Oak Park, Ill. (AP) — Keyon Robinson was just a month away from graduating from high school when he took a loaded gun, placed it in his backpack and headed to campus.
He’d fought with a relative that morning. He was angry, and scared someone would come after him. The firearm, a ghost gun with no serial number that he’d bought via social media, was his security blanket.
“I felt like I just needed it for safety because of the stuff I got myself into,” said Robinson, now 19.
He insists he never intended to hurt anyone at his school in Oak Park, a suburb that borders Chicago’s West Side. “Realistically, I didn’t need a gun at all.”
And he never fired it. On May 3 — three weeks before a gunman massacred 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas — police arrested Robinson near the school’s main entrance as he returned from lunch. He told the officers he hadn’t even taken the gun out of his backpack until they asked him to do so.
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