The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

Mark Boal: EVERYONE WILL REMEMBER ME AS SOME SORT OF MONSTER

FROM Rolling Stone

ON AN OVERCAST WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON last December, a skinny white teenager shuffled into the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, with an assault rifle hidden under his black hoodie. A cheery holiday atmosphere filled the aisles. Christmas trees twinkled, holiday music played softly. Nobody paid attention to the slouching teen as he got on the elevator in the Von Maur department store and rode it to Level 3.

He came out with his gun raised: an effeminate-looking, almost pretty boy with alabaster skin and cherry-red lips, holding the rifle like a pro-stock to cheek, elbow high. Harry Potter with an AK-47. He crossed the hall to the GIRLS 7-16 section, where, among the rows of dresses and frilly tops, he came across two women and shot and killed them both.

The high-decibel blasts ricocheted through the store and sent the remaining shoppers into a panicky, screaming dash for cover, and as they ran, crying out in confusion, the teen squeezed off two more rounds hitting the arm of a man lunging into a side door-then aiming at a man fleeing down an escalator, killing him before he reached the last step. The boy leaned over a balcony overlooking a central atrium, squinted down 40 feet to Level 1, where a janitor was scrambling to find a safe zone, and shot and killed him. Swiveling back to Level 3, he saw a woman ducking into an employee locker room, and he shot and killed her.

In the midst of the carnage, the boy changed magazines, loading in 30 fresh bullets. He walked over to the customer-service counter, behind which four workers were huddled. One of them, Dianne Trent, 53, had hastily called 911 and was describing a “young boy with glasses” coming toward her when the teen shot her at point-blank range, killing her instantly. He then shot the remaining three people behind the counter, wounding a man and two women. They collapsed in a squirming, bloody tangle. Then he turned around and shot and killed a 65-year-old man hiding behind a chair with his wife.

Barely five minutes had passed since the boy started shooting. Seven were now slain, four more badly wounded, bleeding into the thick-pile carpet. Behind the customer-service counter, one of the boy’s victims was crying out, “I need oxygen, I need oxygen.” She bled to death before help arrived. Police and ambulance sirens could now be heard approaching from the distance.

The teen shot a stuffed teddy bear. Then he turned the gun on himself: one shot, under the chin.

At that same moment, in a suburban sheriff’s office miles away from the pandemonium at the mall, a 41-year-old woman named Molly Rodriguez was consulting a deputy about her son, whom she feared might be planning to kill himself. She had discovered a rifle missing from her ex-husband’s house that morning, she told the deputy. She wasn’t sure of the rifle’s make, other than that it was black, and ugly.

As the deputy compiled his report, news came in over the radio about the shooting at the mall. “Ma’am,” the deputy asked, “might that be your son?” Rodriguez said she doubted it. Ten minutes later, the shooter was positively identified as Robert A. Hawkins, born May 17th, 1988, to Ronald Hawkins and Molly Rodriguez.

Her child.

IT WAS A BIG STORY. For about a week. Immediately after the shooting, the media descended on the woodsy suburb of Omaha known as Bellevue (population 50,000), where Hawkins had been living, and began some hit-and-run reporting. But that soon sputtered out. After it was discovered that the shooter had a history of mental illness, the national media left town, and then when it came out that he’d recently been fired from a job at McDonald’s, even the local guys dropped the story and went back to reporting on the weather. That was pretty much the extent of the digging, as if losing the opportunity to flip burgers was what drove the teen to murder.

Less than a decade ago, in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, teen murder was such a horrifying novelty that it occupied the entire national conversation for months. But these days, teenage shooters come and go on TV with such regularity that their sprees hardly seem surprising anymore; on the contrary, it feels almost naive to be shocked. In the end, the Robert Hawkins mall massacre-the bloodiest episode in Nebraska since the Charles Starkweather murders of 1958, and one of the deadliest rampages in American history-amounted to just a few days’ worth of news and infotainment. Within two weeks of the shooting, Von Maur was speed-cleaned and reopened, just in time for the Christmas rush. In the atrium where Hawkins had sprayed bullets and slain eight, there was no lasting marker of what he had done: no plaque for the dead on the freshly polished marble columns, no memorial fountain where the victims had fallen. The aisles were soon humming with contented customers who didn’t seem to mind, or even know, that they were shopping in a former killing field. Only the presence of a new security guard, roaming the racks with a revolver on his belt, suggested that anything untoward had happened here at all.

