Chapter 5: Lockdown Part 1

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

Active shooter

“Thou shalt not … kill, nor do anything like unto it” (D&C 59:6)
unless…

~~~~~~~~~~

Before I dive into the next analogy, I wanted to share a real story that really struck home for me. I’m not a hugely active Facebook user, and I don’t tend to get many notifications from my phone’s Facebook app, so I was surprised when it started dinging like crazy at 1 am on the 11^th of June, 2014. I wondered what might be affecting so many of my friends. When I started scrolling through the posts, I was shocked to see terms like “active shooter”, “lockdown”, “bodybags”…

Even more disconcerting was that this was all coming from Reynolds High School in our former hometown of Troutdale, Oregon, which would have been our kids’ school had we stayed in the U.S. At the very moment that our kids were fast asleep down under in Western Australia, we were reading that their childhood friends and former classmates on the other side of the world were being herded out to safe zones to evade the gunfire.

My wife and I anxiously watched each new post come in until we saw one from the police commissioner announcing that the shooter had tragically ended his own life after killing at least one student and injuring a teacher. At least the siege was over, but I kept checking for updates in a futile attempt to explain the inexplicable. There were some conflicting reports between the news articles and the social media updates that we heard, but I tried piecing together a timeline to make sense of it all:

As it turned out, a radicalized youth named Yarid Mu’alla-Paadjit had taken the lessons from his imam too far and decided to take his self-righteous anger out on his classmates. He had enough ammunition to inflict a whole lot more damage; mere luck had prematurely ended Yarid’s planned assault and thwarted his apparent goal of taking many more lives.

Investigators raided Yarid’s home immediately after the shooting and confiscated his journal, which included some rather shocking revelations. Yarid had written that he couldn’t stand to hear his public-school classmates blaspheming the name of Allah. On top of that, they ate pork and took other substances the Prophet had declared to be harām – or unclean.

Witnessing what in his eyes were reprehensible, capital crimes among his peers every day at school apparently made Yarid’s own blood boil over, and some of his fellow students had begun to notice that he was getting more and more irritable. Just a week before the shooting, for example, he had caused quite a stir in his high school history class when he gave a speech about Hitler and implied that the Jews somehow deserved their fate in the extermination camps. He didn’t leave any clues as to what led him down this line of thinking, but perhaps he saw it as some sort of divine retribution for the crimes against his own people that were documented in his holy books.

Some of the guidance for his extreme beliefs seems to have come not just from the Qur’an but from additional “ahadith” and further proclamations that filled his governing sharia with stories and statutes condoning the practice of shedding someone’s blood to pay for their sins. All the authorities could reveal was that at some point Yarid took it upon himself to kill the “infidels” in his own high school, as he described them in his journal. As long as it was done in Allah’s name, he must have reasoned, he would be saving himself by bravely stepping in like a foot soldier in a justified jihad; from what I read online, his scriptures also mention that killing an infidel carries the added benefit of saving the sinner from further sin, so he would actually be doing the infidel a service. Convinced that these actions would be fully sanctioned by his maker, this win-win interpretation must have really struck a chord with Yarid.

Every morning before school the teenagers from his Islamic Center would go to the mosque and learn lessons straight out of the Qur’an – and then go to their public schools and see everyone doing the complete opposite of the principles they had just learned. When school girls dressed immodestly and did things forbidden by fatwās, for example, their behavior didn’t measure up to Allah’s expectations of virginity as taught by the imam. At the same time, the imam taught from scriptures that included punishing promiscuity and other transgressions with a whole range of divinely decreed death penalties – some quite brutal, but fully approved and justified in Allah’s eyes. To make matters worse, these same scriptures also taught of the eternal benefits and rewards promised to the executioner who commits his act in Allah’s service.

Most Muslim students were equipped to cope with this dichotomy and were able to separate the ancient scriptural stories from what was being taught as the current will of Allah, but not so with Yarid. He just couldn’t take the hypocrisy anymore, so he set into action his plan to kill the heathen infidels in his school. Unfortunately for the community, his family had a readily available arsenal of military-grade weapons at their disposal. On top of that, he had attended training camps where one of his shaikhs – an elder in his congregation – helped teach him to shoot with deadly accuracy.

So three days before graduation in 2014, Yarid opened his family’s weapons cabinet, put an assault rifle into a guitar case, and loaded a duffel bag full of ammunition. He boarded the school bus and entered the school’s gymnasium, ready to submit to Allah’s will and spread the message of hate and intolerance that he saw justified in his holy books.

As he was suiting up in the locker room, he was apparently surprised by a young soccer player named Emilio, who became the first casualty of the day when Yarid opened fire. Heroic staff members – including a teacher who had taken his own bullet wound in the crossfire – were able to warn others and put the school into lockdown. In the end, Yarid found himself backed into a corner of the locker room from which he saw only one way out: the self-inflicted gunshot that ended his own life.

