballenger testified. "He wanted people to know."
At the five-day hearing that began Feb. 12, prosecutors pushed for Jesse to be tried as an adult because if he remained in the juvenile system, he could only be held until age 21.
Jesse's defense team, meanwhile, tried to portray him as a lost but misunderstood child, alleging that he had been bullied by kids at school and mistreated by his father at home.
Jesse, who had grown up on his family's chicken farm, liked to shoot guns, but so did many boys his age in Townville, a rural community 40 miles southwest of Greenville.
He camped with his grandparents, whom he adored, and watched the movie "Frozen," one of his favorites. An avid reader of history, he told his family he wanted to fly to space when he grew up.
At odds with that portrait were Jesse's own words, captured in dozens of messages he'd exchanged in his private chat group, which the teen claimed included users from around the world.
"I HAVE TO BEAT ADAM LAZA . . .," he wrote nine days before the Sept. 28, 2016, shooting in a misspelled reference to the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. "Atleast 40."
Two days later, he debated whether he should attack his middle school, from which he'd been expelled, or his elementary school, just up the road. He decided on Townville Elementary, because it was closer and had no armed security.
Jesse, who considered himself the victim of an unfair world, announced online that he would kill kids he didn't know and had never met "before they bullie the nobodys."
"Itll be like shooting fish in a barrel," he wrote his friends, whose identities remain unclear, along with whether the FBI has tracked any of them down. The agency declined to comment, citing Jesse's open case.
In the chat, he said he had researched police response times for the area and found that it would take them 15 minutes to get there, and maybe 45 for SWAT. He said he would throw pipe bombs into each classroom before he got in a shootout with police and killed himself with his shotgun. He said he had been planning a massacre for two years.
A detective later discovered that Jesse, then a 6-foot-tall, 147-pound wispy-haired blond with a voice that tended to crack, had used his phone to Google these terms: "deadliest US mass shootings," "top 10 mass shooters," "youngest mass murderer," "10 youngest murderers in history."
Seven hours after he was pinned to the ground outside Townville Elementary by a volunteer firefighter, Jesse acknowledged in an interview with investigators that he'd shot far fewer kids than he'd intended.
The problem, he explained, was the weapon. He'd only had access to the .40 caliber pistol his father kept in a dresser drawer. It had jammed on the playground, just 12 seconds after he first pulled the trigger.
The weapon Jesse really wanted, the one he'd tried desperately to get, was, the teenager believed, locked in his father's gun safe: the Ruger Mini-14, a semiautomatic rifle much like the gun that, 17 months later, was fired again and again at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, during one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.
His obsession began, he said, with a song that mentioned Columbine.
Jesse wanted to know what it meant, so he asked his father, who told him about the April 20, 1999, attack that became a seminal moment in the evolution of modern mass shootings.
"And so I researched more," he said during his confession. "Then I looked up all these other ones."
Through much of his childhood, Jesse had seemed no different from any other kid in the Southern community of 4,000 people. Before he attacked Townville Elementary, Jesse had gone there through fifth grade, doing well in his classes and hardly ever getting into trouble. He played catcher on a rec-league baseball team. He got invited to birthday parties.
It wasn't until he moved to a middle school in a neighboring county that his "other side," as one psychiatrist put it, became clear. He pulled the legs off crickets and smashed frogs against the ground and habitually watched a video of kittens being mutilated.
He also posted Instagram videos about Columbine that some at the school considered a potential threat. The teen grew more volatile, insisting that he'd been bullied, a claim investigators later questioned.
After one kid poked his chest, Jesse threatened him.
"When I come back with a rifle, you're going to be the one I shoot," he recalled to Ballenger, who noted in court that Jesse "loved how much it scared the boy."
Then, one day, he brought a hatchet and a machete in his backpack. When another student spotted the weapons and reported him, Jesse was expelled and arrested, serving a brief stint in juvenile detention before being placed on probation.
It was then, as a home-schooler, that he became consumed with violent fantasies, the court evidence showed.
How much his parents knew about them remains unclear, but at least once, the couple came across Internet messages he'd written that they found disturbing, and his mother acknowledged to investigators that he'd become increasingly difficult to raise.
Jesse, whose older siblings had moved away, spent long stretches alone in his room, where he played first-person shooter games for hours and scoured the Internet for information on firearms.
Beneath one YouTube video reviewing guns, The Washington Post found that he'd asked about the quality of a Hi-Point 9mm Carbine, an affordable semiautomatic rifle.
In response to a question about gun licenses on another video, he wrote, "depends on your state. here in south caralina we dont need a lisense for anything except explosives or machine guns which are crazy expensive."
At least once, he commented on a video titled "Active Shooter in the School - Plans and Drills."
Jesse told police that he had also discovered the "true crime community" on Tumblr, where fans of serial killers and mass murderers gather to delight in their shared devotion.
Through that, his fascination with other school shooters, especially Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, bloomed. His Instagram username included "nbk," for the movie "Natural Born Killers," and "kmfdm," for a German industrial band - a pair of pop-culture references that appeared frequently in the writings of the Columbine killers.
The pair's influence over the past two decades has been enormous, said Langman. He noted that Jesse was at least the 33rd gunmen to cite Harris and Klebold as an influence.
"Knowing about a school shooter doesn't cause someone to become a school shooter," Langman once wrote. "For people already at risk or on a path toward violence, however, external influences in the form of other mass attacks may be a factor in spurring them on toward committing their own attack."
That was clearly true for Jesse, who mentioned Lanza and Harris in his messages and Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, in his confession.
On the morning of the shooting, he preloaded a magazine for his dad's handgun, writing to his chat group that he would soon "be on the news." When his dad, who Jesse accused with little evidence of being an abusive drunk, "started fussing" at the boy, he retrieved the pistol, came down stairs and shot his father in the back of the head.
He said goodbye to his dogs and gave his favorite rabbit, Floppy, a kiss, he told investigators, before putting on a vest, packed with more than a dozen extra rounds, and heading to the school, where he arrived at 1:41 p.m.
Inside the mind of school shooter Jesse Osborne
