Waseca, Minnesota (CNN)John David LaDue cradled the homemade bomb in a tree not far from school. It was summer 2013, and classes were out -- the perfect time to test his explosive.
He lit the fuse.
Nothing.
The teen had used hot glue for his sealing agent. He switched to auto body filler.
The next time, his bomb exploded.
And the next time, too.
The rush grew addicting. Over a span of nine months, he exploded more than a dozen homemade bombs around this small town in southern Minnesota. At a church. A skate park. A shooting range.
The 11th grader was practicing for his master plan: to carry out one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history.
"I had fun entertaining the thought of actually, like, injuring and maiming people," he told police, "and, like, showing people that I am dominant over them."
His explosives were known as crickets, made from emptied-out CO2 cartridges and filled with gun powder. Police say it's not unusual for teens in rural areas to play around with them. Yet those who study mass killings know their significance: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried dozens of crickets with them when they entered Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
LaDue had done his homework.
He purchased a black duster jacket so he could dress like Harris. "Kinda want to pay tribute to him," he would later tell police. He hoped to time his attack to the Columbine anniversary, in honor of his idol.
He'd studied the Boston Marathon bombers. He thought their attack weak because they killed just three.
He planned to fill two pressure cookers with 6,000 ball bearings, as well as buckshot and screws. Each bomb would have cans of WD-40 strapped to it to magnify the blast. He would use flash powder, instead of black powder, to create a more powerful explosion than the ones in Boston.
He believed Adam Lanza was a coward for killing first-graders. "I wanted to target people in my grade who I knew."
He named five students at his high school who he wanted to kill for specific reasons. Two were classmates who talked too much in German class and "got annoying." A third called him queer on the school bus in seventh grade. He also would target the school resource officer.
So meticulous was his plan that LaDue told authorities he chose a bolt-action Soviet-style SKS rifle to use in the attack -- a weapon without a large magazine like Lanza's AR-15 or other semi-automatic rifles used in shooting sprees.
That way, he said, people lobbying for gun restrictions after his attack would have a weaker argument. "I kinda wanted to prove that wrong."
The pressure-cooker bombs were to be hidden in recycling bins in the hallways at Waseca Junior & Senior High School. LaDue planned to detonate them remotely. He'd use his SKS rifle and a sawed-off shotgun to mop up the rest, before getting killed in a shootout with police.
He hoped his assault would leave at least 40 dead -- more than triple the 13 killed in Columbine.
His plot was thwarted on April 29, 2014, when a 911 caller reported seeing someone she suspected was breaking into a storage locker.
The case looked like a slam dunk. Bomb-making material in the storage locker. A confession. An arsenal in his bedroom.
And a diary he kept to "explain after I was dead why I did it."
But the case would turn out to be anything but simple. And the judicial system would wrestle with this question:
What is justice in a case like this -- a massacre that never happened?
Where does preparation end and a crime begin?
Every few months, you read it or hear it on the news: a "Columbine-style plot" is foiled.
The suspects are almost always white male teenagers who have studied the Colorado high school massacre or cite the killers as inspiration.
In the 16 years since the attack in Littleton, Colorado, more than 40 people have been charged with Columbine-style plots, according to searches of news accounts. Of those, more than a half dozen have come since LaDue's arrest in April 2014.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Columbine, says Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is its allure to disaffected youth. "Eric Harris presented himself as an anti-hero, not as a crazy man. He is easy to associate with if your life is going nowhere," says Torrey, a research psychiatrist, best-selling author and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, which advocates for timely treatment of the severely mentally ill.
"They're attracted because [Harris and Klebold] went after the people who were most bothersome to them at that time -- and that's their peers who are not appreciating their 'greatness.' It's not just parents. It's not just society. It's actually getting back at the girls who won't go out with them, the boys who exclude them from peer groups."
In 2013 alone, the FBI said its Behavioral Threat Assessment Center prevented 148 mass shootings at schools, workplaces and other public spaces -- up 33 percent from the previous year.
Experts say the public has gotten better at notifying authorities of suspicious activity.
In Waseca, police Capt. Kris Markeson held a news conference two days after LaDue's arrest and praised the resident who called police.
"This case is a classic example of citizens doing the right thing when things seemed out of place. By doing the right thing," Markeson said, his voice cracking, "unimaginable tragedy has been prevented."