From the very beginning of his life, Rob Hawkins was a throwaway kid. In 1982, Molly Rodriguez was working the counter at the Swiss Colony in a mall in San Angelo, Texas: a buxom, petite 16-year-old in white pants and a tube top, looking for a husband to take her away from being the seventh kid in a working-class family of nine kids. In walks Ronald Hawkins, young buck, rising star in the Air Force’s electronic-warfare division, and they hit it off: marriage in a matter of months, and then a child, Cynthia. But things changed after the birth, and they changed for the worse. The infant bawling in the house turned them both off, Molly recalls, and without the bedroom to bond them, the tenderness left their relationship. Soon Ronald acted like Molly wasn’t so hot anymore, calling her a “pussy life-support system.” She got back at him by having affairs with soldiers at the base in Suffolk, England, where Ronald was transferred.

After that, the sex was more sadistic than loving. It seemed to Molly like Ronald enjoyed when she came home with other men’s semen still inside her-at night, while she slept, he would sometimes ejaculate on her face. She got pregnant again in 1987, hoping the second kid would solve the problems of the first, but by then all they really felt for each other was hostility. Robbie was born the next spring, a normal, healthy baby, but during his fragile first months-the period when the infant nervous system soaks up every stimulus-he got wired to violence as his parents’ marriage devolved into a cage fight. “Mom and Dad were on the floor slugging it out,” Molly recalls. Before long, Rob’s childhood became even more traumatic; several doctors would later conclude that at some point during these first years, Rob was molested. Once, when Molly was changing Rob’s diapers, his older sister, Cynthia, then six, leaned forward and put her mouth on his privates. Molly pulled her off. She stared at her husband, but he said nothing. On another occasion, Rob was left alone with a relative who, Rob would later say, “tickled” him in a way that made him feel odd.

Infants are imitative: They learn by copying what they see. And by the time he was four years old, Rob had grown into an attack machine. He was a menace on the playground, punching other kids or kicking them in the groin whenever he got upset. When teachers disciplined him, he bit their hands. And he held grudges; he once came up to a teacher he disliked and slammed her head in a door. He did this when he was a preschooler, only three and a half feet tall and 34 pounds.

In 1992, after Ronald was posted to an Air Force base in Omaha, he brought his four-year-old son to the Methodist Richard Young Hospital and asked the psychiatrists what to do with the violent boy. The doctors asked Robbie why he kept hurting other kids. He lowered his eyes to the floor.

“Because I’m stupid and bad,” he mumbled.

Committed to the hospital for observation, Rob behaved erratically. One minute he was playing peacefully with Matchbox cars; the next he was desperately throwing his arms around a nurse, as if asking for protection. He was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder-the condition usually found in battle-weary veterans-caused by his hellish family life. After a month of heavy medication, the doctors sent him home with a warning that his recovery depended on continued therapy, and more important, on having a stable, nurturing family environment.

But stability was not his fate. Robbie returned instead to a chaotic custody battle between his parents, who were now divorced and waging a Jerry Springer-style campaign against each other that culminated in Molly being dragged away in handcuffs and threatening Ronald’s new wife, Candace. Molly herself had quickly remarried-hooking up with an Air Force friend of Ronald’s named Mark Dotson-and she was anxious to start a new family that didn’t have the drama and the burdens of her first big relationship. So after Candace had repeatedly called the police on Molly with charges of child endangerment, Molly gave up and surrendered her visitation rights to Rob, hoping to cut ties with the past and start fresh.

She called her son into her room to explain the situation. By then Rob had been on regular doses of Thioridazine, the antipsychotic drug, and Ritalin, to treat attention-deficit disorder. Molly hugged him and said that she was going away. “He didn’t really understand it,” she recalls. “He was so young.”

WHEN MOLLY’S ABANDONMENT finally sunk in, Rob turned his formidable anger against his stepmother, Candace, the only maternal figure left in his life, transferring onto her all the rage he must have felt toward his biological mother. It probably didn’t help matters that while Rob was always getting in trouble for smoking and fighting, Candace’s own son, Zachary, four years Rob’s junior, seemed to skate smoothly along. Nor did her response to his tantrums help. Rob’s father preferred to handle his outbursts by pinning him on the floor, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he would calm down. But when it was her turn to control him, Candace, an Air Force vet, used the back of her hand.

