‘Delete my life 05.09.17’

How the 1999 Columbine Massacre inspired a ninth grader in a Moscow suburb to shoot up his school

On the morning of Tuesday, September 5, a ninth grader in the town of Ivanteyevka, just outside Moscow, brought an air gun to school and went on a shooting spree. Four people were injured in the chaos: a computer science teacher sustained a critical head injury and three students were wounded when they jumped out the window. Ahead of the attack, the teenager responsible wrote about weapons on social media, also sharing photographs and videos about the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre in the United States. Meduza journalist Pavel Merzlikin takes a closer look at what happened this week at a Moscow suburb grade school.

On the evening of September 4, fifteen-year-old Mikhail P. (Meduza is withholding the boy’s surname, because he is a minor) met up with his friend Maria not far from his home. She told Meduza that Mikhail eagerly described his plans to “stage a terrorist attack” the next day at school. She says she also noticed that he was covering what appeared to be a firearm, but she wasn’t particularly alarmed, given that Mikhail had long been enamored with guns. She says she also didn’t attach much significance to his use of the words “terrorist attack,” in light of Mikhail’s “fanaticism” about the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, when students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and one teacher, injuring another 37 people. On his social media accounts, Mikhail published photographs of Harris and Klebold, and changed his username on Vkontakte to “Klebold.” He even found the same clothing brands the Columbine killers wore on their rampage and bought some for himself.

Two alumni from Mikhail’s school told Meduza that he constantly talked to his friends about wanting to follow in the footsteps of the Columbine killers. The two former students say the boy frequently argued with the school’s computer science teacher and several classmates over the past three years. Other students made fun of Mikhail’s appearance: he would come to school dressed in a long overcoat and army boots, carrying a military-style shoulder bag. Mikhail told his friends that he wouldn’t put up with the abuse forever, vowing to stage a terrorist attack against the school, but nobody took him seriously, dismissing his threats as a joke. Most people also assumed that Mikhail didn’t have a real reason to resort to anything so drastic. Relatively speaking, the boy is from a rather affluent family.

On Tuesday morning, September 5, Mikhail packed a meat cleaver and a box of homemade fireworks into his bag, and grabbed an air gun. Before leaving for school, he texted Maria to say that he wasn’t joking about the terrorist attack. He then changed his status on Vkontakte to “delete my life 05.09.17.” According to police investigators, Mikhail hid the firearm under his coat when entering the school building, calmly passing the security guards. The mother of two students at the school told Meduza that students are almost never checked when entering the building, and they can bring virtually anything they wish to school.

Around 10 a.m., Mikhail walked into a second-floor classroom, where a computer science lesson was getting underway. The last thing he did before entering the room was send a text message to his sister, who attends the same school, asking her to leave the building.

Seeing Mikhail, the teacher was outraged by his appearance and the fact that he was late to class. She then ordered him to leave the room, sources told the news agency TASS. In response, Mikhail shot his teacher once and then hit her in the head with his meat cleaver, screaming that he had “come here to die” and “waited several years for this moment.”

During the attack, some students hid from Mikhail in a supply closet, and three jumped from the second-story window. One student who says he used to bully Mikhail because of his strange appearance told Meduza that Mikhail next went up to the fourth floor, where another computer science class was in session. “He came to kill me and another two of our classmates because we made fun of him… He went to the fourth floor looking for me, but my classmates and I had already fled to the street by that time,” the student said.

Mikhail never made it to the next classroom: he was detained by police officers in bulletproof vests and helmets, who rushed into the school. The computer science teacher sustained a critical brain injury, and she’s now in intensive care. The three teenagers who jumped from the classroom were hospitalized with fractures and bruises.

Police cordoned off the school and evacuated the building. An eighth grader named Andrey told Meduza that students had been drilled just three days earlier on how they should behave in a terrorist attack (hide and don’t show yourself), though the boy says he ignored this advice during Mikhail’s attack. “I was on the third floor. Hearing the explosions, I ran to find my sister. She’d gone to third period and was in class on the second floor at the time. I found her. She was in shock, crying,” Andrey said.

The schoolchildren spent about half an hour assembled at a nearby athletic field. Then they were allowed to return to the school and collect their things, though many students had already run home. “Almost all the younger classes were in hysterics and crying. The teachers tried to tell them that it was all a game,“ one eyewitness told Meduza.

Journalists appeared near the school almost immediately after the classrooms were evacuated. Despite pouring rain, some students — mostly from the younger grades — later returned to the school. Boys and girls about 10 years old gathered with excited looks and discussed the details of the attack and argued about how they would have reacted, had they been in the classroom when Mikhail opened fire on his teacher. Former students and students from other schools around town started showing up, too. A little later, the rest of the students returned to the building, where many happily granted interviews to TV news crews, discussing among each other which channels would air their comments. “Now I’m a star — cooler than Shurgyna. Well so what? Gotta seize the moment. Who knows when so many reporters will come again,” one schoolgirl said. Others voiced the same opinion, debating how much they might get paid to appear on Pervyi Kanal’s flagship talk show.

Only Mikhail’s classmates openly refused to talk to journalists. The mother of one of these teenagers told Meduza that the school had instructed them not to communicate with the media. “The children are afraid to talk,” the mother added. But many children didn’t seem to be very scared. Fifth grader Lyosha told Meduza that he heard explosions during the attack, though he didn’t think they meant anything special. “I thought it was a joke. That somebody had flushed firecrackers in the bathroom,” he said.

Teachers also refused to speak to reporters, ignoring television cameras. Investigators and police officers also declined to comment on what happened. Only Ivanteyevka’s public prosecutor, Sergey Koshelyev, crossed the police barricade to deliver a short briefing, explaining that officials have opened two criminal cases on charges of hooliganism and negligence. Koshelyev did not reveal who is a suspect in the latter investigation.

Over the course of the day, adults from around town also stopped by the school to see the crime scene. By the end of the evening, almost everyone in Ivanteyevka had heard about the attack, and conversations outside the school indicated that many locals see Mikhail as the victim of larger malignant forces. One elderly woman blamed the Americans, given that Mikhail’s inspiration was the Columbine school shooting. The mother of another student placed responsibility on the World Wide Web: “Now all students have the Internet, where they can read anything they want and buy whatever they want. Now we didn’t have the Internet or television. I think maybe that’s why we grew up to be so much more calm?”

Russian text by Pavel Merzlikin, translation by Kevin Rothrock