Fire Drill Part 6.1- Aaron Sitanski

Aaron Sitanski

            April 5^th, 2031. 0805h. Today, I will finally have the chance that no other reporter has been granted in a decade; I will be heading out to Oak Grove State Penitentiary again to sit down for an in-depth interview with the surviving perpetrator of the Delta Heights Massacre, Aaron Sitanski. I had considered speaking to his small handful of confidantes within the prison afterwards, but opted instead to go talk to them yesterday, to gather their impressions of the man who had been America’s most infamous teenage mass murderer in history.

            The two who proved to be the most illuminating to speak with were Doctor Renier and Harvey ‘Stoneface’ Jenson. Jenson, himself a mass murderer, turned out to be, much to my personal surprise, a lot more talkative than I had anticipated. His reputation among the guards and other inmates in the prison is one of stoic standoffishness, but when he sat down with me in the prison’s library to answer my questions, he was quite effusive.

            “There’s something you have to understand about Aaron,” he started when I asked him for his initial impression of Sitanski when he’d arrived at the prison nearly a decade earlier. “If you’re not in the way of him getting what he wants, you’re probably just fine. Even then, as long as you talk to him on an even level, treat him like an equal, you’re probably all clear. But the minute you talk down to him, there’s going to be a problem.”

            I asked Jenson if he could give me an example of what he meant, and he provided one immediately. Mere days after arrival, he informed me, Sitanski approached him one afternoon in the mess, asking if he was, well, who he was. Jenson, ever suspicious of newcomers, said that yes, he was indeed Harvey Jenson. Sitanski said okay, that’s good to know, and started to walk away.

            Of course, that wasn’t going to be the end of it, because Jenson wanted to know, instinctively, why Sitanski wanted to confirm this. Sitanski, according to Jenson, just shrugged and said he’d overheard another inmate boasting to some of his friends that he was going to climb the ranks in the yard by shivving Jenson to death at the earliest opportunity. Sitanski pointed out who had said this, and walked away.

            Jenson admitted to me, as he did at that time to the prison’s staff, that he immediately took after the inmate in question, one Phil Hartley, and savagely beat him nearly to death, gouging out both of his eyes in the scuffle. It wasn’t until later that Jenson learned that Hartley had been Sitanski’s first assigned cellmate, and that when Sitanski had requested the top bunk, the veteran inmate had threatened to cut his tongue out if he asked such a stupid question again.

            Now, Sitanski had the cell all to himself, since his cellmate had to be taken to the intensive care unit of a hospital outside of the prison. Jenson chuckled as he told me this story, looking almost wistful. “Yeah, that’s the thing with Aaron. Given enough time and opportunity, he’ll always get what he wants.” He gave me a predatory smile then, and added, “Best hope what he wants when you’re done talking isn’t to see you in a puddle of your own guts.”

            Doctor James Renier added to this revelation, when I asked him about it just half an hour later in his private office within the prison’s medical ward. “Jenson and Sitanski are a perfect pairing, when it comes to analyzing the criminal mindset,” the narrow, sickly-looking psychiatrist said to me. “Both are mass murderers, and both were relatively young when they did, well, what they did. But the key difference here is that Jenson is a sociopath, while Sitanski is a psychopath.”

            Now, this is a point that I, along with most Americans, frequently get confused about. The terms, while intended for clinical use, are often tossed about with relative conversational abandon. We label people with fierce tempers ‘psycho’, or use this term as a collective for a single argument conclusion- as in the phrase, ‘s/he went psycho and started screaming and throwing stuff!’

            ‘Sociopath’, while often overlooked in such off-the-cuff conversation, denotes an entirely different subset of people in everyday life, and the differences between a sociopath and a psychopath, Doctor Renier went on to explain to my quirked eyebrow, are often subtle and hard to solidly define. For instance, both sociopaths and psychopaths have difficulty empathizing with their fellow human beings. For a sociopath, this is difficult because of low impulse control and a tendency to put themselves first; for a psychopath, this is difficult because they are neurologically almost incapable on a fundamental level of recognizing the needs and emotional states of other people. They can mimic emotions with superb skill, but they do not genuinely feel them, where a sociopath CAN experience the emotions themselves, but often have trouble accessing anything other than anger and selfishness.

            Above all other factors that separate the two categories, Renier informed me, the temperament and approach to getting what they want is what chiefly divides these two subsets of persons. “A sociopath’s rage is swift and brutal, often impulsive and with very little regard to what will happen as a result of whatever action they take to achieve their goals. They may feel a little bad afterwards, but if they get what they’re after, that guilt quickly washes away. A psychopath, on the other hand, experiences not even rage, as much as a kind of icy annoyance when there is a deterrent to their goals. They almost never feel any genuine remorse for the harm they do in the course of achieving their aims, because they literally can’t.”