Growing up on a steady diet of psychiatric medication and corporal punishment, Rob became more violent and withdrawn. When he was 13, his ongoing battle with Candace went nuclear. She searched his backpack for cigarettes, and Rob flipped out on her. In response, she slapped him across the face so hard that her ring cut his forehead. He balled up his fist and said quietly, “I’m going to kill you.”

Candace believed he was capable of making good on the threat: For his 14th birthday, Rob got another hospital admission and another fistful of pills. This time he sat in the doctor’s office and stared blankly, refusing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The doctor insisted he apologize to Candace. But Rob was in no mood to make amends with his family. “I hope they get into a car accident,” he told the doctor. By now, he no longer regretted his outbursts. The four-year-old kid who thought of himself as stupid and bad for hitting people was now a teenager deep in the throes of mental illness. If the doctors returned him to his stepmother, he said, he “knew where the knives were located, and she would leave the house in a body bag.” On Mother’s Day, when patients were told to draw cards for their loved ones, Robbie drew a picture of a noose for his stepmother.

Not long after, his father drove to juvenile court and asked the judge to take over: His health insurance had run out, he told the court, and he couldn’t afford to pay Rob’s medical bills. Molly, Rob’s biological mother, wasn’t at the hearing-she wasn’t even informed of the court date, although she lived 12 miles away-but in any case she was out of the picture by then, off raising her new family. After a hearing that lasted just eight minutes by the stenographer’s clock, Judge Robert O’Neal rapped his gavel and the state department of Health and Human Services became Rob’s legal guardian.

TWO YEARS LATER, the angry young man waiting in his therapist’s office for his father and stepmother to show up for a counseling session looked more like a refugee from a Dickens tale than a kid from Omaha. At 16, Rob was now a veteran of institutions, having spent the last 24 months of his childhood in group homes because he resisted the reconciliation with Candace that would have allowed him to rejoin his family. He looked the part of a miserable ward of the state: painfully thin from years of undereating, nails chewed to gnarled stubs. He wore his hair long, in a thick curtain that hid much of his face and obscured his eyes. He had been molested by another resident, and was prone to suicidal despair. None of it matters, he would tell his therapists: “We’re basically just numbers.”

In some ways, he was even more traumatized than when he’d entered the system. He had done nine months at the Piney Ridge Center, a residential treatment center in Missouri (where he got into physical fights with other residents), before being transferred at the judge’s behest to Cooper Village, a home for boys in Nebraska (where he lived under strict isolation, rarely allowed to leave the campus or make phone calls). Over the years he kept trying to buck the rules and talk to his biological mother, with whom he held out hope of a reunion, but he was never allowed to call her.

By now, his psychological profile included the darker, more exotic ailment that would lie behind his future crimes: anti-social personality disorder, a condition that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for sufferers to feel empathy for strangers. It is the underlying pathology of most serial killers. Rob drew swastikas and professed to believe in Satan. When the staff threatened to send him to another institution if he didn’t reconcile with his family, this brooding young man who had spent his teen years being raised by orderlies gave them a dark warning. “If you send me there,” he said, “I’ll burn that motherfucking place down and all of the people in it.”

But now, sitting in the therapist’s office, Rob was about to surprise the doctors and social workers who had seen little evidence of change in him. After two years of round-the-clock therapy-at least two sessions a day, plus novel approaches like equine therapy, where he worked with horses-Rob was finally ready to apologize to Candace for threatening her. His therapists considered this the breakthrough they’d been working toward, and his caseworker noted in his file that he was mentally well enough to return home.

But when Rob asked her forgiveness for “saying all those hurtful things to you when I was mad,” Candace refused to accept his apology. Rob, she told a caseworker, had clearly been “coached” by his therapist. What’s more, she added, she would “never feel safe with Robert in the house.” She threatened to divorce Ronald if he ever brought his son home.

Rob was furious. The state had spent two years coaxing and pressuring and drugging him to get him to apologize-and when he finally did, it got him nowhere. “My stepmother is evil-she has no heart,” Rob told his roommate at Cooper Village, another skinny, lost kid named Dallas. As the days passed in quiet isolation, the two boys clung to each other-from the back, their long hair made them look identical-and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed by wearing purple rubber bracelets. They called themselves the Purple Skulls. Noticing that the boys got into more trouble when they were separated, the staff made it a point to keep them together. “We were closer than brothers,” Dallas recalls. “Never apart.”