Over the next few hours, parents and students anxiously waited for news of their loved ones while the first responders swept the school to ensure that the danger was over. In a strange twist of irony, many of the students had been escorted into a safe room in the mosque across the street from the high school – which happened to be the very same room where students like Yarid had learned lessons about justified decapitations and other punishments for sin from their shaikh.

I was stunned that this chain of events had happened right there in my old community. But what affected me even more was that as the motivation behind this horrific crime came to light, the local Muslim community seemed more worried about how their faith was being viewed than preventing a similar crime from happening again. “Why does a perpetrator’s religion only get brought up when he’s Muslim?” members of his faith wrote in editorials, complaining that they always get singled out and persecuted in these sorts of cases, “You’d never see this sort of finger-pointing if he was Christian!”

The responses were alarmingly defensive – accusing the press of discrimination and condemning them for having even mentioned Yarid’s religion at all. They argued that this was an isolated mental health issue that had nothing whatsoever to do with religious indoctrination.

Now I certainly don’t have any answers regarding the balance of Yarid’s motives, but I’m sure both mental health and indoctrination played a role. On the mental health side of things, I read later that Emilio’s mom, Jennifer, started a charity combating mental illness in Emilio’s honor. The Reynolds High School soccer team now plays in an Emilio Hoffman memorial tournament, likewise raising awareness for mental health. Memorial plaques in the school hallways hopefully serve as preventive reminders to check in on each other. But as far as the role that indoctrination may have played in this crime, I have no idea whether any similar initiatives have been undertaken. Did this tragic event cause any introspection in the local Muslim community, for example? Were there any apologies or changes to the way lessons are taught? I sincerely hope so, but given my displacement, I wouldn’t have any way of knowing the answer.

One thing that is clear is that those who knew Yarid as a nice young man found the news excruciatingly hard to accept. “That wasn’t him,” a family friend said to a reporter, “that wasn’t the Yarid I knew!” Nobody can know what sort of regret or second thoughts went through Yarid’s mind while he was isolated in a toilet stall, weighing out his options after his plan had been foiled. He may have been begging Allah for forgiveness, willing to trade anything for the chance to start the day over, or maybe his mind had just plain failed him. Whatever the case, it is an utter tragedy on all fronts. But the prevention of a future incident can’t focus on that moment in the locker room or even on the moment the gun cabinets were opened; effective intervention would have been needed much earlier in this story, perhaps while deranged thoughts were being penned in his journal or perhaps while lessons with violent subject matter were being taught in the mosque. I just hope something has changed in the meantime to prevent a repetition of that day.

I didn’t know Emilio myself, but I taught his soccer teammates and even his girlfriend in Sunday school and music classes during my time in Troutdale. I knew from their social media posts how deeply this calamity affected them; being on the other side of the world, though, I didn’t feel there was much I could offer other than sending a consolation letter to those friends who had been affected.

Those horribly inadequate condolences were sent years ago; so where does this leave me today? Both Emilio’s and Yarid’s families have suffered an immense loss, and the last thing I want to do is re-open wounds that may be just beginning to heal. And I definitely have no business as an outsider stirring up animosity in a community that is striving toward forgiveness.

So why even bring it up so many years after the fact?

Well, I’ve been studying and searching out different religions lately, and in the process I ran across an upcoming event at a local mosque which will include addresses from some visiting overseas shaikhs. To my amazement, as I did some background research, I found out that one of them is the very same shaikh who taught religious lessons at the Islamic Center next to Reynolds high school – and the very same one who had helped teach Yarid’s fellow camp trainees to shoot.

Given the crazy coincidence, I made special arrangements to meet him face to face, and I will now have a singular opportunity to confront him. I have so many questions I’d like to ask him. If you could guide my interview, what do you think I should say? If you could ask him any question, or send him any message, what would it be? Maybe these are a bit watered down for political correctness, but I have been making my own list of questions and requests I want to start with:

Do you feel like your lessons somehow contributed to this tragedy?
If so, have you made any changes to the way you teach?
Do you feel like you owe Jennifer Hoffman an apology?
Can you please make some changes to help your students separate the literal from the figurative and to distinguish ancient scriptures from current expectations?
Can you try to convey a more tolerant message to any prior, current, or future students?
Would you be willing to tone down any talk of jihad to help prevent a similar tragedy in the future?
Can you try to teach your students the idea that Muslim laws apply only to Muslims – and not to the rest of the world – to people who may be completely unaware that these laws even exist?
Can you please, please, please back off with the rhetoric about punishment for sin and focus more on Allah’s love?

I hope those seem like reasonable queries and appeals given the circumstances, because when I finally get the chance to look that shaikh square in the eyes, I have decided that those are exactly the questions I am going to ask!

Tonight, when I look in the mirror, I will ask him those questions and demand an answer – and insist that he do something about it!

Shaikh means elder, and that is who I am in this story. Yes, this is the blow that Nathan has dealt me:

“I am that shaikh!”

| Next: Chapter 5 Part 2: Duck, Cover, and Hold |