My Brother Shot Two People at His High School. Here's What He Was Really Like.

This story is based on an interview with the editors of The Doe.

My brother and I have always been really close. Being born just two years before him, I don't have many memories of when he wasn’t here. He was always the sweeter out of us two—I was usually the one with an attitude and getting into trouble. He was really caring and loved making arts and crafts for people. He was very smart and did really well in school.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when he started having a hard time. At one point he started getting into smoking weed—which I think is wrong but not out of the ordinary for a teenager. Then he started getting into huge arguments with my mom and running away and trying to be really difficult on purpose. The first incident with a gun that I can remember was in the fall of 2021, a few months before I was supposed to go away for college. He posted something on social media that made it clear he had a weapon. The police came to our house and found that he had actually built a gun. He was put in a program that was supposed to help him, but, essentially, he got away with it.

From there, it just got worse. I think he began getting really comfortable and thinking, “Well, now I can kind of do whatever I want without having to face the consequences.” There was one big event that happened while I was away at college: My mom and my stepdad moved down South and they brought my brother and my older sister along with them. The night before they were supposed to leave, he was really upset. Which is understandable, because he had lived in the West his whole life. But usually he’s pretty mature through change, so it seemed random. Eventually they did all move down there, and my mom started my brother in an alternative school to help out students like him.

Things were going a little better for a while, until my mom noticed that my brother was ordering a bunch of packages in the mail. She looked through his closet and found that he had built another gun. He was extremely angry and he took the gun and pointed it at himself. He told my mom and my stepdad that if they didn’t leave him alone, he was going to kill himself. 

He was sent to a mental facility for a few weeks, but they told my mom that they didn’t really have a reason to keep him, that he didn’t seem suicidal. They said, “There's nothing to worry about. We’re not the type of place for him.” Which seems really weird, but he was good at bouncing back. He’d misbehave and then the next week he'll be back to his old self—doing amazingly in school, making everyone happy. So maybe when they evaluated him, they were like, “Oh, we don't see anything wrong. We think he can be sent back into normal society.”

There were opportunities to get him help. I think people were lazy and didn't want to deal with it.

Typically, Black men and boys are treated more harshly and given fewer chances for rehabilitation in comparison to other races. In my brother’s case, though, I think the people trying to help him knew that and therefore tried not to treat him more harshly because he was Black. They purposely did not punish him as much as he should have been.

Instead, he was prescribed some medicine and sent back home. The medicine did help for a while. He was really calm, but he also wasn’t himself. He was kind of just there and he wouldn't really interact with us. He'd be in his room all day and wouldn’t really laugh about anything. He  went through the motions of his day with no real personality. 

He didn't like how that medication made him feel, so he stopped taking it. One day, he told my mom that he wanted to go live with my dad back West. My dad has been in and out of our lives, so it was surprising that my brother wanted to go live with him. 

My dad said, “If you come with me, I'll give you a car and I'll let you have freedom and I'll treat you better.” He basically bribed him. I don’t think my dad realized the severity of the situation—I think he just wanted to be a cool parent. In the South, my mom didn’t allow him to have a car. He had a strict curfew. She was keeping an eye on him. Everyone tried to tell my dad, “This is not a good idea.” But at that point, my mom was really tired. She'd gone through a lot with my brother. Eventually she just said, “Okay, whatever. If you want to go, you can go.” So about a year ago, my brother moved back West to live with our dad.

That was the last time we saw my brother. There's a lot of things I don't know, but I do know that he wasn't being watched. He wasn't being punished. He wasn't being helped. Because of his past, a condition of him being able to go to his new high school out West was that he’d be checked for weapons every morning, which made complete sense. But other than that, he was left alone.

The day the incident happened, I was on the West coast, far away from my family. I had come back from class and I saw a missed call from my mom. She told me she had gotten a call from a woman who said my brother was “involved in a shooting.” Those are the words they used. They didn’t say if he’d shot someone or if he’d been shot.

Until you are that person that's dealing with a mental illness, it's really hard to judge.

Here’s what happened: He shot two deans who were checking him for weapons, and then he ran. [Editor's note: Both deans were taken to the hospital and survived the shooting.] It seems like it escalated because, that day, he refused to let them search him like they normally did. But we didn’t know any of that yet. I kept refreshing Google, and the hardest moment of that day was when I refreshed it and a picture of my brother popped up. It said, “This is the shooter. We're looking for him.” My brother was a minor—they didn’t even tell my mom before they released his photo.

I was a mess. I was crying out of shock, like I could not believe that my brother shot someone at school. Everyone had seen what he did and was posting about it. I don’t want to say it was embarrassing but…well, yeah, it was embarrassing. Then reality started to set in: I knew he was going to take his life after doing something like this. At nine o’clock at night, I got a call from my aunt and she told me they had found a body and they were pretty sure it was my brother’s.

I don't think anyone really knows what went on that day except for my brother and those two deans. When you think “school shooter,” you usually think of a white man rampaging through the school shooting students. I always thought of what happened with my brother as more of a shooting that happened to take place in a school. He did not harm or try to harm students. He was not bullied and was not trying to retaliate. That doesn’t make what he did any better, though, and it doesn’t tell us why he did it. It’s so hard to find a reason for any of it. He was going through stuff that no one will ever know. 

I think he needed a lot more help than they were giving him. He should have been sent to a long term facility. There were opportunities to get him help and show him that there are consequences, and I just think people were lazy and they didn't want to deal with it, or they were trying not to be unfairly hard on him because he was Black. 

Until you are that person that's dealing with a mental illness or whatever he was dealing with internally, it's really hard to judge. That being said, it was no one else's responsibility to make him do the right thing. It was my brother’s responsibility to stay out of trouble and take help when offered. He was 17. That's old enough to know right from wrong, to know you should not be taking a gun to school or shooting anybody. What he did only gives people who want to treat Black men like criminals more space to do so. 

Although I don't agree with what he did, he really was a good guy. He loved his family and he loved the people around him. There were so many people who loved him back. A few moments before he decided to kill himself, he left my sister a voicemail on her phone. It sounded like he was driving, and he said: “I’m sorry. I'm sorry that I had to do this. I love you, and I love everybody.”