In places like Newtown, Connecticut, and wherever schools have been violated, traumatized families would do anything to trade places with the people of Waseca.
Yet the truth is that after the plots are foiled and the arrests made, the legal system struggles with how to deal with the accused, especially juveniles. Often, the public never learns their names -- or the outcome of their cases. The information is shielded in juvenile court.
When children under the age of 18 are charged as adults because of the seriousness of the threats, punishments range widely from state to state. Courts must decide where preparation ends and a crime begins. The outcomes often depend on whether a prosecutor holds a tough-on-crime stance or is sympathetic to defendants suffering from mental disorders.
A 17-year-old boy with underlying mental health issues was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a 2009 plot on Landstown High School in Virginia Beach, a foiled attack that was timed for the 10th year anniversary of Columbine. The prosecutor in that case was outraged over what he felt was a lenient sentence.
That same year, a 15-year-old boy in Monroe, New York, had a plan to attack his school; he got 18 months in a psychiatric center.
LaDue was 17 but prosecutors vowed to try him as an adult. He faced 12 felony charges: four counts of first-degree attempted murder, six counts of possessing explosives and two counts of attempted criminal damage to property. If convicted on all charges, he faced more than 60 years in prison.
'This was his little surprise for us'
A photograph of a smiling young John and his sister, Valerie, rests on the center of the mantle in the living room. A framed print of the Last Supper stares down in the nearby dining room.
A white basket contains more than 60 letters from strangers who wrote to lend their support to the family. David and Stephanie LaDue have read every note. Each brought solace in the face of Facebook posts from people calling for their son to be dismembered or people who drove by to gawk at their home. One man banged on their door and screamed, "Not in my f----ing neighborhood."
"We were taken from this idyllic little world we'd been living in to complete utter chaos," says Stephanie, who works as a substance abuse counselor.
Within a week of their son's arrest, she collapsed under the stress and checked into a psychiatric facility. She literally had to learn how to walk again.
Feeling alone, she called the mother of one of the Columbine killers. She doesn't want to say which one, but the conversation helped her cope and gave her strength. Yes, her son harbored terrible thoughts, but he didn't harm anyone -- and he was still alive.
The LaDues found themselves facing the question asked repeatedly after mass shootings: How could two parents active in their son's life not know he was plotting such destruction?
David wracks his brain for missed clues. "If you just start from here, it sounds like a kid who never should've been born. The fact that he kept it from us and that this was the way we discovered it was real painful.
"This was his little surprise for us."
Adds Stephanie: "One of the things I remember him telling me in those first weeks was: 'I just felt like something was pressuring me to do it.' I'll always remember him saying that."
She flips through photo albums that capture life "before." Here's John at a zoo. In a baseball uniform. Perched with his sister on their father's back, riding "horsey." He was a good student in high school; he made As and Bs. He wasn't the most popular kid, but he wasn't the most aloof, either. He was never disruptive or violent.
A photograph of John LaDue and his sister, Valerie, rests on the mantle in the family's living room.
At home, he got along with his parents, and his sister. "They're good parents," he told police.
Yet he planned to kill all three. He would then set a fire in town to distract authorities before carrying out his massacre at the school.
Behind bars, John was diagnosed for the first time with a highly functional form of autism spectrum disorder, with violent ideations. Psychologists found that it didn't manifest until late adolescence, and that he was able to conceal his troubles from family, friends and classmates.
Research has shown that people with autism spectrum disorder are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population. A 2008 review found that 84% of violent offenders with autism also had an underlying psychiatric disorder at the time they committed the crime.
The LaDues don't believe their son was capable of carrying out the attack.
Says his father: "What would you do if you got caught in the darkest moment of your life and thinking the most hideous thing possible -- and everybody knew about it?"
If anything, they believe their son was prevented from killing himself. "I don't think he could've killed us, though he says he wanted to," David says. "I don't ever see that he could've done that."
He does not deny the seriousness of his son's plot, but he's frustrated by how events played out. Police questioned John for three hours before notifying the parents. They'd been texting him for hours, worried something bad had happened. When police arrived, their hearts sank: They thought John had been killed in a car accident.
Police found seven guns in John's bedroom: two near his bed and five in a safe in his closet. All but one of the guns belonged to his father.
David had taught both his children how to hunt and took them to gun safety courses. He trusted his son with guns to protect the family while he worked the overnight shift at a steel plant.