            Another determining factor in figuring out if a person is a sociopath or a psychopath, the prison psychiatrist informed me, lies in the ability to manipulate and plot. Dr. Renier admitted to me that this bit is more his own personal theory than anything agreed upon universally in the field of research, though he does intend to conduct a study and complete a paper for peer review. According to his theory, based on observations he’s made of prisoners over the fourteen years he’s worked for the prison, a sociopath rarely engages in the practice of drawing out long and complicated plans, opting instead to stick to simple, easily adaptable methods. Swiftly incensed by challenges to their authority or ability, the sociopath understands, at an instinctive level, that they simply do not possess the patience for fine details required of a master manipulator.

            Psychopaths, Renier offers, are so cold, distant and calculating, fundamentally inhuman in a way that some sensitive individuals can feel from across the room, that they conversely struggle to adjust to abrupt and unexpected alterations to the circumstances surrounding their efforts. Utilizing all available information to them, a psychopath will poke, prod and manipulate everyone around them in order to get what they want, with no sympathy for their fellow human beings. They are capable, due to their generally high logical intelligence, of sussing out patterns of consequence and human behavior to the point that they can, with time and care, prepare and set into motion a series of events that will almost always get them what they’re after.

            It is precisely because of the depth of attention they put into these machinations that a psychopath is, generally speaking, less dangerous on a moment-to-moment basis than a sociopath. They can improvise, but the human façade they usually cloak themselves in becomes tattered, easily seen through, and they can then be pegged for precisely what they are.

            After a little more explanation involving psychological terms and concepts that I couldn’t quite comprehend in their total, I felt an inquiry bubbling up in my throat that begged for release. When there was a pause in Dr. Renier’s explanation, I threw it out there. “Given what you know, then, about the circumstances surrounding the Delta Heights Massacre, what would be your estimation on how the event transpired? With Norris and Sitanski, I mean.”

            “Oh, that’s simple, and quite deadly,” Renier replied. “In Aaron Sitanski, we have an almost classical case of the narcissistic psychopath, intelligent, thorough, and quite ambitious in his designs. With his then-partner, Brandon Norris, we had a burgeoning young sociopath, someone who knew how to get things done and who had the volatility to do it at any given time. With the two of them being brought into one another’s orbit, that travesty was inevitable. Even if Norris were to for some reason have been removed from the equation, Sitanski still would have pulled off an event like that on his own, though it is possible it wouldn’t have resulted in as great a loss of life.”

            “So nothing could have kept the Massacre from happening?”

            “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Renier, rising from his chair in an unspoken cue that our time together was drawing to a close. “By now I’m sure you’ve had a chance to read up on those two’s childhoods. There’s a combination of nature and nurture that makes all people who and what they are. By their hardwired nature, neither Brandon Norris nor Aaron Sitanski was going to have an entirely benevolent life; there was going to be something awful coming from their direction no matter what. However, because of the brutality each suffered in their home environments as they came of age, any hope they might have had of becoming healthy, or at least functional, members of society was entirely flattened.

            “It’s about modeled behavior and learned mechanisms, you see,” said Renier. “If Aaron had grown up in a home where kindness and helpfulness were rewarded, if he had observed that the standard response to challenges had been cautious and constructive reactions, then that’s what would have imprinted on him as the kind of approach to mimic. Instead, he was raised to see that violence and neglect, that selfishness, was the way to go. Even when he tried to look to his peers for a framework of how to be a person, he was met with hostility and dismissal. As such, why not just do what he felt he wanted to?”

            While I do not entirely endorse Dr. Renier’s theory, there certainly seems to be ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that he may be onto something. Consider how many serial killers are known to have come from broken homes, raised in an environment of abuse or neglect. If a child is already cursed with abnormal neurochemistry, and you add a cancerous childhood and upbringing, what are the odds that they’re going to become a decent human being as an adult?

            Probably pretty slim.

**

            1047h. My tongue is practically glued to the roof of my mouth, the flesh on the back of my neck a dry, scratchy patch of fine grade sandpaper, tiny hairs standing on end like drying shoots of tall grass. While it is true that I was just here yesterday, I didn’t feel nearly as on edge as I feel right now. This is a whole other thing, and although there will be guards no more than a few feet away while I talk to Aaron Sitanski, and he’s never shown a capacity for intimate and sudden violence, I am going to be in the presence of a person who has taken more lives than anyone I have ever come in contact with.

            Given that I have interviewed members of the military during the course of my career, that’s quite the grim accomplishment.

            I’ll be heading into the prison in a moment.

**

[This section inserted to set the scene for readers of the interview, in order that they might better understand the experience.]

            The first thing one likely notes when passing through the tall, barbed-wire-topped gates fronting the Oak Grove State Penitentiary, is one of the facility’s three separate outside exercise yards on their left, fronting the bleak gray concrete structure itself. This yard is occupied predominantly by fairly up-to-date workout equipment, including several weight machines and benches with shiny, newer free weights, and even a collection of resistance band gear for toning and definition work.

