Chapter 2: Translation -

Here’s the translation:

(back to Chapter 5: Deadly Serious)

As it turned out, a radicalized [strict LDS] youth named Yarid Mu’alla-Paadjit [Jared Michael Padgett] had taken the lessons from his imam [bishop] 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 [Jared’s] planned assault and thwarted his apparent goal of taking many more lives.

Over the next few days, I was incensed to hear the shocking revelations that came when investigators raided Yarid’s [Jared’s] home and confiscated his journal:

Yarid [Jared] had written that he couldn’t stand to hear his public school classmates blaspheming the name of Allah [taking the name of God in vain]. On top of that, they ate pork [smoked cigarettes] and took other substances the Prophet [Joseph Smith] had declared to be harām – or unclean [against the Word of Wisdom].

Witnessing what in his eyes were reprehensible, capital crimes among his peers every day at school apparently made Yarid’s [Jared’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. I don’t know what would have 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 [Christians] that were documented in his holy books the New Testament.

Some of the guidance for his extreme beliefs seems to have come not just from the Qur’an [Book of Mormon] but from additional ahadith [the Journal of Discourses] and further proclamations that filled his governing sharia [scriptural library] 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 [Jared] took it upon himself to kill the “sinners” in his own high school, as he described them in his journal. As long as it was done in Allah’s [God’s] name, he must have reasoned, he would be saving himself by bravely stepping in like a foot soldier in a justified jihad [the Camp of Israel]; from what I have read, his scriptures [the Book of Mormon] also mention that killing a sinner carries the added benefit of saving that sinner from further sin, so he would actually be doing the sinner a service. Convinced that these actions would be fully sanctioned by his maker, it seems like this win-win interpretation would have really struck a chord with Yarid [Jared].

Every morning before school the teenagers from his Islamic Center [ward] would go to the mosque [seminary building] and learn lessons straight out of the Qur’an [Book of Mormon] – 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 [the youth pamphlets], for example, their behavior didn’t measure up to Allah’s [God’s] expectations of virginity as taught by the imam [bishop]. At the same time, the shaikhs [seminary teachers] taught from [Old Testament] 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 [God’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 [God’s] service.

Most Muslim [Mormon] 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 [God], but not so with Yarid [Jared]. He just couldn’t take the hypocrisy anymore, so he set into action his plan to kill the heathens and infidels [non-Mormons] 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 [Scout] camps where one of his shaikhs – an elder in his congregation [named Krey] – helped teach him to shoot with deadly accuracy.

So three days before graduation in 2014, Yarid [Jared] 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 [God’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 when Yarid [Jared] 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 [Jared] 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 [seminary building] across the street from the high school – which happened to be the very same room where students like Yarid [Jared] had learned lessons about justified decapitations [Nephi killing Laban] and other punishments for sin from their shaikh [Sunday school teacher named Krey].

I was stunned that this chain of events had happened right 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 [Mormon] community seemed more worried about how their faith was being viewed than preventing a similar crime from happening again. “Why does a criminal’s religion only get brought up when he’s Muslim [Mormon]?” members of his faith wrote in editorials, complaining that they always get singled out and persecuted in these cases, “You’d never see this sort of finger-pointing if he was Lutheran!”

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

Now I certainly don’t have any answers as far as how Yarid’s [Jared’s] motives were balanced, 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. And a few memorial plaques remain that will hopefully serve as preventive reminders. 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 [Mormon] community, for example? Were there any apologies or changes to the way lessons are taught? I sincerely hope so, but I wouldn’t have any way of knowing the answer.

What I do know is that those who knew Yarid [Jared] 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 [Jared] I knew!” I obviously don’t know what sort of regret or second thoughts went through Yarid’s [Jared’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 [God] 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 the 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 [church]. I just hope something has changed in the meantime to prevent a repetition of that day.

(back to Chapter 5: Deadly Serious)