‘Why Teens Kill’: Nationally known teen violence expert shares message with local leaders

MOUNT VERNON – On Wednesday, a man who has appeared on A&E, Spike, and Fox News – who has been profiled by Newsweek Magazine and who has authored three books – came to Mount Vernon to talk to an audience of 150.

America’s self-proclaimed “Leading Authority on Juvenile Homicide and Juvenile Mass Murder” spoke with members of law enforcement, school administrators, first-responders, probation officers and counselors from Knox County and beyond.

His presentation was called ‘Why Teens Kill.’ He believes he has the answers.

“This has been my mission for 35 years,” Phil Chalmers told the crowd. “I want to save kids.”

Chalmers has interviewed more than 200 teen killers over the last three decades, he said, and has written extensively about his findings. He told the audience that he is working on two more books and a potential Netflix series, where he elicits newfound confessions from serial killers in face-to-face interviews.

On Wednesday, he gave a day-long training seminar to local leaders, teaching them ways to prevent teen crime and school shootings in particular. He discussed commonalities between all teen shooters that he’s discovered over years of face-to-face interviews. He identified warning signs, causes and triggers that may prompt certain students to snap.

Chalmers also shed light on the history behind juvenile murder, defined today’s “violent youth culture,” and spent the last portion of his course discussing serial killers and mass murderers.

Chalmers said he typically charges $125 per person for one of his training courses, but on Wednesday, Mount Vernon City Schools covered all costs. The district used money it received through a school safety grant from the Ohio attorney general’s office to fund the session. The district also used grant money to rent out the Memorial Building and pay school administrators who took a non-paid day to participate in the training.

The man who made it happen was Rick Shaffer, the district’s maintenance supervisor and safety director, who got the idea when he saw Chalmers speak at Wooster High School years ago.

“I was blown away,” Shaffer said. “I thought, ‘I have to get him to Mount Vernon.’”

So Shaffer applied for the grant, received the grant, and then reached out to Chalmers via email to get the ball rolling. Chalmers, who lives in Florida, was already in central Ohio this week for additional trainings. He had no problem coming a day early.

“I think this training is good for anybody – big cities, small towns, rural communities. The warning signs, causes, triggers are what they are and it affects all kids,” Chalmers told Knox Pages in between sessions. “Killers come from all types of communities, all cities, big or small.”

‘Killers don’t look like killers’

Chalmers spent the first half of the morning session breaking down misconceptions about teen killers.

He showed photo after photo of boys and girls – altar boys, Eagle Scouts, soccer players – who have committed brutal murders. He showed their smiling yearbook photos, then photos of the crime scenes that made them famous.

They were gruesome. The crowd sat in a stunned silence. This was Chalmers’s point.

“Who do you think is more deadly here?” he asked rhetorically, flashing two mug shots on the projector screen – one of a man with tattoos covering his face and body, the other of a 100-pound boy with a pocket protector.

“He,” said Chalmers, pointing to the boy, “is 27 times deadlier than this man.”

“Killers don’t look like killers,” Chalmers continued. “School shooters don’t look like school shooters. They look like little kids. That’s what they are.”

Chalmers also noted that school shooters are “getting younger” and “getting more violent.” In the U.S., Chalmers said, five teen murders occur per day. According to FBI and CDC data, this decade will be the deadliest in U.S. history for school shootings – 42 have already occurred.

Chalmers said that, despite a common misconception, the race of school shooters largely parallels the race of the U.S. population – 60 percent white, 18 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and 6 percent Asian.

He added that 90 percent of all school shooters are male, but that number is shifting slightly due to a recent rise in female shooters.

He urged school administrators and law enforcement officials to keep an open mind when it comes to juvenile murderers.

“These are normal people,” Chalmers said, “but they’re monsters.”

How to prevent school shootings

While Chalmers said he has mixed opinions on the role of gun laws in massacre prevention – and he refused to bring politics into Wednesday’s discussion – he said that after talking with hundreds of teen killers, he feels strongly about one thing.

“Gun laws will not stop school shooters,” he said. “We have a lot of gun laws and I support many of them, but they are not going to stop school shooters.”

Chalmers believes that if a teen wants to attempt mass murder, they will find a way to do so. But there are ways to prevent that from happening, which is where he steps in.

According to Chalmers, there are two things that separate unsuccessful school shooting attempts from successful ones: how accessible are the victims – in this case, students and teachers – and how much time does the shooter have?

In some of the deadliest school shootings, Chalmers said, school administration and law enforcement committed critical errors in both categories. At the 1999 Columbine shooting, which remains the deadliest American high school shooting by an active student, the two shooters were given an hour inside the building to kill 13 innocent bystanders.

In 2007, the Virginia Tech killer had 15 minutes. He barged into campus buildings and classrooms that had no locks on the doors, Chalmers lamented.

And last February, at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the killer had 11 minutes inside the school. He shot through easy-to-break glass, sniping down unprepared students as they sat at their desks. The district’s school resource officer allegedly waited outside while the shooting spree occurred.

In turn, Chalmers pleaded that school administrators enforce aggressive, clear lockdown policies; that doors are locked during class and all teachers have the ability to initiate a lockdown; that safety glass is utilized in all classrooms.

Teachers should establish well-communicated lockdown procedures with students, Chalmers said, and students should be tucked away, hidden from a shooter who might go into a room looking for bodies.