            Yesterday, some of the guards took me on a brief walk of this yard while it was erstwhile unoccupied. Everything, including the small one-hoop basketball court, appeared to be in tremendous condition. “This yard is only for trustees and guys in protective separation,” one of the senior guards informed me. “That’s why everything’s so nice, and why it isn’t as heavily manned.”

            I had been given brief glimpses into the other outside areas of the facility the day before, and I can attest to their less-than-stellar conditions. One of them, situated in the dead center of the prison, hosts watch towers at all four corners, and each one is staffed with two sharpshooters whenever the yard is in use. One of those men in each tower is armed with a sniper rifle that is loaded with rubber bullets, while the other is loaded to shoot to kill if necessary.

            The dirt pathway up to the prison itself is split in half, with a fenced-in corridor extending from the front doors twenty feet, where it terminates in a guard booth attached to an electrified wire mesh door. When you get to within a few feet of this hinged door, you can hear the hum of the electricity running through it, smell the subtle aroma of constantly burning ozone. A nod from the guard inside the little hut and a movement of his left arm later, and the sensation vanishes, allowing one to pass through the door unharmed. As soon as you’re on the other side, though, that sensation of harm within hand’s reach kicks back in, and directly behind you, causing an involuntary hunching of the shoulders, lowering of the head.

            This is a place and these are people who do not fuck around.

            A minute later, and you find yourself standing in the entry room of the facility, a squat, colorless room of slate gray walls and floor, the waiting area to the right ringed with dull green plastic chairs. A low window-counter stands across from the entrance doors, hosting a bulletproof shielding window between visitors and the duty officer seated on the other side.

            To the left of the counter is a dense metal security door with a keypad beside it, and against the left-hand wall is a similar portal, also with a keypad. That second door leads back through a short corridor to the guards’ locker room, wherein the staff can get changed into uniform and gather their required gear for their shift. The door beside the security window leads into a narrow corridor, the walls white from the waist-up and dark gray from the waist-down, which once again terminates in a wire mesh security door. A visitor/staff check-in counter runs the length of the wall to the right, allowing one to see the multitude of monitors and control panels inside that little guard booth fronting the facility.

            The officer on duty within has access not only to their personal suppression equipment, but there is also a close-range combat shotgun plainly visible within the booth, The idea of someone trying to get into or out of this place without the guards’ say so seems increasingly insane.

            And yet, attempts have been made. I know this thanks to a few stories told by the guards I’ve spent time with.

            The cloistered, claustrophobic feeling of the corridors and most of the rooms throughout the prison is not accidental; designed to infer a feeling of nigh-suffocation, it is an environment that makes its inhabitants feel small, insignificant, and penned in. While this must be unhealthy for the guard staff, they have one advantage that the inmates don’t enjoy: at the end of an eight-hour shift, they get to leave. They can go wherever they want when they end their workday, and beyond that, if they feel like they just can’t take working in that environment anymore, they are free to just not report back. Sure, it’ll leave the prison short-staffed momentarily, but they have the option of saying ‘No more for me, thanks’.

            For the purposes of my interview with him, Miss Holly Maxwell, Sitanski’s attorney, has required that I sit down with her first and go over some ground rules that she and the warden agreed to on Aaron’s behalf. I’ll be meeting in the prison library with her for that discussion.

            Inside that library, one could easily mistake it for a normal, everyday lending location, were it not for the dark blue jumpers worn by the three men who serve as its principal staff; inmate-run and inmate-tended, the library has no civilian or guard operating it in any capacity, beyond Dr. Renier apparently having the final say on what should or should not be allowed on the shelves.

            Miss Maxwell puts herself together quite well, a pretty woman who knows that her greatest physical asset is her legs, but who possesses enough wisdom and sense of her surroundings to only accent them by wearing a pair of knee-length capris. The smile she offers is a 1000-watt number that reveals nearly moviestar quality teeth, and there is a playfulness in her eyes that one might not expect, given where we are meeting to talk.

            She clearly doesn’t realize she’s barking up the wrong tree with me, but I’m flattered, nevertheless. She asks me to have a seat with her at one of the small tables in the center of the library, inclining her head in several directions for my benefit. I see guards in the library, guards who had not been visible to me before, and I notice that there isn’t a single blue jumper to be seen.

            Miss Maxwell informs me that this is where I’ll be talking to Aaron. Here, in the prison library, not in some cramped little cell or interrogation chamber. This doesn’t seem so bad, so I just nod. Sitanski wants to be addressed as ‘Aaron’, not ‘Sitanski’ or ‘Mister Sitanski’, nothing formal. He wants the interview to “sound like a conversation between friends”, according to Miss Maxwell.

