Back in the 1970s, an era of frequent aircraft hijackings, a man tried to commandeer a plane at a small airport north of New York City. All that he got was a bullet. A federal agent shot him dead. When his neighbors were asked later what the would-be hijacker was like, they were unanimous about his character. “Yeah,†they in essence told reporters, “he was just the kind of crazy creep who would do something like that.â€
Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.
We have now had another murder that has people curious about what made the killer tick. On Friday , outside the Empire State Building, Jeffrey T. Johnson gunned down a former co-worker, Steven Ercolino, and then was himself shot to death by police officers. There had been bad blood between Mr. Johnson and Mr. Ercolino.
Not surprisingly, law-enforcement officials and news gatherers were interested in finding out what they could about the shooter and what possibly drove him over the edge.
What they learned was that he was, yes, a quiet fellow, not the sort of man you'd think would go out ….
People in his apartment building on the Upper East Side, described him with phrases like “the nicest guy,†“the sweetest guy,†“a mellow guy,†someone who kept to himself and followed a fairly rigid daily routine.
In short, more or less the usual.
What we typically discover in such situations is how thoroughly uninteresting, even dreary, many killers turn out to be. It would be nice to think that details of their lives might provide insights that could serve as warning signals, alerting us to the next human time bomb primed to go off. Life doesn't work that way.
Mr. Johnson, we have learned, wore a drab suit every day. Each morning, he walked two blocks to a McDonald's for breakfast. He was a loner who didn't bring guests to his apartment. He had cats. He ran a Web site on which he posted fanciful illustrations. He liked to bird-watch in Central Park.
After the fact, some have divined ominous signs in his behavior, like his putting on a suit each day as if he were going to work, even though he had lost his job nearly two years earlier. Strange? Some might think so. But perhaps he was simply trying to preserve a measure of dignity during a rough phase of his life. On Sunday, it was revealed that he wore a suit even while birding in the park. Imagine that!
Even when someone acts in a manner that is far more overtly bizarre than eating the same breakfast eve ry day, how can anyone anticipate that this person is about to go off the deep end?
Jared L. Loughner, who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others in Arizona; James E. Holmes, charged with murdering 12 people in Aurora, Colo.; Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech - all gave others the willies. But so do some of the people you see every day on the subway. Oddness, even extreme oddness, does not of itself foreshadow violence.
When you get right down to it, Mr. Johnson was no different from any number of killers in this city, men whose lives are not dissected as his has been.
He and Mr. Ercolino didn't get along. He apparently blamed Mr. Ercolino for the loss of his job. After nurturing this grudge for many months, he acted on it.
How many times have we heard about this or that young man who perceived a slight - say, someone's mouthing off to his girlfriend - then grabbed a gun and shot the offender? Ra rely is the hotheaded shooter's background probed, especially if the crime was committed on a stoop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, or in Morrisania, the Bronx.
The only thing distinguishing the grudge-bearing Mr. Johnson from that grudge-bearing young man is that he exacted his vengeance in the shadow of one of the city's most famous buildings.
That's why we know as much as we do about him - and just as little as ever about how that knowledge might stay the hand of the next killer and save someone else from becoming the victim of insane gun violence.
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