He had no idea that John had purchased a gun; he got it through a friend's dad by forging his own father's signature.
John's sister, Valerie, knew about her brother's fascination with explosives, but she viewed it like any big sister might: My brother is such an idiot. She says she didn't know about his plot. He bugged her about getting a storage locker, saying his room was getting crowded and he wanted to move some stuff. She thought it was a weird idea and refused to help him. A friend's mother did.
Valerie LaDue remembers her brother as her math tutor and the guy who carried her around on piggy back.
Valerie was a senior at the high school and had to return to the very building her brother planned to blow up.
What was her reaction when she heard about his plan, beginning with her assassination?
"It's kinda like, 'Come on, John.'"
Looking back, she believes her brother was crying out for help. "He was trying to put his hand up and say, 'Notice me. Somebody stop me.'"
In his recorded police confession, John LaDue told police he believed he was mentally ill.
"Like when would be the best time for me to see a psychiatrist?" he asks toward the end of his second major interrogation.
Moments later, he adds that he thinks he might be a sociopath. "I don't know," he sighs.
David LaDue describes what he now realizes was a sign of trouble in his son in the months leading up to the arrest. He calls it "The War Within John."
His son had questioned the validity of God and proclaimed himself an atheist. The father sat him down and spoke about the mysterious ways in which God works. He told his son that he too struggled to believe in a higher power when he was young.
"I got there the hard way," he told his boy.
He prayed for God to intervene in his son's life.
Resting in the recliner where he sat the night police raided the home, David recalls a dream he had just days before the arrest:
John was a little boy. Father and son sat beside each other on the ledge of a five-story building. Dad sensed something wrong. A dark force tugged at them. His son asked to climb in his lap, even begged, but Dad told his boy to sit still. To stay put.
Dad looked around to gauge what was happening. Suddenly, his son fell. Down, down, down. The father watched. Helpless. He sprinted down a stairwell.
John smashed onto a patio. He was still breathing, but his body shattered.
David LaDue weeps.
He has seen his son shackled over the last 17 months, his family humiliated, the town of Waseca embarrassed.
But he believes his prayer was answered. That God intervened.
"Divine."
That's his one word explanation for all that has transpired.
He lit the fuse.
Nothing.
The teen had used hot glue for his sealing agent. He switched to auto body filler.
The next time, his bomb exploded.
And the next time, too.
The rush grew addicting. Over a span of nine months, he exploded more than a dozen homemade bombs around this small town in southern Minnesota. At a church. A skate park. A shooting range.
The 11th grader was practicing for his master plan: to carry out one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history.
"I had fun entertaining the thought of actually, like, injuring and maiming people," he told police, "and, like, showing people that I am dominant over them."
His explosives were known as crickets, made from emptied-out CO2 cartridges and filled with gun powder. Police say it's not unusual for teens in rural areas to play around with them. Yet those who study mass killings know their significance: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried dozens of crickets with them when they entered Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
LaDue had done his homework.
He purchased a black duster jacket so he could dress like Harris. "Kinda want to pay tribute to him," he would later tell police. He hoped to time his attack to the Columbine anniversary, in honor of his idol.
He'd studied the Boston Marathon bombers. He thought their attack weak because they killed just three.
He planned to fill two pressure cookers with 6,000 ball bearings, as well as buckshot and screws. Each bomb would have cans of WD-40 strapped to it to magnify the blast. He would use flash powder, instead of black powder, to create a more powerful explosion than the ones in Boston.
He believed Adam Lanza was a coward for killing first-graders. "I wanted to target people in my grade who I knew."
He named five students at his high school who he wanted to kill for specific reasons. Two were classmates who talked too much in German class and "got annoying." A third called him queer on the school bus in seventh grade. He also would target the school resource officer.
So meticulous was his plan that LaDue told authorities he chose a bolt-action Soviet-style SKS rifle to use in the attack -- a weapon without a large magazine like Lanza's AR-15 or other semi-automatic rifles used in shooting sprees.
That way, he said, people lobbying for gun restrictions after his attack would have a weaker argument. "I kinda wanted to prove that wrong."
The pressure-cooker bombs were to be hidden in recycling bins in the hallways at Waseca Junior & Senior High School. LaDue planned to detonate them remotely. He'd use his SKS rifle and a sawed-off shotgun to mop up the rest, before getting killed in a shootout with police.