            “And that’s important to him,” I ask, eyebrow raised to convey my skepticism. To her credit, Miss Maxwell just gives out a low snicker and shakes her head with hands upraised.

            “I’m not sure if anything’s actually important to him, other than his books and his weekly Internet privileges.”

            “They give him online access?” I am frankly stunned that the staff here would let him near a computer at all. “Isn’t that a little foolish, given his background as a young hacker?”

            “He’s heavily monitored for the entire two-hour block, every Friday afternoon,” she informs me. “From what I’ve been told, he mostly goes on a few news websites and reads a host of articles, then hops off. Some weeks, he doesn’t even use up the entirety of his allotted time. But you might be interested to know that one of the sites he goes to, every time, is The Deertracker’s.”

            It makes perfect sense, in a way. Though he doesn’t live there anymore, it feels reasonable to expect that Sitanski would want to keep abreast of the goings-on of his old stomping grounds. “That’s good to know,” I comment. She looks over her shoulder to one of the guards, the only one keeping an eye on us presently, and gives him a single raised pointer finger.

            “Are you ready, then, Mister Hayes?” I set up my OneNote, my cell phone with voice recorder program, and my pocket notebook, setting them in a neat row in front of me like a shield wall.

            “I am.”

**

[Interview format to follow below. When Aaron Sitanski was led into the library, my first impression of him physically was that he was so slight that he could, at any moment, simply turn sideways and practically disappear. The flesh on his face looked dry and tight, as if pulled tight against the skull beneath, though it isn’t exactly what I would traditionally describe as ‘sickly’. No, this seemed like a carefully, deliberately achieved appearance, to make him look as deathly as the actions of his past. It was an affectation, though I couldn’t deny that its likely intended affect, to put one ill at ease in his presence, was accomplished at least in part. When he sat down across from me at the table, the guard who had led him by the arm to the table set down an ashtray, a pack of Marlboro Golds, and a lighter in the middle of the table. He hustled away for a minute, and returned with a plastic pitcher of water and two plain gray plastic drinking cups, then stepped three long paces away from us, scowling intently at the back of Sitanski’s head. His distaste for the mass murderer was palpable.]

Matthew Hayes: [With an incline of the head] Aaron.

Aaron Sitanski[AS]: Matt. Or is Matthew preferred? You’re my guest, so you tell me, so I’m not stepping on your toes. [grins as he takes out a cigarette and lights it, using one finger to push the pack toward me. The fingernail looks like it has been sharpened by being rubbed against the wall of his cell repeatedly.]

MH: Matt’s fine. I assume you’re aware of the memorial unveiling coming up soon, then? For the anniversary?

AS: Yes, I’ve read about it. The first press release announcing it, not one of Brenda’s best efforts, if I say so myself.

MH: You mean Brenda Mattheson, of The Deertracker?

AS: Yes. She’s been quite unhappy with my insistence that she not be the one to talk to me. She’s not from Deertrack originally, you see, so I didn’t think she’d be the correct, vessel, for this conversation.

MH: That’s an interesting choice of words, Aaron.

AS: And that is precisely what it is, Matt; a choice. The choices we all make in life, and the choices we make for others, along with those choices made for us, are what define us as people.

MH: Made for us?

AS: [with a wry grin] Surely you’re not naïve enough to think that you’ve never had a decision made for you, right? There’s all kinds of life-shaping events and circumstances that we have almost no control over.

MH: Can you think of an example in your own life?

AS: Quite easily. [Sitanski draws out another cigarette from the pack, taps it twice on the table on the filter end, then strikes it alight, taking a long first inhale. He slowly releases a jet of cerulean blue smoke, right at my face, and I end up pulling one of my own smokes out of my pack and lighting it as well.] My father, as you well know, was a military man. That was how he provided for my mother and I, and it was a duty he performed without complaint or regret. However, it was also a career which carried a certain degree of danger, of threat. Despite my mother’s insistence that he should not re-up his active duty contract, he chose to continue being a man of action. That decision, in the long run, resulted in my becoming fatherless.

MH: There are plenty of people in the country who have a parent who passed away during enlisted action.

AS: Do not mistake me, Matt, I’m not trying to use this example to excuse my own decisions or actions. [I nod and make a quick note in my analog notebook] But we are digressing. You noted some interest in my use of the word ‘vessel’ for the method by which my statements and conversation with you is to go out into the world at large.

MH: I did. Could you clarify why you’ve selected that term?

AS: Definitions are quite important to members of our generation, Matt, as they are for the generation that came just before us, the Millenials. Gen-Xers aren’t so much concerned about the trivialities dialectic nuance, because as a cohort, they’re much more tolerant of the speech selections of those persons with whom they speak. But Millenials and Gen-Z, well, we’re all about setting down our own definitions of every word under the sun.

