Part V- Then and Now
Then (Right After the Massacre)
March 26th, 2031. 0900h. I have spent the last few days speaking to as many locals around Deertrack as I possibly could, first confirming that they have been in the town since at least a couple of months before the Delta Heights Massacre. For the purposes of this section, I have opted not to utilize the ‘interview style’ format for composition, since many of the folks I spoke with only agreed to talk to me on the condition that they not be named specifically for my article, essay, or book. In one gentleman’s case, the colourful expression employed was ‘-whatever the fuck kind of gobbledygook blog or ebook thing [I’m] going to end up making’.
Some folks truly do not appreciate the efforts that go into constructing even a non-fiction narrative, it seems.
In the span of those few days, I’ve observed a curious phenomenon, a behavior normally reserved for folks who have lived through a natural disaster in regions known for hosting just such things. This is not universal among Deertrackers, but I detected a hint of it in enough folks to feel it worth mentioning here.
Think about farmers in southern Iowa, or rural Kansas or Missouri, whose crops are routinely damaged by tornados, twisters and waterspouts. They have come to know that these things are, at a high probability, going to negatively impact their livelihoods and ways of life if they should remain in the area. Yet they cannot help themselves, tied through deep bonds of either bloodline inheritance or steadfast stubbornness to the land they work their trade upon.
There are folks here in my hometown who almost seem to be constantly expecting something like Delta Heights to happen again, though it may not be here. When the topic of school violence generally is discussed, even when citing examples of other incidents in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there’s a kind of fatalistic shadow that stretches out around some folk here in Deertrack. Inflection ranges curb in, volumes drop, and the overall mood seems to fluctuate between cautious pragmatism and grim nihilism. “People are going to kill each other, no matter where, when, or how,” one twenty-year resident said to me, a gentleman who is himself only a little over forty years of age. “But yeah, it’s always worst when it’s kids.”
This dovetails into the question I posed to almost every person who would talk for more than five or six minutes; ‘What do you think can be done to prevent something like the Delta Heights Massacre from happening again in the future?’ To be fair, a couple of factors set what happened here apart from every other school assault in modern American history, and more than one person who lives here was quick to point out the most obvious of these.
For starters, no other school attack by students has involved the use of improvised explosive devices. The planning that went into the development and deployment of those bombs would be extremely difficult to duplicate, and in the ten years since the incident, only one other high schooler has attempted it to the public’s knowledge. James McCafferey, a fifteen-year-old sophomore at a public school in southern California, had been apprehended by authorities when his younger brother, Ian, informed one of his teachers that James had been scaring him with the stuff he was looking up on his tablet computer at nights. Authorities moved in swiftly based on the tip provided by Ian’s teacher, and they discovered numerous files downloaded to James’s phone and tablet involving blueprints and formulas for concocting devices similar to those used by Norris and Sitanski at Delta Heights.
A notebook tucked under McCafferey’s mattress was littered with scraggly handwritten notes detailing the schedules and routines of almost a dozen of his classmates, all of whom he had apparently ranked into an ‘enemies list’ of sorts. When pressed by authorities to explain what he’d had in mind, the young man confessed that he didn’t really care how the people named on his list died, exactly, just that they be among the dead when he enacted whatever plan he ultimately came up with.
The second major factor that sets the actions of Norris and Sitanski apart from those of other school shooters before and since is this- they left no manifesto. Despite my earlier summary of media stories and anecdotes and interviews in this project, there remains to date no concrete, known explanation beyond the conjecture and theories floated by criminologists and armchair psychologists for what those boys did here at Delta Heights High School. For reasons rather obvious, Brandon Norris could never be interrogated regarding his part in the planning or execution of the assault, or his motivations behind it. As for Aaron Sitanski, as mentioned previously, he has steadfastly refused to speak to anyone except his attorney and a handful of the guards and inmates at the facility where he resides, living out a life sentence.
This last I learned just yesterday, when talking to one Garret LeBeau, a lifelong resident of Deertrack, United States Army Ranger veteran of twelve years, and currently in the third year of his employ as a Corrections Officer for the State of Georgia. I was pointed in the direction of LeBeau by Shelly, one of the waitresses at Jerry’s, while having my usual breakfast there early yesterday morning. LeBeau was already dressed for his shift and sitting in a booth by his lonesome, drinking steaming coffee and waiting for his own food to be delivered. I thanked Shelly for the tip, and headed over to his table.