Chalmers urged law enforcement to arrive quickly and enter the school with force.

“You cannot stop this from happening,” Chalmers said. “All you can do is harden the targets.”

He also asked that everyone look for the warning signs that almost always occur in the lead-up to a shooting. If a child is taking pictures with guns or is making online threats, Chalmers said, that’s a red flag. If they are making violent drawings or diary entries, that should also be looked into.

He encouraged parents not to ignore the long-held stereotypes – the kid who kills animals and sets fires for fun, the kid who wets the bed well into their teen years, the ‘Peeping Tom’ – because he’s found them still to be indicative.

Chalmers offered a list of causes he’s found common in almost every case he’s investigated. Almost every juvenile killer, he said, has 3-6 of the following characteristics:

They have no father, or an abusive father
They have an unstable or abusive home life
They experience bullying at school
They are obsessed with deadly weapons and violent entertainment, including video games, torture films and pornography
They exhibit suicidal ideologies
They abuse illegal drugs, alcohol and prescription medication
They want to be famous
They are involved in cults, gangs or hate groups
They simply have the “wrong friends”
They are poverty-stricken
They have no spiritual guidance or home discipline
They have a mental illness

Chalmers stressed that these ’causes’ aren’t set in stone, and they often only portray part of the picture. There are children who grow up in the church choir and go on to commit heinous murders, he said. But all teen killers he’s interviewed have a handful of these characteristics in common.

“It takes 3-6 causes to make a teen killer,” Chalmers told the crowd. “You have 20 of those kids in your school right now. Because of that, we have to be looking at warning signs.”

There are also three main triggers that will cause a potential shooter to snap, Chalmers said. The number one trigger for males, he’s found, is when their girlfriend dumps them. The number one trigger for females, Chalmers said, is when they’re told by their parents that they can’t date someone. And the third trigger is the suspension or expulsion of a student from a school campus.

Chalmers said it’s all about awareness and communication between parents, students, school officials and law enforcement. That, combined with stricter school safety procedures, is all that can be done.

“It’s not for lack of warning signs, we just don’t know what the hell we’re looking at,” Chalmers said. “If you see something, say something.”

Immediate impact

One of the reasons Shaffer wanted to bring Chalmers in – aside from his national recognition and quick, applicable training courses – was his approach. He was blunt with those in attendance on Wednesday; he swore, he asked tough questions, and he showed rare, gruesome school shooting surveillance footage to drive his points home.

He even opened up about his brutal upbringing, on the east side of Cleveland, where he was raised in a “rat-infested” house by an abusive, alcoholic father. He believes that experience shaped who is today.

“When I did get to go see him, I’d heard a lot of good things about how in-your-face he is and how he doesn’t hold back,” Shaffer said of Chalmers. “And to me, when it comes to keeping our school and community safe, that’s the approach I’d like to take.”

Midway through the morning session, Chalmers’s lessons were already impacting the Knox County community.

A woman approached Chalmers in between sessions to show him a photo on social media of a local boy she suspected might turn violent. Chalmers called law enforcement over and the group began communicating on how to approach the situation.

It was Chalmers’s mission at work, right there in-person.

“I hope when I leave here, people are safer. I hope the community’s safer. And I also offer myself as a resource to the community, so after today they know they can reach out to me if they need help,” Chalmers said.

“We’ve already had a few people come up with some things that are troubling on social media and stuff, so we’re already dealing with stuff here, which is good.”

Mount Vernon Police Captain Scott McKnight attended Wednesday’s training with several of his department’s officers. He said the course was not only impactful, but rare.

“It’s one of the first ones I think we’ve had within Knox County as far as the educational piece,” McKnight said, “which I think has been very valuable to us.”

Shaffer, who writes the Mount Vernon City School District’s safety procedure plans, meets regularly with local law enforcement to share ideas. He said providing the training for free was a way of repaying the officers and deputies who keep the district safe on a regular basis.

“Our law enforcement – from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office to the Mount Vernon Police Department, the fire department and EMS, they have all been great resources and have always answered our questions, anything I ever needed,” Shaffer said. “So this was kind of our way to give back to them.”

Mount Vernon Superintendent Bill Seder sat just a few rows back from McKnight while Chalmers spoke. He seemed reflective after the morning session, still soaking it all in.

“Understanding some of those warning signs is really critical,” he said. “You know, the idea that 3-6 of these 13 characteristics should prompt us to just do a little bit more investigation to keep our kids safe. I did enjoy hearing some tips relative to things we’ve been doing; it kind of validates some of the things we do, but it also provides us some additional things we could look at.

“I mean, you look at some of the pictures and it just makes your heart sink when you see those. And while it’s graphic and we don’t want to see those things, there’s a true reality that we never want it to happen. So we want to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t.”

Chalmers has traveled across the country – to bigger towns, in front of bigger audiences – to share the message he shared on Wednesday in Mount Vernon. The venue may change, he said, but the mission – and its importance, now more than ever – does not.

“Hopefully these parents can go and be better parents, and they’ll be a lot more alert on helping troubled kids and being an active member of trying to make the community a safer place to be,” Chalmers said. “Murder visits every town and every city. Murder can visit Mount Vernon, it has already. And it just takes one crazy person.”