Be very wary when looking for Jaylen Fryberg ‘warning signs’

Let’s talk a bit about that nearly unthinkable crime committed by Jaylen Fryberg, who murdered some of his friends before killing himself at Marsyville Pilchuck last year.

There was a piece in the Everett Herald recently about “potential warning signs.”

While I understand why they wrote it, I find an article like this to be somewhat dangerous.

The article uses language like “there may have been warning signs” and there were “potential warning signs.” It had a bunch of “this was possible.” But that’s code for confirmation bias, also hindsight bias. Essentially meaning that you already know what happened, so you go looking for reasons to explain away what happened.

“There may have been warning signs” also means “there may not have been warning signs.”

After dating for about a year, he sent some texts to his ex-girlfriend, according to the Herald.

Three days before the shootings Jaylen sent the girl texts saying: “The guns (sic) in my hand.” and “Ohk (sic) well don’t bother coming to my funeral.”

Two days before the shootings, he wrote a text saying: “I set the date. Hopefully you regret not talking to me.”

Two minutes later, he wrote: “You have no idea what I’m talking about. But you will” followed by “Bang bang I’m dead.”

After she wrote a text telling him to knock it off, he texted: “No. You don’t care. I don’t care.”

In retrospect, yes, they all seem telling. But they also seem like pretty much what every emotional teen says. The further we get away from our own teenage years, the further we are removed from the realities of what being a teen was like.

None of us are normal when we’re teens &#8212 teenagers are literally walking blobs of irrational emotions. You get a zit and you think your life is over. You go through a breakup and your entire world comes down.

I spent a better part of my afternoon watching YouTube clips of teens crying over the most meaningless things. One 15-year-old girl goes from hardcore crying to maniacal laughter, then back to crying over a bad haircut. One 14-year-old boy freaks out and cries in front of his friends because he couldn’t win in a video game.

I’d say 95 percent of kids overreact to the most silly and meaningless of things and then they recover. It’s the 5 percent that don’t. Maybe Jaylen Fryberg is in that 5 percent, but maybe he acted like how a lot of teens act. Go on Twitter or Facebook and you’ll see millions of teens being remarkably dramatic after these types of life events.

In these texts, Fryberg acted emotionally and was clearly seeking attention. The truth is, I’m more scared of the kid who doesn’t wildly emote, than the kid who does. In fact, the warning signs usually have to do with kids being withdrawn and emotionally closed off.

Are there warning signs when you take out the shooting from this equation? I’m not entirely certain there are.

The Herald writes:

Detectives investigating the shootings say they can’t pinpoint Jaylen’s motive. Likewise, domestic violence experts are reluctant to make specific conclusions based on the text messages.

However, they do believe the texts exchanged between Jaylen and his girlfriend contained potential warning signs that the breakup could become volatile.

Vicci Hilty, the executive director of Domestic Violence Services of Snohomish County, told the Herald: “We don’t have enough facts or solid information,” to say the relationship was abusive. “We did see some red flags that could be interpreted as teen dating violence.”

Everything has potential. But that doesn’t mean it’ll come to fruition and I’m wondering if you’re some kid reading this in the Herald, you’re wondering what you’re supposed to do. Report every emotional outburst or need for attention coming from some classmate or friend?

The implications of that are pretty serious because the one thing I won’t do if I think someone’s gonna embarrass me by telling people how I’m emotionally reacting, especially when it’s irrational…it means I won’t be sharing my emotions. I’m more scared of what that means when kids stop expressing themselves at a time of their lives when it seems most healthy to express themselves.

Kids act weirdly &#8212 and sometimes it’s not predicative of anything other than their age and emotional immaturity.