Standing a couple of feet away, I made an awkward introduction to myself and explained why I was in town, and asked if it would be all right with him to ask a few questions about the prison and one particular inmate. His response, while amiable enough, carried a hint of guardedness, and his smile did not reach his eyes.
When I asked him about Sitanski, all pretense of a friendly expression fled like a roach when the light is turned on overhead, leaving me staring into the face of a man who has killed other human beings on behalf of the United States Army. “You get one question,” he said softly. If you ever wonder what’s more terrifying, someone shouting in your face or someone barely being audible when they are literally less than two feet away from you, I can tell you without worry of being untrue that the answer is the latter rather than the former.
Opting to exercise some measure of caution, I asked if there was anybody that Sitanski spoke with routinely since his incarceration. LeBeau replied that outside of his attorney, there were only five individuals with whom Sitanski ever actually said more than a few words-
Roger Eddings. Eddings was a convicted bank robber who gunned down several bystanders during his ‘jobs’. He and Sitanski, according to LeBeau, occasionally spend time together in the commons area on their cell block discussing mythology, a shared interest.
Liam Finnegan. Finnegan, serving a fifteen-year sentence for aggravated arson, is a small, waifish man, described by LeBeau as ‘sickly and strange, just like Sitanski’.
Harvey ‘Stoneface’ Jenson. I suppose, looking back, that I should not be surprised that one of Georgia’s most notorious spree killers in the last half-century would end up in the orbit of acquaintances kept by Aaron Sitanski. Jenson I already knew of, you see. In 2024, Jenson brought a pair of folding combat knives to his job one day, working at Saint Michael’s Regional Hospital on the northern outskirts of Atlanta. According to the notes taken at his trial and security footage recovered from St. Michael’s, Jenson clocked in for his shift, and proceeded to quietly and calmly start going into the rooms of random patients, stabbing them several times before moving on to the next room. This carried on for fifteen minutes before staff at the hospital started to clue in that something was seriously wrong.
Staff and visitors started to come into his crosshairs as Jenson ran out of sleeping victims to kill, and even security once they got involved. According to witness and surviving victim testimonies during his brief trial, Jenson never once made any kind of sound during his spree or the subsequent struggle, and his expression remained the same; a stony, emotionless glare straight ahead at his intended target.
According to LeBeau, Jenson and Sitanski could frequently be seen sitting together on the perimeter of the prison’s northern exercise yard, talking quietly among themselves. Whenever anybody came within earshot, the two would clam up and go their separate ways, but nobody was fooled among the guards or inmates; Jenson and Sitanski were tight.
Sitanski’s last named repeated contacts were both staff within the facility. First, there was CO Steve Vinnis, a corrections officer who, according to LeBeau, bears a striking physical resemblance to what he imagines Brandon Norris would have looked like, had he lived. Sitanski only puts forth requests among the guard staff through Vinnis. Secondly is Doctor Jeff Renier, one of the prison’s three on-call medical personnel, and the only licensed psychiatrist of those three.
I thanked LeBeau for his time, took my OneNote, and beat a hasty retreat back to my rented room.
**
Back in the days immediately after the Delta Heights Massacre, the local and regional news broadcasts were flooded with the same kind of pablum that we have come to expect as thinking, breathing Americans; sensationalized rumormongering and the casting of blame in every identifiable direction. But the people of Deertrack themselves didn’t go through these standard fare steps, no.
For the residents of Deertrack, some ineffable sense of safety and security had gone up in smoke. No longer could they assume that the more troubled youth of their township would eventually find their way and fly right in institutions like the military or apprenticeship programs to tradesmen; now they had to face the grim reality that two of their own had committed an act of evil.
The more faith-focused residents of the town, when asked, can recite upon request precisely how long after hearing about the attack it took them to get to their particular house of worship. The cynic in me, unbidden, just thinks back to the animated Netflix program ‘Bojack Horseman’, the episode ‘Thoughts and Prayers’. Sending one’s good vibes doesn’t accomplish anything, this tiny part of my mind reasons. But for the God-fearing folk of this Georgia town, there was literally nothing else at the moment that they could think to do. You can try to argue that it doesn’t do any good, doesn’t produce any tangible result that genuinely helps anyone by the person doing the praying, but think on this- how many of those folks who stop to pray first then go out and actually volunteer in some small way to effect a change? More than one might think, as it turns out.