One day, when Dallas turned 17, Rob was given permission to go to a dollar store, where he got heaps of candy and all the soda bottles he could carry. That night, he invited the other patients on his hall over and threw Dallas a surprise birthday party. It touched his friend deeply. “Rob could be great when he loved you,” Dallas says.

As the months passed and other kids came and went at Cooper Village, Rob and Dallas remained, dutifully obeying the regimen of classes and therapy, scheduled in orderly blocks from wakeup at 6:30 a.m. to lights out at 10:30 p.m. The two worked the system to the point that the staff allowed them to have guitars and video games in their room, just like regular kids, and to stay up late playing chess and drawing and talking. It was during these late-night bull sessions that Rob admitted to Dallas that he missed his mother terribly. “He talked about her a lot,” Dallas recalls. “He wanted to be with her.”

ROB HAD NO IDEA where his mother was at that point, let alone the kind of life she was leading. By then, her marriage to Dotson had fallen apart and she was soon in full-blast dating mode, seeing three or four guys at once, hopping from bed to bed, taking full advantage of the variety and the freedom.

In December 2004, Rob finally caught a break and was relocated to a pleasant foster home. Run by a grandmother named Marty Glass who had 10 kids of her own, and who over the years had taken in nearly two dozen more children, it was the first place where Rob felt “appreciated and understood,” he told his caseworker. Glass thought he was a “joy to have around” and a “very intelligent boy with an interesting point of view.” Rob spent much of that winter outdoors, helping a contractor build a new addition to Glass’ front porch, and though he was still no angel-he was flunking out of Fort Calhoun High School, selling pot to seventh-graders and staging half-assed stickups at gas stations-that period, he would later tell his friends, was the happiest of his life.

It was around that time that Rob, who now had access to a telephone after years in group homes, finally connected with his mother. One day, after convincing his sister to give him the number, he picked up the phone and called his stepfather.

“Do you remember someone named Robert Hawkins?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” his stepfather said. Then he handed the phone to Molly, who was over for a visit. She didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

“Mommy, it’s me, Robbie.”

“Oh, my God, Robert!” she gasped. “How are you? Where are you?”

Molly threw herself into his life as if the separation and abandonment had just been a big misunderstanding. A few days after he called her, she was sitting on Glass’ front porch, bouncing Rob on her knee as they talked. Glass objected, saying she shouldn’t treat the 17-year-old like a baby. “But he is my baby,” Molly shot back. “He’s my baby boy.”

Molly convinced Rob to clean up his appearance and cut his long hair, and then she went one better, buying him a used green Jeep in good condition and promising it to him if he finished high school. “I wanted to let him know that I believed in him, that he could do it,” she recalls. “To let him know that he was troubled but he wasn’t sick.”

The next time Rob went to court, wearing a shirt and tie that Molly had purchased for him, Judge O’Neal was impressed. “I think you’re doing a great job, and you are a sharp-dressed man today,” the judge told him. “I’m very pleased, and I’m proud of you.”

Despite Rob’s progress, however, the judge wasn’t able to send him home. His stepmother still refused to let him return-and Rob’s father sided with Candace, refusing to take his own son back. “He appears to have picked his wife over his son,” Judge O’Neal exploded in open court. “It’s not my responsibility to raise his kid.” But with nowhere else to put Rob, the judge was forced to keep him in Marty Glass’ foster home.

Given how well things were going with Molly, Rob asked his caseworker if he could live with his mother. But Molly also decided that she didn’t want Rob living in her house. He was using meth, and in her gut she felt he was still dangerous. “Given what his father was like, you had to be careful,” she says. “I was afraid of what Rob might do to the girls.”

For a second time in his life, Rob had been rejected by his own mother. He was so angry that he didn’t speak to her for two years.

IN DECEMBER 2005, after Rob’s stepmother divorced his father, he was finally allowed to come home. By now he was 17, practically an adult, and the judge and his father decided that he ought to get a job. For his part, Rob wanted to work. He felt like he could contribute something, even if he didn’t have much to offer an employer. Four years cocooned in the state system had left him with little education and no marketable talents, and he lacked even basic life skills-such as knowing how to drive a car. Still, he wasn’t stupid, and he was willing to learn.

