Nightmare Evolves From the Suburban Dream
There isn’t yet anything that passes muster as a profile of a schoolhouse killer. This is, in part, good news. There haven’t been enough of them, yet, to form a statistically reliable portrait. Maybe there’ll never be. But the one thing that is, or ought to be by now, well-known is that there is no place that is immune from a young man with a gun and troubles, and a compulsion to apply one to the other.
The places of which it is frequently said, “It couldn’t happen here,” are in fact the places it seems most likely to occur: fringe towns, suburbs and country villages.
By income, by location, ethnicity or almost any measure you could apply, Andy Williams’ hometown lies right in the cross-hairs.
Santee sits in a flat-bottomed valley, scrunched down under clouds that hang low in the bowl of the scrub-rush hills. It’s a young city, just 20 years old, but people have lived here, under one name or another, for more than 200 years.
Santee today is, by any definition, a suburb, a bedroom community without much economic base. People commute here, usually west over the Fletcher Hills to San Diego, or to the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar. To call it a suburb, though, is not to confuse it with tonier places where the well-off, weary of fighting metropolitan woes, high-tail it for comfort.
East county, as San Diegans call almost everything out of sight of the ocean, isn’t like that. It’s a place people settle for as well as in. Most homes are modest tract models. One of every nine residences is a mobile home. One of four is an apartment.
The Sanside Apartments sit more or less in the middle of town--more or less because the town has no real center, just some intersections that are busier than others. It’s a complex of 63 beige, stucco one- and two-bedroom units, with a swimming pool. Rent tops out at $795 a month.
The single-family homes in this part of town are small, with half-paved driveways, rusting swing sets in the back, maybe a trailer, and sagging fences. One house has no grass, just dirt turning to mud.
The ground-floor entry to Apartment 53 is beneath the staircase. There’s no name on the door. The Williams live here. Or did. Andy Williams probably won’t be back for a long while and Charles, his father, remains hidden from view. Charles, according to his sparse public response, remains as perplexed as anyone on the subject of Andy and the events of Monday morning that left two dead, 13 wounded and a trail of questions that wind up into the hills and beyond.
The blinds have been drawn on Apartment 53 all week. There appears to be a light left on in the living room. The bedroom is dark. A small patio out front looks as if it has been deserted for a while. Three bikes with dusty seats and early signs of rust are piled willy-nilly next to upside-down brooms and a rainbow-colored beach chair.
Just beyond the patio, a slight depression in the ground is filled with runoff and cigarette butts. When he could get them, Andy smoked Marlboro Reds.
The suburbs are no longer a one-stop escape hatch, no panacea for troubled families, said Max Neiman, a political science professor at UC Riverside and the director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Research.
“The expectation is different when you get to the suburbs,” he said. “People still come to the suburbs with the expectation that life is about to change, that it’s a brass ring, that it’s still a bastion of a different, homogenous culture. That’s just not true anymore.”
Almost none of the places where the more notorious of school killings have occurred was known much, if at all, beyond its county line before the triggers were pulled: Moses Lake, Fort Gibson, Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, Springfield, Conyers, Littleton. They’re mostly smaller towns, many of them semirural or not far removed from it.
All a town really needs to be a potential target is a population of teenage boys and guns. Santee has plenty of both.
Like most places, Santee and its children are divided on an intricate social grid, often too fine to measure and know, but sometimes as obvious and old and sadly human as a tribe.
High school hierarchies tend to be simpler and more standard than most. At Santana High School, where Andy Williams enrolled last fall, the social order has two main levels. On top are the jocks--football and basketball players--and the “bops”--cheerleaders and their crowd.
Below that rank, and all more or less at the same level, is everyone else. Most of the other groups are determined by recreational affinity. Musical taste, for example, dictates membership among the “freaks,” dark-clothed devotees of Marilyn Manson and gothic rock.
Some groups are named for weekend destinations. The “beach” people go west to surf at “OB,” Ocean Beach; the “desert” people drive east to the deserts in full-size trucks and go off-roading, or “froading,” as they call it.
Some Santee students claim to be in white power groups. They wear caps with straight bills cocked up in defiance of Latino and African American groups, which curve their caps.
