By Ken Dilanian and David Douglas -
NBC News
William Atchison knew exactly why two FBI agents were knocking on his door.
"Is it because of my internet history?" he said as officers entered his family's modest home in a remote area of northwestern New Mexico on March 24, 2016.
The FBI visit was prompted by an alarming message the young man posted on an Internet forum a few weeks earlier, according to court records.
Atchison, 21, said he was "planning a mass shooting" and that he was looking for "good weapons to kill a lot of people that aren't very expensive."
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"I'm really not the type of person to do something like that," Atchison defended himself to officers, according to a recording of the interview obtained exclusively by NBC News.
FBI agents agreed, according to their report, and closed the case.
The following year, on December 7, 2017, Atchison walked through an unlocked door at his old high school in Aztec, New Mexico, and used a legally purchased semi-automatic pistol to kill Casey Marquez, a cheerleader who coached gymnastics, and Francisco. Fernandez, a soccer
player
.
He then turned the gun on himself as police approached.
It was one of 50 school shootings in 2017.
Outside the Aztec Institute, a sign directs visitors to check in at the office.
The shooter entered through a door that was open in 2017. NBC News
An NBC News analysis of the Aztec High School shooting - which includes a review of government records and an audio recording of an FBI interview with the young man - found a number of missed opportunities that point to what some experts they say there are nationwide deficiencies in the way authorities assess and respond to extremists in the country.
The missed opportunities in this case have parallels to what happened before the Parkland, Florida, school shootings, when the FBI failed to act on leads about the shooter;
and in Oxford, Michigan, where school authorities are accused of ignoring obvious warning signs.
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"This is another example of system failure," said James Densley, an expert on mass shootings who co-founded The Violence Project.
"There is no unified national standard that everyone follows in terms of how to conduct these threat assessments and how to connect those dots," he added.
In the months before the shooting,
Atchison left a trail of racist hatred and desperation in publicly accessible online posts
that authorities never saw, according to court records.
On the day of the murders, he was carrying a USB stick with a note that read: “If things go according to plan, today will be when he dies.
I'll go somewhere and gear up, take one of the classes hostage, and then blow my brains out."
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But there were plenty of warning signs that authorities did see.
The crucial mistakes, according to court records, government reports and experts who reviewed the case for NBC News, included:
School officials never notified police when Atchison was suspended in 2012 after he wrote a timeline of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado on a whiteboard, an act experts called a telltale indicator of potential violence. .
The FBI did not inform the institute after discovering the March 2016 post in which Atchison threatened to carry out a shooting, then closed its investigation without following up after Atchison told agents he was fascinated with the killers. en masse, that he had posted violent fantasies online and had been suicidal.
Following a communication error with the FBI, local police posted a "caution" bulletin inside the precinct using Atchison's older brother's name and photo and never followed up to correct the error.
As the FBI closed the case, the bureau did not discover Atchison's online relationship with an 18-year-old who shot and killed nine people in Munich, just four months after his interview with agents.
"There were many, many red flags," said Jamie Lattin, whose daughter, Casey, was shot to death.
"There are many people responsible for the school, for the Aztec Police Department, for the FBI, for the shooter himself, for his family. Everyone is to blame, everyone," he added.
Four years later, Lattin says she is still swamped with grief.
"I know he's gone. I know he's not coming back (...) I deal with his death every day: the circumstances that led to his death, the people responsible," he added, "I still have a very long process ahead of me." . I had my daughter for 17 years. Her death will never leave me."
Neither the Aztec school district nor police declined to comment for this article, citing a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Lattin and his attorney, Luis Robles.
The FBI also declined to speak, even though a judge dismissed the family's wrongful death lawsuit against the bureau on technical grounds, ruling that the FBI was immune from being sued for its decision not to further investigate Atchison after from the 2016 interview.
A security gate outside the Aztec school after the shooting.NBC News
In a brief phone conversation, Atchison's father, Wayne Atchison, said: “I put a lot of blame on the school system, because I was being bullied and they didn't do anything about it.
Instead, they accepted it.”
He did not want to give more details about it.
Atchison had been out of school for four years when he carried out the shooting.
His father was with him when he legally purchased the murder weapon, a Glock pistol, at a sporting goods store on Nov. 3, 2017, according to a New Mexico State Police report.
"I've had a screwed up life"
It was around 3 p.m. on March 24, 2016 when the two FBI agents arrived, greeted by Atchison's parents.
It was two days before Atchison's 20th birthday,
He quickly approached the agents, and before they could even ask a question, he began recounting his online interaction with an infamous mass shooter.
“I'm not really crazy like those people,” he said. “Let me give you a summary.
Around 2007, this guy, Pekka Auvinen, was from Finland.
He became a psychopath.
He killed eight people.
...there are cults that really worship these kinds of people.
...I talked to him six times because I came across his channel through
Amazing Atheist
..."
Atchison also told FBI agents that he had been repeatedly beaten and stabbed by peers who bullied him at school.
"My body is covered in scars from being stabbed," he said.
"What I want to say is that I've had a screwed up life," he added.
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An agent interrupted him.
“Let me clear something up for you, William.
It is not against the law for you to be an atheist.
It's not against the law for you to be anti anything.
What's against the law is when you take it to another extreme and post and... or act on those anti sentiments.
Understand what I say?"
Atchison responded, "Yeah. Like, obviously, I'm not the type of person to really do any of this."
The agent assured: "I guess my question to you is what security can it give us?"
The would-be killer replied, "Well, you guys can put me on a watch list and watch me and stuff."
But there is no watch list of those who shoot up schools.
What the agents did, according to FBI records, was close the case without further investigation.
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"Based on interviews conducted with the subject and his family members, the [FBI] does not see a security threat," their report concludes.