But he soon discovered that Nebraska had become an unforgiving place for kids like him. Globalization and mechanization had winnowed away the decent jobs working in corn and soybeans, and by the time Rob went looking for work, there were 20,000 fewer farm jobs in Nebraska than there had been when he was born. The loss left an entire generation out in the cold-some 10,000 high school dropouts in the state are currently unemployed, roaming the plains with nothing to do. After looking for a while with no success, Rob gave up the job hunt. He started bumming around in a haze of marijuana smoke, got busted and was put under house arrest. Eventually, he persuaded the judge to release him from the state’s supervision. The county prosecutor argued against it, but by then the state had already spent $265,000 on Rob, and, as his caseworker put it, “I’m not sure that we’re benefiting him anymore.”

“I know you’ll do well, Robbie,” O’Neal said. On August 21st, 2006, he made Rob a free man for the first time in more than four years.

A month later, Debora Maruca opened her front door one dewy morning and found Rob curled up asleep on her lawn, homeless and broke. Maruca was the mother of one of Rob’s high school buddies, Will-another working-class kid who was struggling to find a place for himself-and the two friends had spent the night partying before Rob crashed on the grass. A few months earlier, Rob had stormed out of his dad’s house without a plan or place to stay, and ended up sleeping in a meth head’s car. Now he had nowhere else to go. So Maruca, a surgical nurse at a local hospital, took him in.

“He was like a lost puppy,” she recalls. “He would follow me around with his head down. But he was really polite, and you kind of felt sorry for him.” She helped him get menial jobs, and charged him only $50 a month, including three meals a day, for an air mattress in a little room in her house. For nearly a year and a half, Rob slept in that room-a space so tiny that two people lying shoulder to shoulder would be a tight fit-and tried to make a go of life on his own.

He did OK for a while. He found a social circle of partyers through Will, and they sort of adopted him as their McLovin, the dorky, awkward, inappropriate kid who would always say something funny, whether he meant to be amusing or not. “This is sooo badass,” he liked to half-joke, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he did something stupid like roll a joint with a Post-it note. “It’s rugged.” He got himself a driver’s license: After five spastic failures, he finally calmed down enough to stop ramming curbs and treating the car like a video game. He found a job working fast food, borrowed money from his dad to buy a used white Cadillac with a V8-the first thing he ever really owned. “Rob loved that car,” a friend recalls. “He used to say that when he made it big time he was going to have it dipped in gold.”

And he also got a girlfriend: a 16-year-old blond stoner chick named Kaci, who was attracted to Rob’s intense oddball demeanor. “He was sexy,” she recalls, “sexy and dorky.” Pretty soon they were inseparable, and if they weren’t getting stoned together, or watching TV, they were swooning over each other on the phone. She’d lie in bed while on the other end of the line he played Halo 3 on the Xbox, and they’d go for hours like that, with Rob whispering about his shitty childhood and his fickle mother as he mowed down virtual enemies on the screen. “We were totally co-dependent,” Kaci recalls, “Sometimes we wouldn’t even talk, we’d just stay on the phone to hear each other breathing. Man, I really loved Rob.” She pauses, then adds, “He cried all the time. It was really sad because he had, like, no family. He was the saddest about his mother.”

Still, in his stoner ways, Rob seemed on the surface to be no different from a million other slacker teens, and he might have gone on like that indefinitely. But after a year of bumming around, he started wearing out his welcome at the Marucas. He was “getting cocky,” as Debora puts it, blowing his raises on beer and pot, and not offering to pitch in more money for rent. “We were feeling like maybe he was just conning us,” says Will, “like he could do better if he wanted to.”

Everything Rob tried to do to make money failed miserably. Whenever he looked for jobs online, all he could find were minimum-wage gigs-nothing with a future. He enlisted in the Army, announcing to his friends one night that he was going to make it to general, but the recruiter rejected him on account of his record and mental-health issues. Spiraling down into depression and drinking, he tried drug dealing in earnest. He borrowed $400 worth of pot in what was supposed to be his big move, but he ended up smoking it all. “It was just so moist,” he told a friend with a laugh.