Both of the other high schools that serve the township of Deertrack went into a state of semi-martial-law after the incident, and both students and staff who had been in attendance at them at the time talked to me briefly about how nerve wracking it was. “I thought maybe they had friends at the other schools who were just biding their time, maybe setting up a series of attacks,” says Lindsey Quinet, a saleswoman at Harper’s Automotive in the southwestern corner of Deertrack. “I tried to find their profiles on Facebook to see if I knew anybody they were friends with, but it was like they were ghosts online.”
You will remember that in a previous section of this project, I informed you, dear reader, that Sitanski was suspected to have used his skills as a hacker to scrub almost every trace of himself and Norris from the Internet, or at least, from social networking sites and services. Miss Quinet’s comment sparked a flicker of curiosity in me, one that sent me mentally back to something Chief Carlyle had pointed out- someone had called 911 before the attack.
Meaning that back in the days right after the Massacre, someone must have stood out to the general public or their peers.
**
A re-hash of old local stories from the time of the initial incident took almost three hours to pay off, but thanks to my newfound acquaintanceship with Ms. Brenda Matheson of The Deertracker, I was able to unearth some small crime beat pieces from the archives of her paper.
In the weeks and months after the incident, authorities were said to have pulled aside several of the members of the Delta 26 for questioning. Most speculation seemed to suggest that investigators were simply assembling testimony for Sitanski’s trial, should he pursue a not guilty plea. But this simply doesn’t track for me, given the timing of these crime beat blurbs.
There’s something more here to pull at.
**
March 26th, 2031. 1810h. This has indeed been a long day, and one filled with more phone calls than I’ve made in a long time. My previous suspicion that things were not what they seemed regarding the questioning of survivors of the Massacre has proven correct.
According to a source within the Deetrack Police Department, who wished to remain anonymous for the time being, investigators at the time were trying to find out if any of the Delta 26 had been involved, in any way, shape or form, with the planning or execution of Norris and Sitanski’s attack on the school. This makes good sense; both boys had been marked as ‘absent’ from their homeroom classes, had been unseen by anyone throughout the morning, and yet had been perfectly prepared when the fire alarms were sounded throughout the school. My own personal theory is that investigators assumed someone, a third party, had pulled one of the alarms inside the school.
There were also several instances wherein FBI agents were seen going to the home of the Edmunds family, best known around Deertrack for Edmunds’ Hardware, the only non-chain hardware store within fifty miles of the downtown area. A less-than-reputable gossip blog run by one Marlene Thomas, a life-long resident of Deertrack, had at the time posited that it had perhaps been young Parker Edmunds who had placed the call to 911.
It didn’t take me a great deal of time to do some background research of my own and discover that Miss Thomas had, for a period of perhaps three months, been the paramour of one Officer Felix Carlyle, now the Chief of Police.
Yet it can’t be denied that Miss Thomas’s blog, while largely inconsequential and rife with sensationalized piffle, seems to have held up to the test of time, with no less than a dozen major rumor/gossip pieces proving true over the years.
Her own personal opinion writings regarding the days shortly after the Massacre appear to have been far less formulated than her standard fare, containing all manner of syntax errors, spelling foibles, and a sort of unconstrained sentimentality that leaned less toward the salacious and more toward the grieving.
**
When the Massacre took place, there were no major calls to the broader public to disarm or give up their firearms, though plenty of folks in Deertrack voluntarily and without fanfare turned over their guns and ammo to the members of the police department. Every garden supply store, hardward store, and even the nearby Wal-Mart was gone over with a fine-toothed comb by both local and federal authorities, quantities of fertilizer, propane, and anything else that could be used as a common component in the construction of a homemade bomb inventoried, accounted for, and inspected for tampering of any kind.
Perhaps more telling than any of this was the cancellation of an event. A chapter of the NRA had been planning a rally in Deertrack’s town square, set to take place just ten days after the incident. Without any kind of press release or major televised or broadcast statement, the event had been cancelled, and checks sent to the handful of vendors who had been prepared o help with the event, to help cover the cost of their inconvenience in having the event cancelled at the last minute.
The school itself had remained closed for just over two years, until the other two senior high schools in the area could no longer cope with the overflow of student numbers they had faced since the closure of Delta Heights. When finally Delta Heights reopened its doors, it had an almost entirely new faculty and staff, a new student body, and a definitive mission- fend off the specter of what happened here, and educate a local adolescent populace in such a way that this sort of travesty doesn’t happen again.
But one has to wonder if such ghosts can ever be fully expunged.