It’s not always the quiet ones

If you caught CNN on Monday, you may have seen the half-a-state chase as Michigan police and local offices tried to catch Anthony LaCalamita III: my 38-year-old high school accounting teacher from Notre Dame Preparatory, Pontiac.

LaCalamita wasn’t a quiet teacher. He was frequently on the announcements, and he never hesitated to scream at us when we ran in the halls. Honestly, none of the teachers there were terribly quiet or introverted. I could see a few of them being closet gays, but never a mad gunman.

LaCalamita took it upon himself to LARP Doom, the police said. I cannot imagine what was going through his head, but it probably wasn’t sane.

During the last seven years, he apparently left Notre Dame Prep for Gordon Advisers, an accounting firm. This means he has been at the firm no more than seven years: hardly something to stake your life on.

Friday, Good Friday, he was fired from the office job. This was probably difficult for a religious guy.

I am guessing Saturday, he was shaken and cried a lot, and Easter, probably asked God for help.

What I am truly stunned by is that God suggested he buy a shotgun and 32 shells, and go pay an alleged visit to his former coworkers. Usually, he is not that explicit except when talking to fundamentalists.

According to the news, LaCalamita came in carrying a long object under his clothes, which later turned out to be a pump-action shotgun. He went after two of the managers in particular, and supposedly was after a third who wasn’t in the office that day.

The truly sad thing is, the only one confirmed dead was a Warren woman, Madeline Kafoury, 67. Much like in the true ending of Clerks, where Dante gets shot, she wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. She had retired years ago, and just came into the office every now and then to help out, CNN reported.

That’s what you get for being nice.

The accounting firm is in an office off Crooks and Long Lake Road, putting it just four blocks south of where I lived when I was still in Michigan.

If Mr. LaCalamita is found guilty, his will be the third person I have known personally to have been convicted of murder. I’m 25. I’m not from the inner-city.

The first, and arguably most famous, is Michael Conat, the boy who was found guilty of murdering his sister in late 1997. Conat and I were in the same Boy Scout troop, and we had to share a tent together with Randy Johnson and Mike Rossi, the only person I have ever heard of holding a collegiate degree in blacksmithing. Both went to my high school.

Conat, for years, told us he hated his sister. The last time I saw him was in middle school. The next time I saw him was on the news in a red jumpsuit after blowing his sister’s head off and rearranging the murder scene. According to reports at the time, he was also plotting to murder his parents.

Of course, that’s not the Conat in my mind. I will remember him as the boy who at scout camp had a bad case of the rumbles one night and went running out of the tent at 3 a.m. The next morning, we found an abandoned pair of underwear in the men’s room that was full of diarrhea.

Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go …

I’m not sure how I should feel about this. It’s strange looking 8,000 miles west of my current home, and the only news ever being bad news.

US makes me very sad, and nothing I hear about it is anything less than disappointing. It hurts a lot, because Chinese people here often talk about wanting to go there.

All I can do is shake my head and mutter, “If you only knew.”

These crimes happen in China too. Only a few weeks ago, our paper covered the story of the Liaoning man who started his day by shooting his wife, then shot his best friend, then went over and shot his business partner’s parents and lured in his son to hill him too.

But something about it hits harder in US. I think it’s that US does nothing to address these problems, or what about USn society drives people to lash out in this way.

Surely, easy access to guns doesn’t help anything. But there is something much deeper than this.

LaCalamita’s reported shooting is one of three attacks in the last two weeks alone, one of which occurred within CNN Atlanta headquarters. This is much too often, and these don’t even begin to touch the thousands of gang related deaths and random murders that aren’t as photogenic and media-friendly.

Something is very, very wrong with the US, and I deeply do wish to not go back there.

I worry about my family being there nearly as much as I would worry about them being in Iraq or Cambodia. Anywhere else seems safer.

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