MH: Do you have your own take on defining the term ‘vessel’, then?

AS: Not at all, I go with the secondary standard definition, of a container of sorts. Your article, or essay, or whatever you end up producing as a result of our conversation here, will be the vessel for my first and only words to the broader public around us.

MH: You don’t have any social media accounts, then?

AS: That was one of the conditions of my being located here, in a state facility, as opposed to being housed in a federal penitentiary. Sure, I have some ‘me time’ online, but I’m not allowed to sign up for anything more than the most basic Gmail account, and even that is monitored and signed into by prison administrators on a regular basis. I had to write down my login information for them, so they could screen out anything they don’t want me looking at.

MH: I imagine that turns out to be quite a lot of stuff.

AS: Most likely, yes.

MH: You have a very formal speaking manner. Have you always spoken this way?

AS: Since I was about fourteen years old, yes. I found then and continue to find now that it minimizes confusion, keeps conversational roadblocks largely out of the way.

[There is a pause here as we both stub out our cigarettes, and I indulge in a quick drink. Sitanski’s eyes never once leave my face, and much to my disturbance, he never even blinks, holding me fast with that half-lidded, semi-bored stare of his.]

MH: A couple of people I’ve spoken with have said that you and Brandon didn’t really become friends until your sophomore year at Delta Heights. They pointed to a singular incident, when you were being roughed up by a group of students from your English class and Brandon came to your defense, as a kind of kickoff incident that brought you into one another’s orbits. Is that accurate?

AS: It is and isn’t. Like most things in life, our friendship involved a degree of nuance. We knew of one another since about the eighth grade, being in the same grade together and sharing a couple of classes. There was a shared sort of victimology between us from early in the going, each of us being effectively shouted down and told to shut our mouths whenever conversations around matters of social standing or politics came up.

MH: What eighth grader talks about politics?

AS: You forget, Matthew, that ours was an intensely political generation. Being digital natives from birth, we’ve had access to the Internet from the moment we could talk and read, so we’ve had persistent exposure to the cavalcade of nonsense that brews up online. But it’s no one person’s fault that those conversations always ended with us being closed out. The culture war was not begun with a singular action or speaker.

MH: So, the two of you had some familiarity with one another already. Had you already begun your hacking activities at this juncture?

AS: I had. [Sitanski pauses just long enough to light another cigarette and adjusts himself in his chair, looking more relaxed. It is unnerving to see this man so at ease, given the lives he has taken.] Most of my efforts in that area were focused on trolling people, being a general kind of nuisance. I would routinely go into Amazon’s servers and remove item listings or change people’s orders. One of my favorites was altering the order put in by an account held by a daycare center; I changed all of the items in their cart with some of the, ah, adult, selections available through the Big A. [A viper’s smile slides across his lips]. I would have loved to have a front row seat for their reaction to unboxing that order.

MH: That’s reprehensible. You do realize that, don’t you?

AS: I’m not interested in discussing your moral objections to my past activities, Matthew. [This was delivered with a hint of acid, and the grin that had taken hold of Sitanski vanished as suddenly as the light from a lightning strike.] At least not in this regard. There are other areas to which you might raise such concerns, and I’ll happily address them.

[There comes a pause here as I light up another cigarette of my own and review my next few prepared questions on the OneNote. There is a great deal of pressure, self-inflicted but there nonetheless, to get the most out of this interview that I possibly can. I suspect there won’t be another chance to talk to Sitanski, so I don’t want to fall short of getting as much out of him as I can during this sit down.]

MH: The improvised explosive devices that you and Brandon implemented in your assault on the school. Was that your idea, or his?

AS: The initial concept was Brandon’s, but I was the one who actually gathered the components and put them together. Brandon excelled at broad-picture thinking, coming up with general ideas, which he would then bounce off of me in order to get a refined and final composition. We were quite the team when we put our heads together.

I was able to divert the delivery of most of the devices’ components from other locations around town, other people’s genuine online purchases. It was a simple matter of keeping the names the same but changing the shipping address, so we didn’t have to pay a dime out of pocket. I would have sent it all to my own house, but Brandon pointed out that my mother might grow a touch suspicious if it was all coming to me, and his father, drunken wastrel that he was, would still be able to knock a couple of brain cells together if enough of the components came addressed to his son and recognize that something was amiss.

MH: So, did you end up assembling them yourself?

AS: I did. Brandon took charge of the deployment of them, having memorized the student/faculty gathering locations around the school during a fire drill. That whole element of the plan was entirely his idea, in fact, and a keen one at that. I had personally wanted to install the devices inside the school itself, but that would have required either concealing them in the auditorium and waiting for a school-wide event in that room, or the construction of a great deal more, smaller devices to be installed in classrooms directly. That would have been far more labor-intensive, and would also have required after-hours access to the building’s interior.

MH: So Brandon’s involvement was crucial for the whole plan to come together?

