A plot to kill ‘50 or 60. If I get lucky maybe 150.’
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 hassle to get through any doors.”
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.
Inside an accused school shooter
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