Filed under: News
When 17-year-old Robert Butler killed Vice-Principal Vicki Kaspar, and critically wounded Principal Curtis Case, his motive was unclear.
Police have since discovered that he was suspended from school that morning, after driving his car on the school's football field and track New Year's Day.
Yes, a woman was murdered in cold blood for suspending an errant student.After calmly accepting the suspension, the troubled teen went home to speak with his father and friends. Waiting until his father, a detective with the Omaha Police Department, left home, Butler stole his father's service weapon, a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, from the closet and returned to the school to exact revenge.
Butler was called out of class at 8:10 a.m. Wednesday to meet with Assistant Principal Vicki Kaspar. He didn't show any signs of violence as he was calmly escorted out of the school at 9:23 a.m., police said:
"He wasn't acting like an out-of-control student at all," Police Chief Alex Hayes said.
As the story unfolded yesterday, Butler was painted as a seemingly innocent, "normal" student who was well-liked by everyone. Now it has been revealed that he was having disciplinary problems in Lincoln where he resided with his mother, who is divorced from Butler's father and remarried, Hayes said.
According to a statement given to police by Detective Butler, his son did not seem angry or overly concerned by his suspension, which, according to Superintendent Keith Lutz, could not have been longer than 19 days:
"He was disappointed with the discipline, but he wasn't acting angry," Hayes said.
Waiting until his father left home to run errands, Butler broke in to the locked garage (where his car had been kept since the athletic field incident) stole the car, then posted a heart-wrenching status to his Facebook page, apologizing to his friends, family and families of his intended victims in advance for his "evil" actions.
"When we, as police officers, leave our houses, we do not expect our children to commit crimes like this," Hayes said.
Butler returned to the school at 12:45 p.m., methodically signed in at the administrative office and requested to see Principal Kasper.
"He walked in to the school just like a normal student. He was not displaying any firearm or weapons," Hayes said.
Police said he had been in her office about four minutes with the door closed before he shot her. Butler then walked across a hallway and shot Principal Case.
While it was initially stated that Butler fired only at the principals, it has now been reported that he also fired at a custodian and missed. As he was walking away, he pointed the gun at an unarmed security guard, who immediately took cover.
A security officer called police to give them Butler's name and a description of the car, and at 1:35 p.m., authorities received a report of a suspicious vehicle about a mile from the school. That's where officers found the shooter, dead behind the wheel, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
While Lutz says Principal Case is improving and receiving visitors, Principal Kasper's family is left to mourn on what would have been her 58th birthday.
"She will be missed but certainly not forgotten," Lutz said.
While this story just gets increasingly more tragic as it unfolds, I do not want to minimize the families' grief with speculating on the whys.
I know if some kid walked in to a school and shot my loved one, I wouldn't care what he was going through.
Yet, I can't help but believe there is more to this story.
It is obvious that Butler wasn't as "normal" as everyone thought, but what pushes a child to murder? How alone must he have felt in the midst of his parents' divorce and transferring to a new school?
In less than three months, he not only drives on to a football field at a school he is unfamiliar with, but he also shoots both administrators in cold blood?
How deep was his mental anguish?
Make no mistake, there is no excuse. If he had lived, Robert Butler would be thrown in jail for a very long time after an extremely sensationalistic trial.
Exactly where he belonged.
Whatever perceived sense of injustice he felt he was experiencing, he was still alive to plan premeditated murder.
And Principal Kasper is dead as a result.
Our educators, often on the frontlines where parents fail, should not have to go to one of the most thankless jobs in the world, worried that they might not make it home alive. We must not allow ourselves to romanticize a killer because he took his own life.
Yet we must not underestimate the mental process of a fragile mind. Mental illness carries a stigma that we refuse to address, and it is killing our boys. Killing them.
My cousin, suffering from schizophrenia, committed suicide at the age of 27 years old, believing that there was no other way to free himself from the shackles of his own mind.
When people lose hope, all else is lost. In this case, the lives of two people and the peace in Omaha, Nebraska.
The facts behind Robert Butler's selfish decision may never be known, but this I know is true:
It still takes a village to raise a child, and we must pay attention to our children. If we don't recognize how much our decisions and their circumstances affect them even when they don't say a word, the tragedy in Omaha will continue to happen in schools all across America.
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