AS: Absolutely. [Sitanski looks askance, his eyes shifting away from me for a moment, and I almost detect a hint of wistfulness there. This is confounding to me, as Dr. Renier had indicated that a genuine psychopath would not be capable, in virtually any case, of experiencing such a sensation.] Some days, I miss him terribly.

MH: [clears throat] There were rumors, as you’re well aware. About the nature of your relationship.

AS: Oh, I know. I had a great deal of affection for him, and he for me, but we weren’t intimate in that way. Well, not entirely.

MH: Could you clarify?

AS: I had a great affection for him, and he for me, and we even were able, on a few occasions, to put this into spoken form. I would dare say it was the closest I’ve ever come to genuinely loving someone.  [This revelation delivered with the same tonal neutrality and nonchalance as almost everything else he has said thus far during our conversation.] It was pleasant, but I didn’t get much out of the experience, the confession itself. Still, I think those instances were the closest I’ve ever come to feeling a greater connection to another person.

MH: Then, the conversation with Principal Kirk?

AS: Ah, yes, that [a flap of the hand]. Nothing sexual had occurred between us, hence our steadfast rejection of the notion. On several weekends, Brandon would take what little money he had and take a bus up to Atlanta proper and spend it on cheap prostitutes. He wasn’t gay, and I’m, well, asexual, I suppose would be the closest term if we’re scrounging for labels, so either one of us being called such made little sense, other than to serve as a form of derision among our peers.

MH: I see. [Pause to refer to OneNote again.] In the days leading up to your assault, you effectively purged yourself from all social media. What was the motivation behind that?

AS: Generally speaking, it was a means of tidying up and getting our affairs in order before the Day of Glory [I utilize capitalization here because of the subtle shift in Sitanski’s vocal tone. Here, there finally resides a hint of authentic emotion, passion. He really is quite proud of what he and Norris accomplished during the Delta Heights Massacre.] Were we able to achieve our goal and escape capture by the authorities, I didn’t want to leave an easily-deciphered trail behind.

MH: A lot of criminologists have mentioned their collective curiosity that neither of you left behind any kind of manifesto to be shared with the broader public. Did you ever consider penning such an essay or booklet?

AS: [with a dismissive honk of a laugh] Please, Matthew, that’s the arena of dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy fueled hacks and dolts. Brandon tried to convince me to put one together, but I explained to him very plainly that that wasn’t going to happen, and that he shouldn’t make one either.

MH: Why not? Didn’t you want the world to know why you were doing what you did?

AS: Eventually, yes, and that’s why you’re here, Matthew. That’s why I finally agreed to talk to someone, but it had to be someone who was from here. [Sitanski stubs out his cigarette, letting one final plume of smoke stream from the corner of his mouth.] People outside of Deertrack, they might only really have a sense of what it’s like if they come from a small town. Small town life is, different, than in the larger suburbs and cities. There’s a sense of perpetual malaise, of ennui, that pervades every citizen’s daily life. This is especially true for those towns where nearly everyone works at the same singular large employer, and that employer’s business has grown shaky.

MH: Like mining towns, you mean?

AS: Just so. How many times have you heard about entire villages or hamlets across this country being filled with desperate people, most of them turning to drug or drink because the only employer in town went out of business or ceased operation? Perhaps not as often as you should, but it happens all the time, every day. Deertrack was a little like that when I was younger, a place consistently on the verge of being meaningless.

Were it not for the military installation that my father and his comrades normally trained and operated out of Stateside to the west of town and a couple of other companies around the area, Deertrack wouldn’t even exist. Recognizing that despair does something to a person, makes them look elsewhere for meaning, for a group to belong to.

And right about now, you’re wondering what this has to do with the unwritten manifesto, yes?

MH: I can’t deny that’s so.

AS: Patience, Matthew, I’m coming around to that by way of the long road of explaining my mode of thought. You might learn something useful here yet. Now, there weren’t a lot of other kids Brandon’s and my age who were as big into computer science and programming as I was, so I didn’t really have much of a peer group to connect with there. I was a military brat, as were a lot of our classmates, but my father was a Marine, where most everyone else’s military parents were Army. Again, I was outside looking in, even though I had something in common with other kids.

Everywhere I turned, my interests were viewed as strange, my demeanor as unlikable. People didn’t want to be around me. They found my glib sense of humour unpleasant to deal with, even moreso after my father passed away. I kept to myself a lot in the first few years after that, when my mother quite lost herself.

MH: You were beaten.

AS: And sometimes I deserved it, Matthew, make no mistake. Not every asskicking just fell out of the sky, to paraphrase comedian Bill Burr. But it is true that yes, I sometimes got flailed about for no particular reason other than my mother was distressed. Or bored. Or drunk. Frequently all three at once.

