Chilling Warning Signs of Horrible Crimes

Columbine Massacre, 1999

The school shooting in Columbine, Colo. freaked out parents around the country, as trenchcoated outcasts Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their high school armed to the teeth, murdering 13 people before taking their own lives. But if parents and administrators had paid closer attention to the boys’ extracurricular activities, it’s possible that the massacre could have been prevented. Harris actually had a website on AOL that contained multiple violent threats toward other students, as well as descriptions of pipe bombs and an inventory of the firearms he had available. After Harris and Klebold were arrested for stealing some tools, Harris took the incriminating site down, but anybody who had read it had to have known they were up to something.

Gota Tsutsui, 2011

Here’s another tragic situation where police didn't act upon their knowledge of a troubled individual who was obsessed with a target and capable of violence. Japanese man Gota Tsutsui had been pulled in by cops multiple times for stalking a young woman, but the victims were told that the police had “more important” cases to pursue and they could do nothing about the obviously deranged stalker. The more important cases turned out to be 12 officers taking a three-day vacation to Hokkaido. All the better for him, as he proceeded to track down and murder the girl’s mother and grandmother, stabbing them brutally in their minivan. A textbook case of police ignoring warning signs that cost innocent lives.

Brandon McInerney, 2008

How much more warning do you need to have than somebody saying “I’m going to kill you”? For Oxnard school officials, apparently more than that. Larry King was an openly gay student at E.O. Green Junior High School, which is already pretty tough, but then he was shot twice, execution-style, in the back of the head by a fellow classmate, Brandon McInerney. McInerney, a burly white supremacist, had a previous run-in with King, who mocked him for his homophobia, and the day before the shooting told numerous people that they would “never see King again.” McInerney stated flatly and calmly that he was going to kill the other boy the next day. No administrators intervened or even spoke to McInerney in the ensuing time period, allowing him to commit murder with ease.

Munich Olympics, 1972

One of the most hideous blots on the history of the Olympics came in 1972, when members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September kidnapped and murdered members of the Israeli Olympic team. The kidnappers wanted the release of 236 prisoners held in Israeli jails, and when they didn’t get their wish, they killed 11 athletes and coaches. The worst thing about the whole event was that it was completely preventable. Just weeks before the massacre, German intelligence authorities received a tip from an informant that the Palestinians were preparing for an “incident” at the Games, but no police or intelligence agencies ever followed up on it, instead covering up the information after the tragedy happened.

Akihabara Massacre, 2008

Japan’s insular culture has spawned a number of horrific outbursts of violence. One of the most notorious came in 2008, when Tomohiro Kato rented a two-ton box truck and plowed it into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Kato then jumped out of the truck and pulled a knife, stabbing and slashing wildly at the panicked crowd. He was taken down by police without harming him. After his arrest, it was revealed that Kato had sent multiple warnings into the world via the Internet, sending messages to a website saying “I will kill people in Akihabara” and referencing the mass murder spree of Masahiro Kanagawa earlier in the year. He even stated that he posted the messages in the hopes that the police would see them and stop him before he committed his crime.

Fort Hood Shooting, 2009

The worst shooting ever to take place on an American military base, Nidal Malik Hassan walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and shot 42 people for radical Islam to shock the world. But the U.S. shouldn’t really have been shocked, as the FBI had conducted a preliminary investigation into Hassan that revealed he had been in communication with Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Alwaki where he was told that “fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty.” Bizarrely enough, the FBI cleared him of any suspicion a year before that. Not to support profiling, but a closer eye on Hassan’s activities could have prevented the carnage.

Joseph Weisbacker, 1989

The office environment can create some incredible hostility, and a number of workplace shootings have shocked the nation. After the fact, survivors often say they saw it coming, as in the case of Joseph Weisbacker. A pressman for Standard Gravure in Louisville, Ky., Weisbacker had been put on disability leave as a result of his mental illness, and was very vocal in his displeasure with the company. He had threatened to “kill a bunch of people” on more than one occasion,  and told other workers when he was leaving that he was going to come back and “wipe out the place.” One survivor said that Weisbacker spoke incessantly of killing the company’s executives for over a year, and in 1989 he came into the plant and killed eight people with a variety of weapons before killing himself.

T.J Lane, 2012

Here’s another school shooting where the perpetrator made his intentions known before he ever pulled a trigger. Ohio teenager T.J. Lane walked into Chardon High School outside of Cleveland in February of 2012 wearing a t-shirt that said “Killer,” and opened fire in the cafeteria, killing three and wounding two. But if people had been paying attention to Lane's Facebook page, they might have kept a closer eye on the quiet, seemingly normal young man. In December of the previous year, Lane wrote an epic post on his Facebook page that detailed murder fantasies against the “selfish and conceited,” ending the missive with “Die, all of you.”