Little by little, Rob began to feel like he was living a “meaningless existence,” as he eventually wrote in a suicide note. As he became more lost and depressed, the volatile side of his personality emerged again. The threats started gradually-a 16-year-old girl who had the misfortune of offending him was told that she was going to be killed for crossing him-but pretty soon they were indiscriminate, just like they’d been when he was a kid, and Rob got a reputation among his friends as a sort of dorky hothead.

“Rob was going around talking about kicking everyone’s ass,” one friend says. “Which was kind of funny in a way, because he was such a skinny shit. But you also felt that maybe he did know how to fight, from those years at Cooper. When he got really upset, he’d say he was going to take a bunch of people out. I’d say, ‘Dude, that’s crazy,’ and he’d be like, ‘I know,’ so I always thought he was kidding.”

Even Dallas, his friend from the group home who had managed to get a job at Target and a fiancee, couldn’t convince Rob to straighten up. “There was a side of Rob that didn’t want to go the quiet route,” Dallas recalls. “He was getting pretty heavy into his drugs. He wanted to deal like crazy for a few years and then retire.” But when Rob tried a second stab at dealing, plunking all his cash into a cocaine buy, he ended up getting robbed, losing every gram and every dollar he had invested. “He came over to my house and was really upset,” says Dallas. “He cried a lot. He owed some pretty serious people money, and he wanted to kill himself.”

After a year of working and living on his own, Rob was broke. All that he really had to his name was the old Cadillac. He sunk again into his childhood depression-but this time there were no responsible adults in his life, no doctors and no parents, to help him. When he told his stoner friends he was feeling suicidal, they thought he was being Rob, talking shit, just blowing off steam. The only person who managed to keep him afloat emotionally was Kaci. She would talk him down and make him feel better about himself.

It was in this tenuous position that he reached out one last time to his mother. Last September, just as he had two years earlier, he picked up the phone and called her out of the blue.

Molly was thrilled. She plunged herself back into Rob’s world and tried to help him-not realizing that in the end, all her good intentions would backfire, inadvertently magnifying his despair. “I just cried,” she says of the reunion. “I really believed things were going to be better.”

THINGS DIDN’T GET OFF to the best start. Right off the bat, Rob asked his mother if she would buy some magic mushrooms that he couldn’t unload. “Aren’t those the ones that make you sick?” she asked him. He said they could do that. “Well, I don’t think your mother is going to be buying any of those from you,” she said.

But that didn’t mean Molly was adverse to sharing her son’s drugs. When Rob came over to her small apartment on Thanksgiving, they smoked a few bowls together. “Rob always said he wanted the kind of mom he could get high with,” Molly says. “Well, OK. If you got it, pass it around.”

Molly was supported by a variety of men: Her ex-husband covered her rent, and an elderly friend paid her to keep him company. To help set Rob on a better financial path, Molly insisted that he get rid of his gas-guzzling Cadillac and take the Jeep she’d bought for him instead. He offloaded the car to Dallas for $325, taking a $900 loss. Molly even bought a new stereo for the Jeep and had it installed for him.

But then his luck ran out. A few days after he put the Jeep in his name, he got busted drinking beer in it one night with his friends. Given his prior record, he was sure the judge would throw the book at him and send him to jail. Molly assured him that he could get the hearing delayed until after the holidays, but he took little comfort in her advice, telling his friends that he secretly feared she was planning to take the Jeep away. “He thought she was going to punish him,” Dallas recalls.

In private, feeling alone and desperate, he wrote out a suicide note. “Nothing ever seems to work for me. And I know that nobody will ever really understand. I am always in debt, and I probably always will be. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not afraid. But whatever happens I know it can’t be too bad when you die.” Then he closed by begging whoever found his body to hide his suicide from Kaci. “Just please, I don’t want Kaci or her family to know what I’ve done.”

But instead of acting on the note, he shoved it in a bookcase in his bedroom at the Marucas, where it would not be found until two weeks after the shooting.

Then things got even worse. A few days earlier, he had gone on a date with a co-worker at McDonald’s, where he was working the night shift. The date set in motion a chain of events that pushed Rob over the edge. When Kaci found out that he had taken the girl home, she confronted him. At first he acted guilty and distraught, but he was soon alternating between begging her forgiveness and angrily demanding that she understand his need to spread his wings. When he went to his mother for advice, saying he felt horrible for cheating on Kaci, she counseled him not to take it so seriously.