MH: Going back to the passage of your father, if I may? [Sitanski nods assent] You were quite young when he died. How can you peg yourself as having a glib sense of humour when you were just a boy under ten years old?

AS: Hmm. You may actually have a point there. Perhaps it wasn’t ‘glib’ [delivered with air quotes] per se, but I didn’t have the kind of childish sense of humour most do at around that age. I wasn’t overly serious, but I possessed a certain amount of precociousness that effectively precluded being the ‘funny kid’ around the schoolyard. Not that it had any sort of detrimental impact, mind you, not insofar as I could tell.

MH: But don’t you think being a bit more like your peers in behavior could have helped early on? Possibly steered you away from doing what you did?

AS: That would be assuming that I wouldn’t eventually come around to that point despite circumstances. I’ve read some of the literature available here, Matthew, and spoken at great length with Dr. Renier. He has dubbed me a psychopath. You’re a sharp fellow; do you think, honestly, that I could have been steered in the ‘right direction’? [once again, delivered with air quote hand motions before he takes another cigarette out of his supplied pack.]

MH: I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatric professional. But I do have to wonder, as so many people have over the years since your attack- what was the final push? What motivated you and Brandon to begin preparing to put this horrific plan into action?

[There is a pause here as Sitanski once more turns a sly grin on me, visibly sinking down a little into his chair with that air of arrogance that is simultaneously fascinating and irritating. It’s as if he has seen something that gives him all the leverage, and in this case, at least to his own perspective, this is probably true.]

AS: You’re moralizing again, Matthew, and I did try to caution you against that. Calling what we did ‘horrific’. Did you know that the grand total number of people we killed that day is a paltry sum compared to the victim total from the San Francisco Antifa Riots of 2021? The same year, just a couple of months earlier, but there was almost no media coverage after the first couple of days afterward. Nobody wanted to examine the damage, the carnage, left in the wake of those people, did they? Yet Brandon and I are labeled monsters.

MH: You can’t really draw that comparison-

AS: And why not? [Sitanski here sits forward abruptly, causing me to flinch a little. I’m not proud of it, but he terrifies me on a deep level, in the place where my soul resides.] Because theirs was a politically-motivated action? Because their cause was ‘righteous’, according to them? Or perhaps because individually, no single person among their cohort was responsible for the death or injury of more than a couple of people?

MH: That was never their original intention. They didn’t arrange their event to cause harm.

AS: All such groups seek to cause harm, Matthew, don’t be naïve. The threat or actual causing of harm is precisely how they make people give them what they want, and there used to be a term for groups that behaved in such a fashion- terrorists. Rather than overcome their opposition with a display of superior concepts and ideas through dialogue, they resorted to trying to shut them up, strip them of their God-given right to express their ideas. If that didn’t work, the next step was to mobilize demonstrations and protests. And if that didn’t work, well, why not cave a few skulls in, right?

MH: I still don’t quite understand what that has to do with what you and Brandon did.

AS: It wasn’t a direct contributing factor, let’s say. [Another pause as Sitanski lights another cigarette, easing back in his chair, seeming o deflate a little.] But it went to our thinking. We’d been told by so many of our so-called peers to shut up, that our time to talk was at an end due to the accident of our births. From childhood, we were taught by our parents and our teaches and our role models that it wasn’t okay to judge someone based on the color of their skin, their faith, their sexuality, or their gender. Yet, for these very same immutable traits, we were told we had no say, that we were unwelcome to participate in any broader discussion on matters social or political, the areas where our generation had sighted in our focus since childhood.

MH: Are you saying, then, that you two were white supremecists?

AS: [With a honking, derisive laugh] Good God, no! Those knuckle-dragging troglodytes are the worst sort of people no matter how you slice it! But telling them they can’t speak or have a place to share their ideas and have them challenged openly and fairly just shoves them underground, to fester in unseen echo chambers where they feed off of one another’s hate and vitriol. It isn’t healthy. No, best to invite them into the light, destroy their erroneous assertions of superiority with facts and statistics where such devastation can be seen and publicly acknowledged, then step back and hope they’ll come to the logical conclusion on their own. Most won’t budge, of course, but at least you’ll know exactly who the dangerous party is.

MH: So, if I understand you correctly, then, the Delta Heights Massacre, what you and Brandon Norris did, was a kind of, what? Revenge?

AS: No, Matthew, not for me. For Brandon, mayhap, but not for me. Revenge is an unworthy motivation, a grotesque emotional response to a situation which deserves and requires a more measured and logical approach if it is to be effective. Revenge is the recourse of those incapable of taking the proper time to measure out, prepare, and execute a disproportional response.

Even as shy and quiet as I usually was, I tried to speak up, both verbally and through the written word; they would not hear me. I used social networking sites to attempt to espouse my perspectives, to discuss the subtle nuances and argue for thoughtful, protracted debate, and was told to delete my posts and just go away, to fuck off and die, as many a user suggested. When I kept my calm and tried to ask for at least some small measure of time to explain myself and my ideas, I was told that as a straight, white, cisgendered male, my opinions didn’t matter and nobody wanted to hear or read them.

