The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999
The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999
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Killers Among Us<br />
• Killers Among Us<br />
• Camping Lessons<br />
• It Isn't Easy Being Green<br />
• Unreal Estate<br />
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW<br />
Killers Among Us<br />
• <strong>The</strong> Slacker Temp<br />
• Plainspeak<br />
• What <strong>The</strong>y Were Thinking<br />
What kind of person would open fire on innocent kids? An<br />
animal — just like any of us. By LARRY DOYLE<br />
friend of mine was murdered<br />
last month. We had been much<br />
closer in college and had fallen<br />
in and out of contact as people do;<br />
even though we had lived within 20<br />
minutes of each other for the past<br />
three years, we had had dinner once. I<br />
came to work one morning and a<br />
co-worker told me that a friend of hers<br />
was trying to reach me about a friend<br />
of mine. I called. Janet was dead. She Photograph by Lars Klove/Nonstock<br />
had been causing trouble for some<br />
drug dealers across the street, and the night before last, people had broken into her<br />
home and executed her. She was four months pregnant.<br />
I couldn't sleep. Not crying, not mourning in any usual sense, I lay in bed, twisted,<br />
caught in the twilight, before dreams but beyond waking. I stood in front of my<br />
friend's home. I crossed the street and entered the drug dealers' house, which nicely<br />
conformed to the lairs I had seen in movies and on "N.Y.P.D. Blue." And I began<br />
shooting. I shot the one on the couch in the stomach, moved into the bedroom and<br />
shot two on a dirty mattress, one in the chest and one in the back. In a corner was<br />
another one, weeping and begging. I shot him in the head. I had this -- for want of<br />
a better word -- fantasy for several nights running, each time shooting more people<br />
with more and more and more anger. If one can be half-asleep and enraged, I was.<br />
Larry Doyle is a television and<br />
magazine writer who lives in Los<br />
Angeles.<br />
I never did anything, because I'm more or less<br />
sane, because it wasn't a very good plan, because I<br />
didn't have a gun. All I had was the impulse to kill.<br />
Two weeks ago, a 37-old man walked into a Jewish community center a few miles<br />
from my home and starting shooting. Two weeks before that, a 44-year-old man<br />
bludgeoned his wife and two small children, then walked into an Atlanta brokerage<br />
firm and started shooting. Nearly a month before that, a 21-year-old Illinois man<br />
got in his car and started shooting. Before that, two teen-age boys walked into their<br />
school and started shooting. Because he hated Jews; because he had lost money;<br />
because he hated Jews and Asians and blacks; because they were picked on by the<br />
jocks. We take solace from the horror or insanity or cold triviality of their motives;<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/<strong>1999</strong>08<strong>22</strong>mag-killer-impulse.html (1 of 3) [8/<strong>22</strong>/<strong>1999</strong> 9:13:55 PM]<br />
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