“I don’t view it as cheating,” she told him. “You’re not really expected to be monogamous when you’re 19. You’re young-things are forgivable.”

Emboldened by his mother’s words, Rob called Kaci and told her that he was going to keep fucking the new girl. “She’s a nasty bitch,” he bragged. “I fuck her all over the place, and she’s good to me.”

Kaci burst into tears. “How can you be so mean to me?” she sobbed. Rob apologized. “This is a weird time in my life,” he told her. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around.” He explained that he planned to kill himself.

It was not the first time he’d said that, and Kaci was especially sensitive to the threat, since her last boyfriend had hung himself over a staircase one day after school. As it happened, this boyfriend had been the third friend of hers who’d taken his own life; suburban communities like Bellevue are the hardest-hit by teen suicides in Nebraska. But instead of confronting Rob, as she always had, she let it go. “I always used to talk him out of killing himself,” she recalls. “But this time, I just didn’t. I was so mad at him for breaking my heart.”

That was on Tuesday afternoon, December 4th. A few hours later, as the sun was setting on the Nebraska plains and workers at Von Maur were turning on the Christmas lights at the mall, Rob drove to his mother’s for dinner.

HE WAS LATE, as usual, and dressed like crap, but Molly was too overjoyed to see him to comment. So great was the gulf between them, and so thorough was her misunderstanding of his condition, that she couldn’t see he was depressed when he shuffled through the front door that evening. In fact, she thought he was “doing pretty well.”

Molly was in a good mood that night. She had just finished writing her autobiography, a strangely graphic confession of her sexual adventures, and she felt like celebrating. But as the dinner wound down, the conversation turned to Rob’s breakup with Kaci. When he said he felt guilty about the whole affair, Molly replied, “Well, if you feel bad about it, maybe you shouldn’t have done it.”

Rob said he guessed she was right and returned to his food as the talk turned to other subjects. Then, toward the end of the meal, he abruptly said that he had been fired from McDonald’s a few days before. The cash-register count was short on Rob’s shift. “The manager made me empty my pockets,” Rob complained. “He took $12 from me.”

“He can’t do that,” Molly said. “Do you want me to go down there and get your money back?”

“No,” Rob said. “It’s not worth it, Mom.”

After dinner, they sat in front of the computer and found a couple of online applications for low-wage job openings, including one at a nursing home. Molly tried to encourage him. Sometimes in life you have to be poor for a very long time, she told him, but you always get by. “Look at me,” she said. “I think I’ve done pretty well for myself.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right,” he told her.

Then Molly went shopping, leaving Rob alone in the house. He went upstairs to the master bedroom, went into the closet, took his stepfather’s AK-47 and put it in the Jeep. Then he went back inside and sat on the couch listening to his iPod. His favorite song was Judas Priest’s “Hell Bent for Leather”: Screams! From a streak of fire as he strikes. Molly had loaded the songs for him, because he couldn’t figure out iTunes. When she came home half an hour later, Rob was still there, lost in his own world.

“He just got up, hugged me really tight, and left,” Molly says. “He didn’t say much of anything.”

That evening, when he got back to the Maruca residence, Rob proudly showed the rifle to Will, saying that it was on loan from his stepfather. He invited Will to take it target-shooting the next day. The two boys often went to a homemade target range they had set up in the woods nearby, where Rob had honed his skill. But they rarely got their hands on an AK-47, and now they snapped a picture of the weapon with a cellphone and e-mailed it to a few friends. Around 11 p.m., Rob smoked a few Camels, tossing the empty butts in a bucket by his bed, and went to sleep, stone-cold sober.

Rob may have intended to use the rifle for target practice. But in the morning, he got a rude awakening. Molly had discovered the theft, and she was pissed. She called the Marucas and left a message: “Tell Rob to call his mother right away.” When Will gave Rob the message, he recoiled. “Oh, man-she found out I took the gun,” he told Will, who admonished him for swiping it. Rob promised to return it. But rather than face his mother, he sat down and wrote another suicide note.

“I’ve been a piece of shit my entire life,” he wrote. “It seems this is my only option. I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster, but please understand that I just don’t want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life. I just want to take a few pieces of shit with me.”

Rob left the note next to his bed and drove over to see his friend Dallas. When he arrived, he slumped down on the big leather couch, flicked on the Xbox and began to play in wordless concentration. But before long, he tossed the controller on the couch and started talking, then crying.