He hoped his assault would leave at least 40 dead -- more than triple the 13 killed in Columbine.
His plot was thwarted on April 29, 2014, when a 911 caller reported seeing someone she suspected was breaking into a storage locker.
The case looked like a slam dunk. Bomb-making material in the storage locker. A confession. An arsenal in his bedroom.
And a diary he kept to "explain after I was dead why I did it."
But the case would turn out to be anything but simple. And the judicial system would wrestle with this question:
What is justice in a case like this -- a massacre that never happened?
Where does preparation end and a crime begin?
Every few months, you read it or hear it on the news: a "Columbine-style plot" is foiled.
The suspects are almost always white male teenagers who have studied the Colorado high school massacre or cite the killers as inspiration.
In the 16 years since the attack in Littleton, Colorado, more than 40 people have been charged with Columbine-style plots, according to searches of news accounts. Of those, more than a half dozen have come since LaDue's arrest in April 2014.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Columbine, says Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is its allure to disaffected youth. "Eric Harris presented himself as an anti-hero, not as a crazy man. He is easy to associate with if your life is going nowhere," says Torrey, a research psychiatrist, best-selling author and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, which advocates for timely treatment of the severely mentally ill.
"They're attracted because [Harris and Klebold] went after the people who were most bothersome to them at that time -- and that's their peers who are not appreciating their 'greatness.' It's not just parents. It's not just society. It's actually getting back at the girls who won't go out with them, the boys who exclude them from peer groups."
In 2013 alone, the FBI said its Behavioral Threat Assessment Center prevented 148 mass shootings at schools, workplaces and other public spaces -- up 33 percent from the previous year.
Experts say the public has gotten better at notifying authorities of suspicious activity.
In Waseca, police Capt. Kris Markeson held a news conference two days after LaDue's arrest and praised the resident who called police.
"This case is a classic example of citizens doing the right thing when things seemed out of place. By doing the right thing," Markeson said, his voice cracking, "unimaginable tragedy has been prevented."
In places like Newtown, Connecticut, and wherever schools have been violated, traumatized families would do anything to trade places with the people of Waseca.
Yet the truth is that after the plots are foiled and the arrests made, the legal system struggles with how to deal with the accused, especially juveniles. Often, the public never learns their names -- or the outcome of their cases. The information is shielded in juvenile court.
When children under the age of 18 are charged as adults because of the seriousness of the threats, punishments range widely from state to state. Courts must decide where preparation ends and a crime begins. The outcomes often depend on whether a prosecutor holds a tough-on-crime stance or is sympathetic to defendants suffering from mental disorders.
A 17-year-old boy with underlying mental health issues was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a 2009 plot on Landstown High School in Virginia Beach, a foiled attack that was timed for the 10th year anniversary of Columbine. The prosecutor in that case was outraged over what he felt was a lenient sentence.
That same year, a 15-year-old boy in Monroe, New York, had a plan to attack his school; he got 18 months in a psychiatric center.
LaDue was 17 but prosecutors vowed to try him as an adult. He faced 12 felony charges: four counts of first-degree attempted murder, six counts of possessing explosives and two counts of attempted criminal damage to property. If convicted on all charges, he faced more than 60 years in prison.
'This was his little surprise for us'
A photograph of a smiling young John and his sister, Valerie, rests on the center of the mantle in the living room. A framed print of the Last Supper stares down in the nearby dining room.
A white basket contains more than 60 letters from strangers who wrote to lend their support to the family. David and Stephanie LaDue have read every note. Each brought solace in the face of Facebook posts from people calling for their son to be dismembered or people who drove by to gawk at their home. One man banged on their door and screamed, "Not in my f----ing neighborhood."
"We were taken from this idyllic little world we'd been living in to complete utter chaos," says Stephanie, who works as a substance abuse counselor.
Within a week of their son's arrest, she collapsed under the stress and checked into a psychiatric facility. She literally had to learn how to walk again.
Feeling alone, she called the mother of one of the Columbine killers. She doesn't want to say which one, but the conversation helped her cope and gave her strength. Yes, her son harbored terrible thoughts, but he didn't harm anyone -- and he was still alive.
The LaDues found themselves facing the question asked repeatedly after mass shootings: How could two parents active in their son's life not know he was plotting such destruction?
