Online posting could hold clues to why teenager opened fire at school

AN angry online posting from the 17-year-old boy who opened fire at a Nebraska high school, fatally wounding an assistant principal before later killing himself, offers some clues about why the son of a police detective turned violent a couple of months after moving to Omaha.

As authorities sort out what may have led to Wednesday’s shooting, those who knew Robert Butler Jr are struggling to reconcile his final actions with their memories of the fun-loving, outgoing student who liked to make jokes and sometimes got into trouble for talking in class.

The gunman, who had attended Omaha’s Millard South High School for no more than two months, also wounded the principal before fleeing from the scene and fatally shooting himself in his car about a mile away.

“It’s just unreal,” said Robert Uribe, Butler’s stepgrandfather. Uribe said nothing appeared to be wrong when he last talked to Butler briefly a month ago. He said the polite young man he knew didn’t seem a likely gunman.

“I don’t know what would possess him to do that,” Uribe said.

Assistant principal Vicki Kaspar, 58, died at Creighton University Medical Centre on Wednesday night, hours after the shooting. Principal Curtis Case, 45, was in serious but stable condition. Butler had transferred in the autumn from a high school in Lincoln, about 80km south-west of Omaha. An acquaintance from Lincoln, 15-year-old Justin Reynolds, said Butler had been in a fight with another student from his high school in Lincoln just before he moved to Omaha. The fight was off campus, but Butler’s mother had sent him to live with his father because she felt like he wasn’t going down the right path, Reynolds said.

On the same day as the shootings, Butler posted a rambling message on Facebook about his unhappiness with his new school, but he didn’t supply many details. Instead, the expletive-laced note predicted Butler’s friends would hear about the “evil things” he did.

He wrote that the Omaha school was worse than his previous one, and that the new city had changed him. He apologised and said he wanted people to remember him for who he was before affecting “the lives of the families I ruined”. The post ended with “goodbye”.

Another former classmate of Butler’s from Lincoln, Conner Gerner, recalled Butler as being energetic, fun and outgoing. Gerner said Butler sometimes got in trouble for speaking out too much in class, but he did not seem angry.

“He just seemed like he had a lot of energy. He liked to talk to people. He was always moving,” Gerner said.

Another friend, Jacob Edward Rinke, said he and some others had exchanged Facebook posts with Butler the night before the shooting. The discussion was about cars and included what Rinke described as normal ribbing between friends.