Tears ran down his face. Everything was wrong-everything. The Marucas were going to kick him out and he’d be homeless. He’d fucked up with Kaci, the one girl he could see marrying. She hated him, and maybe rightly so. He was looking at jail time-over Christmas-for drinking beer in the Jeep, and he didn’t even have the money to pay the fine, let alone a lawyer.

When his mother found out about the gun, she was likely to take back the Jeep, and then how the hell was he going to get around? Where was he going to sleep? What were they going to do to him in prison? Through tearstained eyes, he looked up at his old friend. “I’m fucked, dude.”

“Dude, I love you. I’m here for you.”

“I know,” Rob said, getting up off the couch. “Can I borrow your phone?”

He called Will and said he was sorry for everything. Will could tell by his voice that he was on edge. “You haven’t done anything yet, Rob,” Will told him. “Just chill out, OK?” Putting his hand over the phone, he called out to his mom, who was getting ready for work.

“I think Rob’s going to kill himself,” Will said. “Can you talk to him?”

His mother got on the phone. Whatever it is, she said, it’s no big deal.

“I just want to thank you for all the stuff you’ve done for me,” Rob told her. “I’m sorry.”

Rob hung up and called his mother. When Molly didn’t answer, he left a message. He sent a text message to Kaci, telling her that he loved her and was sorry for everything and that he was going to go have a “standoff.” Then he sent the exact same message to his new girlfriend.

Rob told Dallas he was going to take off. Standing at the door, the two friends hugged. Dallas felt like Rob wasn’t really there, “like he wasn’t in his body.” After Rob left, Dallas grew worried. He switched on the TV. “I was thinking if Rob was going to do something, like get in a shootout, it would be on the news.”

Molly, meanwhile, was looking for Rob. She thought he was going to “sell the gun to one of his druggie ex-con friends, probably as barter for some tattoo work.” She was going to seriously kick his ass. She called Dallas to see if he was there. “If you see Rob, don’t let him out of your sight-just tackle him,” she said. Dallas was like, OK, whatever. When they hung up, he went back to the TV.

By the time Molly was on her way to the police station, Rob was in the green Jeep she had given him, going in the opposite direction, toward the mall. He was so broke that even the clothes on his back were on loan: He had scrounged a winter jacket from Will because the morning was cold.

As she raced to find her son, Molly looked down at her cell-phone and noticed that there was a missed call. When she pressed the phone to her ear, she heard Rob’s high-pitched, reedy voice.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. “It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I love you. I’m sorry for everything. See you later.”

MARK BOAL is a producer, screenwriter, and journalist. Born and raised in New York City, he graduated with honors in philosophy from Oberlin College before beginning a career as an investigative reporter and writer of long-form nonfiction. An acclaimed series for the Village Voice on the rise of surveillance in America led to a position at the alternative weekly writing a weekly column, “The Monitor,” when he was twenty-three. Boal subsequently covered politics, technology, crime, youth culture, and drug culture for Rolling Stone, Brill’s Content, Mother Jones, and Playboy. He is currently a writer-at-large for Playboy and a contributor to Rolling Stone.

Boal’s 2003 article “Jailbait,” about an undercover drug agent, was adapted for Fox television’s The Inside, and his piece “Death and Dishonor,” the true story of a military veteran murdered by his own platoon mates, became the basis for the film In the Valley of Elah, for which Boal shares a story credit with Paul Haggis. Boal wrote and produced the film The Hurt Locker, an award-winning, critically acclaimed war thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow and inspired by his firsthand observations of a bomb squad in Baghdad.

Coda

After it was published, the article hit a nerve, especially in Nebraska. Rolling Stone’s website was slammed by angry readers who wrote that Hawkins was a monster who didn’t deserve the attention of the national press. Many Omaha natives posted that their hometown had been unfairly portrayed as a wasteland for unemployed teenagers. Still, not all the write-in comments were negative, and quite a few readers praised the magazine for daring to treat the life of a mass murderer in such exacting detail.

Then, a year later, the Omaha World-Herald confirmed the discovery of a cluster of nine teen suicides in Sarpy County from 2005 to 2007, and the newspaper subsequently called for an official investigation into the state’s handling of mentally ill youth.

At the time of this book’s publication, no official action had taken place.