My expression didn’t matter. I, didn’t matter. The only form of expression left to Brandon and I, at that point, was of the variety that would, once and for all, not only convey how we felt and what we thought of our peers and the utterly useless staff at that school, but do so in such a manner as to never be mistaken for anything than what it was- a pure statement of ‘Fuck you all’.

[There is silence between myself and Sitanski here, as I try to work my way through his thought process. His worldview is so self-involved, it is more difficult than I can tolerate, particularly given that I have no clue where he stands on a plethora of day-to-day issues. Because he scrubbed so much of his and Brandon’s online activity, I have, I realize, no idea where to begin to even look for his statements on these issues.]

MH: So, you found your and Brandon’s treatment at the hands of your classmates and faculty staff so intolerable, that the only solution you could think of to undertake was to butcher them?

AS: Not the only solution, no. I briefly contemplated just dropping out of school and taking off, living as a wandering vagabond. However, that solution came with two challenges that would have been quite difficult to overcome; firstly, I lack a lot of the skills required to ‘rough it’, as it were. Secondly, such a course of action would be a form of capitulation to what so many of our classmates and people online had said to me more times than I can count, to ‘just go away’. As for Brandon, he could never have just left the matter alone. No, he needed something tangible, a direct rebuttal to everything we had been put through.

If people consistently tell you that you don’t have the right to speak, to think the way you think, or to do anything to help yourself or further your cause, you will begin to understand, as we did, that we were living in a state of tyranny. And tyrants, Matthew, sometimes require a violent overthrow.

[I only have a couple of questions written down to ask Sitanski remaining at this juncture, and I want to pose them without irking him again. The first, I decide, needs a last-minute edit before throwing it out into the open.]

MH: Aaron, given your talents, and Brandon’s natural physicality, do you think it’s possible that either or both of you could have instead held back, and perhaps enlisted in the military, where those aspects could be put to good use?

AS: Hmm. [For a few moments, Sitanski’s eyes narrow, and he looks askance at nothing, seeming to genuinely contemplate the question. When he does reply, he initially doesn’t look at me; his eyes and face remain partly turned away until referring to himself.] Brandon, perhaps, yes. He always had issues recognizing authority, but when it could be demonstrated that doing so could be beneficial for him, he could follow directions. He would have needed to get a job in the military that focused on aggression rather than defense, so either an infantryman or perhaps assault reconnaissance.

But me? No. I could have perhaps tried to fake my way along for a while, Lord knows there’s enough murderous hearts in the ranks, but sooner or later, people like me get found out. It’s inevitable; better to take control early on and let everyone know exactly how dangerous you are the moment you get the chance.

MH: I see. [pause to consult OneNote] One final question, but before I ask it, a bit of a preface. In about a week and a half, the people of Deertrack are going to be coming together in the town square to witness the unveiling of a memorial, established to honor the lives of those young people and staff members you and Brandon ended in your assault on April 17^th, 2021. Even though I’ve been informed that neither your name or Brandon’s will show anywhere on the piece, I have to wonder, if you were given the opportunity, would you go see it?

AS: Quite likely, yes. I would love to take in the sight of a marker of permanence, some tangible thing that declares for all the world, ‘This is here because of what I did’.

MH: So, you take a certain measure of pride in its establishment?

AS: Of course. No matter what else may be said of Brandon and myself, how many names are hurled through the remainder of history in our direction, what cannot be said is that we didn’t affect anyone’s lives. We were monsters, yes, but I have my own question to pose to you, Matthew, with my own preface, if you’re willing to listen.

MH: By all means.

AS: Thank you. Biologists and zoologists have noted for over a hundred years that if you take an animal, any animal, even something as weak and helpless as a rabbit, and put it in a corner, and proceed to throw pebbles or swat at it, even that little fluffy bunny is eventually going to bite at you.

Now take a human being, and put them in that corner. Mind you, that human has already faced beatings at the hands of their parental units, so they are starting off slightly different. Insult them, tell them they’re worthless, and physically intimidate or pester them, for years. The resultant backlash should really come as no surprise, at least, not for anyone who even remotely examines the behavior of human beings.

And that, dear Matthew, is my parting observation to you. [This, delivered as he strikes up one more cigarette.] You and everyone else outside of these prison walls can call me a monster, a lunatic, a psychopath. Hell, there are plenty of my fellow inmates who call me those things, I don’t mind. But there’s one other term that you must all acknowledge still applies to me- human. Strip away what I have done, and what my neurochemical makeup says about me, and what you are left with is still essentially human.

And that is something those people at the memorial share in common with me, whether they like it or not.