The One Who Fell
March 9th, 2031. 0730h. Last night, I spent the vast majority of my time relating and re-typing the majority of the information that had been gleaned, in the weeks and months after the incident, about Aaron Sitanski. I suspect this is largely due to the fact that I’m a journalist, and like most members of the media, I fell victim to the same disease that infects most of us- an unconscious desire to focus on the person or persons still walking the planet. It’s important to remember, however, that Sitanski didn’t operate alone, that he had a partner who helped him commit the atrocity at Delta Heights. This section will focus on what is known about Brandon Norris, who died on the scene in an exchange of gunfire with responding officers.
The Outspoken One
Where Sitanski was, by all accounts, a quiet, shy, and pensive sort of child and student growing up, his counterpart, Brandon Norris, was a loud, boisterous, and brazen kid. Norris’s first public appearance on record came at the age of 8, when he brought home a third-place trophy for a juniors martial arts tournament he participated in just a little ways north in the city of Atlanta. It was an understandable little bit of pride to be put on display for the town’s small, privately owned and operated weekly mailer, ‘The Deertracker’.
A picture for the piece, still viewable on the mailer’s website archives, shows a widely smiling blonde-haired boy hoisting his little trophy high overhead, dressed in his black martial arts uniform (called a gi), a brown belt tied in a knot around his waist. His mother and father, beaming with parental pride, stand behind him to either side in front of their mobile home.
What the Deertracker’s photographer inadvertently captures in the picture, and what most people likely completely overlook, is the run-down façade of the trailer, as well as the nearly half-dozen empty Miller Lite boxes tossed haphazardly near a pair of Rubbermaid trash cans on the left border of the image. Someone in this family seems to have a bit of a problem.
Norris’s own records don’t appear to indicate more than a handful of fairly typical medical treatments required for a growing boy; a broken leg, suffered as a result of falling out of a tree (the entire incident video recorded by a neighborhood acquaintance via his cell phone camera and uploaded to YouTube). A volatile allergic reaction to a bee sting. Stitches on his hand and knuckles after punching a wall following an argument with his parents. Nothing that raises the red flags normally associated with child abuse.
His mother, Joanne, however, possesses a laundry list of hospital visits, and his father, Billy, has a host of criminal complaints and charges raised against him, most of which end up being dropped by the complainant, Joanne. In 2016, Joanne filed a restraining order and for separation from Billy, effectively putting herself and her son in a single-parent home. Had this held steady and culminated in a divorce, Brandon Norris might well have needed some personal therapy, but he also would have undoubtedly been better off for not being around his violent and chronically underemployed father. Unfortunately, in early 2017, the restraining order was lifted, and Billy welcomed back into the home. No filing for divorce ever went through.
School records and notes from various instructors and administrators indicate that from the 7th through 9th grade, Brandon Norris was a participant in at least half a dozen physical altercations with other students. In all but one case, student and staff witnesses clarify for the record that Norris was simply defending himself, though doing so perhaps overzealously, given his background in martial arts. The lone outlier came in 8th grade, when a classmate is said to have called him ‘trailer trash’, at which point Norris unleashed a vicious assault on the other student.
Norris spent two-and-a-half months in a juvenile detention facility on the east side of Atlanta as a result of the incident.
It was his last fight, in his freshman year of high school, however, that would set events in motion that, seemingly, would culminate with the Delta Heights High School Massacre.
In November of 2017, just days after Aaron Sitanski was allowed to return to school after his suspension, a group of African-American students, still incensed at his racially insensitive ‘blackface’ Halloween costume portrayal of Colin Powell, surrounded him in one of the school’s hallways. At first, they merely shouted at him, but shouting quickly turned into shoving into the lockers set into the walls, and moments later, turned into punches and kicks being thrown in a group assault.
Witnessing the assault, Brandon Norris threw himself into the action, quickly and violently coming to Sitanski’s physical defense. By the time everything was said and done, Sitanski suffered two broken ribs, a broken nose, and a sprained ankle, while his assailants suffered a host of bruises and abrasions. Norris himself came away from the encounter with only a couple of brusies himself and a broken left hand, but he, along with the assailants, were all immediately suspended for one week. Sitanski was taken to the hospital and treated, and returned to classes the very next day.
It is my suspicion that this was the moment that Sitanski and Norris became friends. No previously mentioned connection has since been made by investigative journalists who have looked over the events, and scrutiny of Norris’s online activity never mentioned Sitanski before this incident.
Military philosophers and psychologists specializing in the treatment of veterans have spoken about this phenomenon at length in the past. Commonly referred to in the literature as ‘Friendship forged in fire’, the premise is both simple and, historically, demonstrably reproducible- when two to five people experience the same moment of trauma, it creates an instantaneous and powerful bond between them, one that seemingly can transcend any other factor that might otherwise keep them from belonging to the same categorization of individual.
Likewise and undoubtedly contributing further to the kinship shared between Sitanski and Norris is their background in homes rife with turbulence and violence. It’s certainly not going to shock any sociologists out there to discover yet another link between childhood poverty (both boys’ family incomes put them below the national poverty line) and criminal activity, but the perpetrators of the slaughter at Delta Heights fit the bill once again in that regard.
But where Sitanski remains a mystery by and large to the broader public, Norris does not.
An active member of numerous message boards online, Norris often engaged in conversations surrounding classic or retro video games. A subreddit dedicated to systems and games of the 32-bit era and earlier hosted all manner of threads and comments from him, including a thread wherein he admitted the primary reason he played those games was that, thanks to computer emulation, he could finally afford to enjoy the hobby in any capacity whatsoever. He found it an enjoyable pastime and outlet for his frustrations.
But as so often happens with what might otherwise be innocent or naïve confessions of this sort, the Internet quickly reminded Norris that he wasn’t safe anywhere. Days after talking to a few members of the subreddit about the advantages of emulation, a semi-regular contributor to the forum, known as eldergamesRbettr1990, posted a comment on Norris’s thread offering to send him a large but compressed file filled with every original Sony Playstation game ever released in North America.
Norris, of course, took the bait. It would be three weeks before he was able to post on the site again, and what he had to say was blunt:
‘Fuck you guys for shit like that. I almost had to get rid of my goddamn computer, good thing my buddy Aaron figured shit out so quick.’
But this was par for the course for Norris, it would seem. Any time he made his way into a community online, he was swiftly shown the door or bombarded with hateful, antagonistic messages until he gave up and left of his own accord.
Despite expectations and investigations into the matter, however, there were two specific subsversive communities to which neither Norris or Sitanski ever seemed to turn for a sense of community- the websites and forums of white nationalists and men’s rights activists, or MRAs. Twitter, Facebook and Reddit were riddled with thousands of users after the incident on the 17th of April, 2021, calling for evidence of any kind that one or both of the suspects belonged to either group.
And after Sitanski’s extensive capabilities as a hacker were revealed to the public, many of those same users took the the web to promote the theory that both of them had, in fact, been deeply involved in both kinds of outfits, but that Sitanski had managed to hide every shred of digital evidence to suggest as much. People didn’t need evidence at this point; they had their ‘gut feelings’, which was good enough at that point.
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"Someone in this family seems to have a bit of a problem"- uh, yeah.
For "someone", "Miller Time" is all the time.