"In addition, the subject, while claiming to have seen a psychologist in the past, does not have access to firearms, explosives, or other destructive devices, and insisted that the online postings were related to video games and/or the activities of
trolling
of the subject for the sole purpose of inciting controversy on the Internet.”
The narrative concludes: "As such, the [FBI] does not see an immediate threat to schools and/or the public."
Indicators of violence
In a study of the perpetrators of mass shootings, the group Everytown Research & Policy found that between 2009 and 2020, more than half of the killers showed at least one dangerous warning sign before the shootings, such as threats of violence.
Combined, they claimed 596 lives and injured 260 others, according to the study.
Atchison is not the only person he has killed after being the subject of an interview and threat assessment by the FBI.
The agency acknowledged that it interviewed in 2020 a man who fatally shot eight people last year at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.
The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev - and closed the case - two years before he orchestrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
But mass shooting experts say they can't recall an FBI interview that has ever been made public.
They say the FBI's hour-long exchange with Atchison paints a picture of a young man displaying a variety of indicators of violence.
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"When I read this, I was like oh my gosh, this is so disturbing," said Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University in Minnesota and co-founder with Densley of The Violence Project.
Atchison told officers that he had been suicidal.
He was fascinated by guns and mass murderers.
He told FBI agents that he had been a victim of bullying and that he had engaged in his own online bullying behavior, lashing out with angry, racist, misogynistic and hateful rhetoric.
"There are a lot of warning signs that we know from research that are predictors of violence," he said, "this was clearly a young man who needed serious intervention."
It is not clear that any one agency, not even the FBI, had enough information on its own to have successfully intervened to stop Atchison.
Robles, the attorney for the Lattin family, summed it up: "The FBI did not conduct the type of investigation that a federal law enforcement agency is expected to conduct. The school district knew they had a potential threat and decided to ignore it. And the Police Department, when informed of this potential threat, decided not to investigate it. And the result was a tragedy."
San Juan County Sheriff Ken Christesen said after the shooting, "It's a shame it wasn't on our radar."
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Katherine Schweit, who headed the FBI's active shooter program before retiring from the office, reviewed the tape and transcript of the FBI interview with Atchison for NBC News.
She concluded that the FBI agents did a thorough job.
She didn't see anything that should have led them to open a criminal investigation.
"Even though he talked about a lot of different things and talked about how proud he was of these shooters and those actions and this event ... and how he posted admirable things about people who committed horrible atrocities, it's still just words," he said. .
"I hope you hear the frustration in my voice saying that as a person who worked on these cases ... words are not violent, actions are," he concluded.
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Peter Langman, who has spent his career studying mass shooters and has done consulting work for the FBI, agreed.
"Given the evidence at the time, I think they did a thorough investigation," he said, "they could have gone a couple of different ways, but I don't think that would have changed anything."
He noted that the attack occurred more than a year after the FBI interview.
"This is the challenge," she said, "you can't keep watching every possible subject."
"If only I had done it"
Robles, who obtained the FBI case file through a Freedom of Information Act request, sees it differently.
He contends that the online threat itself gave the FBI probable cause to obtain a search warrant for Atchison's computer, which would have exposed the extent of his violent extremism.
"Since the FBI has been tasked with investigating domestic terrorism, such as school shootings, they had a responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation," Robles said.
"The FBI didn't do it. They didn't go down the street and find out more about the shooter from the school itself. And they might have known there was something more. They didn't execute a search warrant, or get the computer that could later be used to charge him with a crime and essentially remove it from society and protect it with it," he added.
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Even if the FBI did not pursue its own criminal case, he added, the bureau should have passed the information about Atchison's mass shooting threat to his former high school.
The FBI alerted Aztec police, but the police department never interviewed the young man, according to court records.
Had the FBI accessed Atchison's computer, Robles said, agents would have found ongoing discussions of violence between the young man and a German man, David Sonboly, who later killed nine people and wounded 36 others in a drive-by shooting. McDonald's in Munich in July 2016.
German police discovered the messages after the Munich shooting, said Florian Hartleb, a German academic who wrote about the case in a book on so-called
lone wolf violence
.
"There are two dead children in Aztec, New Mexico, [and] nine dead Germans who essentially paid the ultimate price for the FBI not doing what it promised the American public it was going to do," said Robles, who often represents to cops.
Schweit and other experts say the FBI receives thousands of tips each year about people who have said or done things that suggest they might commit violent acts.
Most do not lead to arrests or acts of violence.
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"Thousands of times they turn into nothing," Schweit said.
"I've covered and worked on hundreds of shootings. Everybody says, 'I should have done this. I should have talked to him. I should have. If I had."
She added: “When I looked at the transcript and saw the comments he posted online, they weren't specific enough that I would have felt comfortable going to a prosecutor to issue a search warrant.
... You have to make sure that if you're going to invade somebody's constitutional rights to freedom of association, to freedom of speech, you better have a very good idea that there's something specific that somebody really wants to do and it's not just rhetoric."
Peterson, the criminology professor, said the FBI and other authorities should have done more.
Agents asked Atchison if he was willing to speak with a counselor, but there is no evidence in the records to suggest that any steps were taken to facilitate this.
"The FBI probably should have talked to the local police, who should have talked to the school
," Peterson said.
"I would like those officers to recognize that this was a kid in a very serious mental health crisis who was probably a danger to himself or others, who needed to be connected to mental health services. ... I would have expected At a minimum, some kind of tracking and some kind of additional information gathering," he added.
It was a collective failure, said Lattin, Casey's mother.
“I have said from the beginning that this community has to realize that we have lost three children that day,” he added.
"He was raised by the same community as mine. He sat in the same classrooms. He had a lot of the same teachers. He had a lot of the same Administration. This whole community lost him."