David wracks his brain for missed clues. "If you just start from here, it sounds like a kid who never should've been born. The fact that he kept it from us and that this was the way we discovered it was real painful.
"This was his little surprise for us."
Adds Stephanie: "One of the things I remember him telling me in those first weeks was: 'I just felt like something was pressuring me to do it.' I'll always remember him saying that."
She flips through photo albums that capture life "before." Here's John at a zoo. In a baseball uniform. Perched with his sister on their father's back, riding "horsey." He was a good student in high school; he made As and Bs. He wasn't the most popular kid, but he wasn't the most aloof, either. He was never disruptive or violent.
A photograph of John LaDue and his sister, Valerie, rests on the mantle in the family's living room.
At home, he got along with his parents, and his sister. "They're good parents," he told police.
Yet he planned to kill all three. He would then set a fire in town to distract authorities before carrying out his massacre at the school.
Behind bars, John was diagnosed for the first time with a highly functional form of autism spectrum disorder, with violent ideations. Psychologists found that it didn't manifest until late adolescence, and that he was able to conceal his troubles from family, friends and classmates.
Research has shown that people with autism spectrum disorder are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population. A 2008 review found that 84% of violent offenders with autism also had an underlying psychiatric disorder at the time they committed the crime.
The LaDues don't believe their son was capable of carrying out the attack.
Says his father: "What would you do if you got caught in the darkest moment of your life and thinking the most hideous thing possible -- and everybody knew about it?"
If anything, they believe their son was prevented from killing himself. "I don't think he could've killed us, though he says he wanted to," David says. "I don't ever see that he could've done that."
He does not deny the seriousness of his son's plot, but he's frustrated by how events played out. Police questioned John for three hours before notifying the parents. They'd been texting him for hours, worried something bad had happened. When police arrived, their hearts sank: They thought John had been killed in a car accident.
Police found seven guns in John's bedroom: two near his bed and five in a safe in his closet. All but one of the guns belonged to his father.
David had taught both his children how to hunt and took them to gun safety courses. He trusted his son with guns to protect the family while he worked the overnight shift at a steel plant.
He had no idea that John had purchased a gun; he got it through a friend's dad by forging his own father's signature.
John's sister, Valerie, knew about her brother's fascination with explosives, but she viewed it like any big sister might: My brother is such an idiot. She says she didn't know about his plot. He bugged her about getting a storage locker, saying his room was getting crowded and he wanted to move some stuff. She thought it was a weird idea and refused to help him. A friend's mother did.
Valerie LaDue remembers her brother as her math tutor and the guy who carried her around on piggy back.
Valerie was a senior at the high school and had to return to the very building her brother planned to blow up.
What was her reaction when she heard about his plan, beginning with her assassination?
"It's kinda like, 'Come on, John.'"
Looking back, she believes her brother was crying out for help. "He was trying to put his hand up and say, 'Notice me. Somebody stop me.'"
In his recorded police confession, John LaDue told police he believed he was mentally ill.
"Like when would be the best time for me to see a psychiatrist?" he asks toward the end of his second major interrogation.
Moments later, he adds that he thinks he might be a sociopath. "I don't know," he sighs.
David LaDue describes what he now realizes was a sign of trouble in his son in the months leading up to the arrest. He calls it "The War Within John."
His son had questioned the validity of God and proclaimed himself an atheist. The father sat him down and spoke about the mysterious ways in which God works. He told his son that he too struggled to believe in a higher power when he was young.
"I got there the hard way," he told his boy.
He prayed for God to intervene in his son's life.
Resting in the recliner where he sat the night police raided the home, David recalls a dream he had just days before the arrest:
John was a little boy. Father and son sat beside each other on the ledge of a five-story building. Dad sensed something wrong. A dark force tugged at them. His son asked to climb in his lap, even begged, but Dad told his boy to sit still. To stay put.
Dad looked around to gauge what was happening. Suddenly, his son fell. Down, down, down. The father watched. Helpless. He sprinted down a stairwell.
John smashed onto a patio. He was still breathing, but his body shattered.
David LaDue weeps.
He has seen his son shackled over the last 17 months, his family humiliated, the town of Waseca embarrassed.
But he believes his prayer was answered. That God intervened.
"Divine."
That's his one word explanation for all that has transpired.
a lakers and lions fan. This a has been rough few years...
psycho should have 50+years
