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.
“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, Fla., high school with a semiautomatic AR-15, Jesse was sitting in a South Carolina courtroom, waiting to find out whether 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 murders, as the nation began, once again, to ask why, a group of detectives, prosecutors and psychiatrists were providing answers about Jesse, now 15. 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 grew 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 one day.
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.
A Townville Elementary student sobs as she and her classmates are driven to a local church after the shooting on the playground on Sept. 28, 2016. (Katie McLean/AP)“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, 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, 17months later, was fired again and again at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, during one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
[Read the transcript of Jesse Osborne’s confession]
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