After 18 year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed seven students and his principal at a Finnish high school Wednesday in an attack eerily similar to Columbine, media outlets reported that Auvinen had posted a YouTube video describing the shooting before he launched the attack, leading pundits to question why no one had noticed it in time to prevent the massacre.
But months before the fateful video was posted, one prolific YouTube user known as TheAmazingAtheist called for the police to investigate Auvinen and others who had been posting videos glorifying the Columbine shooters and Timothy McVeigh, saying they were showing warning signs of being more than simply infatuated or interested in violence.
On June 7,2007 TheAmazingAtheist, whose real name appears to be Terroja Lee Kincaid, posted a rant filmed in his garage entitled "Columbine Killers, Mental Midgets & Social Darwinism." About 7 minutes into the video, which drew plenty of comments in June, he says:
"[W]hen someone starts talking about how they admire [Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold], you have to wonder if they might not be potential dangers and I think they should be investigated as potential dangers," he said. "Not go to jail of course, but I think that those people are the kind of people you want to keep your eye on."
On Wednesday, as news of the killing broke, TheAmazingAtheist posted another video entitled "I Knew This Would Happen":
Auvinen had a following and friends on YouTube who would also create videos set to black metal or thrash music that glorified young teenagers taking revenge on bullying classmates and a stultifying society by gunning them down.
TheAmazingAtheist, now 22, was himself a young high school goth at the time of the Columbine shootings, and said, in a YouTube video, that he was interrogated by school authorities who thought he would stage a similar attack. In one video, he argues that the lesson of Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings was that disaffected youth could become famous, not through art or writing, but through mass violence.
On his YouTube profile, Auvinen wrote "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. I have had enough. I don’t want to be part of this fucked up society. Like some other wise people have said in the past, human race is not worth fighting for or saving… only worth killing."
TheAmazingAtheist declined requests to talk in depth to THREAT LEVEL:
He suggested we talk to RobinMcVeigh who he said was Auvinen’s best friend, but she did not respond to a message for comment. RobinMcVeigh was one of the users included in a list of people who he thought was investigation worthy.
The AmazingAtheist’s list of profiles, which he has since removed, is as follows:
(Image: The picture from Avinen’s YouTube profile)
