Calif. School Shooter Said Traumatized by Bullying

3/16/01

A former girlfriend of Charles Andrew Williams, the Santana High School student who opened fire at his Santee, Calif., school, said the 15-year-old was traumatized by bullying, Reuters reported March 8.

According to Kathleen Seek, before Williams moved to California from his home in rural Maryland, he was popular and had a lot of friends. Seek described Williams as gentle and thoughtful.

"He was an excellent young man. He stuck out for anyone who was hurting. If you were down he would ask what was wrong. He would put himself in a position to look stupid just so that someone could smile, so that someone could be happy," said Seek. She added, "Everyone loved him. You didn't have a reason not to. You couldn't help but love him."

Her description of Williams was much different than the image of a boy who opened fire in his California high school, killing two students and wounding 13 others. Reports indicate that students at Santana teased Williams about his slender physique, often calling him a "freak," "dork," and a "nerd."

"He was different. They didn't take the time to get to know him," said Seek. "They just accused him of being some kind of person he wasn't. He's a good guy." Seek's mother, Mary Nederlander, added, "Andy was a joy to everyone. He was on the football team. He had an unbelievable amount of friends. He just has a gentle, kind heart. The person I saw on TV in the police car was empty. That wasn't the boy who came and ate dinner at our house and called me mom."

While she could not excuse Williams for shooting his classmates, Nederlander said his actions may have been a result of the pain he was in over the constant teasing.

"He e-mailed us and told us that he just wanted to come home and that it was just awful over there. They were teasing him, calling him 'country boy.' He didn't dress right; he didn't look right. He was skinny, they called him gay," she said. "He was under a lot of mental torture and just wanted to come home. When he visited for summer, he stood in my house and he cried and said he did not want to go back to California because of all the teasing and the ridicule he was feeling," Nederlander added.

Commentary: White People in Denial over School Shootings

4/4/01

In a March 6 commentary in AlterNet, Tim Wise, a Nashville, Tenn.-based writer and activist, wrote that white people "live in an utter state of self-delusion" when it comes to school shootings. Wise made his comments after the latest school shooting where two white children were killed and 13 injured by a student gunman at Santana High School in Santee, Calif.

"I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I'll say it again: white people live in an utter state of self-delusion," wrote Wise. "We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from 'those people' in the cities we'll be safe. If we can just find an 'all-American' town, life will be better, because 'things like this just don't happen here.'"

Wise noted in his commentary that while there is a significant amount of violence in urban communities and schools, "mass murder; wholesale slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities."

He continued, "And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no 'profile' of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass-shooting category), decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful."

Wise stated that if a black child talked about murdering someone or was involved in the recent school shootings, "you can bet that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops would have beat a pathto their doorstep." Yet, he added, "When whites discuss their murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to ignore it -- they're just 'talking' and won't really do anything. How many kids have to die before we rethink that nonsense? How many dazed and confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we have to listen to, describing how 'normal' and safe their community is, and how they just can't understand what went wrong?"

Wise said he believes what went wrong in the recent school shootings is not related to TV, rap music, video games, or a lack of prayer in school.. "What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long," he stated. He added, "What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us." As a result of the Santana High School shooting, Wise said he hopes "people would wake up. Take note. Rethink their stereotypes of who the dangerous ones are."

He concluded, "But deep down, I know better. The folks hitting the snooze button on this none-too-subtle alarm are my own people, after all, and I know their blindness like the back of my hand."