A year ago, Williams was just another scrawny kid with big ears who liked sports, video games and practical jokes. He played the Peanuts character Linus in a local theater production, wrote wry lyrics to popular rap and punk songs. He rode his skateboard in search of “the grind,” the noise a board makes when its rider can catch a concrete edge just right. Andy didn’t often. As a friend said, under Andy’s command, the skateboard was more for transportation than tricks.
That didn’t keep Williams away from the skate park at Woodglen Vista Park.
After he left a small town in Maryland and moved to Santee last year to live with his father, Williams began “kicking it” at Woodglen Vista Park. The park, centered on an undulating skateboard playground, is the cultural and social center of a ragtag, nose-ringed collection of hard-core stoners and skaters, many of whom joined this group because they didn’t fit or weren’t welcomed in any of the others.
Williams, a 15-year-old freshman, was too adventurous for the bops, the students led by clean-cut cheerleaders; too straight for the freaks, students who dress in black and listen to gothic rock; and too small for the jocks.
Williams became increasingly emotional about his attachment to the park’s two dozen regulars. “One time, he told me he loved me,” said Robert Dockler, 17. “I said: ‘Dude, stop. I don’t want to hear that.’ ” In many ways, he was still a kid--munching hot dogs, his favorite food, toying with a garage band with no drummer, four bass players and no place to plug in. He had a messy bedroom with a cardboard box for a coffee table and dirt-bike posters on the wall.
Lately, he took up cigarettes big time, began drinking more, skipping school and defying his father’s 11 p.m. curfew, friends said. He grew obsessed with Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana singer who killed himself in 1994, as well as the punk group Linkin Park. Over and over, he played the song “In the End,” which features the lyrics, “I had to fall; To lose it all; But in the end; It doesn’t even matter.”
He was fast becoming, said his best friend, Josh Stevens, “a slacker.” His big dream, Josh said, was for the two of them to alternate between working and unemployment, sharing their income so one of them could always be idle.
Williams learned to smoke marijuana joints instead of a pipe, friends said, and was accused of using alcohol to lure his 12-year-old girlfriend into intimate activity.
“He was way wasted,” said Jessie “Red” Cunard, 18, who was kicked out of Santana High two years ago for truancy and spends most days at Woodglen Park.
Many teenagers claim to know precisely when sheriff’s deputies will show up at Woodglen and they have carefully planned escape routes to safe houses--apartments where parents are not home--or toward the hills, where deputies aren’t likely to follow.
They steal Jack Daniels, tequila, vodka and spiced rum from a grocery store across the street from Santana High, then sell the bottles to friends for $5 or $10--”whatever they can get for it,” said 18-year-old Stephanie Matthews, a graduate of Santana High.
The park, teenagers say, has become a narcotics bazaar where locals buy soft and hard drugs. Methamphetamine is available, but scorned because it turns them into pale, neurotic “tweakers.” LSD is commonplace, they say, and marijuana is consumed as casually as pizza.
“Some little kid came up to me last night and said: ‘Please tell me you have an ounce of weed to sell me,’ ” Cunard said. “I said: ‘How old are you?’ He said: ’12.’ In the dugout over there, people are getting high right now. . . See, this looks like an All-American town. But it’s not at all, not when you dig down deep. Kids grow up pretty fast around here.”
To many parents, Santee remains a suburban paradise, stashed away in the hills. Adults, despite the town’s growth, see it as a safe haven from the cities of Southern California, a town where folks bowl, cheer the color guard and ride roller-skates, not roller-blades.
“Living in Santee,” said Karen Davis, a resident and mother, “is like living in the ‘50s.”
Maybe they haven’t been listening to their kids.
One day this week, Woodglen Vista Park is nearly empty. Some younger children play on the swings and climb the jungle gym. There are no skateboarders. On a normal late afternoon, there’d be 50, so many they’d spill over onto the basketball court.
The only sounds are the kids laughing and talking and a small brook sloshing through.
The little kids on the swings know all about the shootings, down to the details of Andy Williams falling out with his girlfriend and being picked on. They’ve seen it all on TV.
Daniel Turpin, 11, says: “I’m just trying to have a good time because I don’t want to remember what happened in Santee.” But it’s not all forgettable.
It has a kind of glamour. Kyle Ross, 10, calls it “the most exciting thing that has happened so far in my life.”
The kids at 10 and 11 seem to belong to a different world than the older kids.
Andy Williams is 15 and his old girlfriend, 12, maybe not so far away after all.
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Times staff writers Duke Helfand and Terry McDermott contributed to this story.
