By John Woodrow Cox, Mark Berman, and Steven Rich, Photo: Oakland County Sheriff's Office/AP, The Washington Post, December 9, 2021
She had seen her grandson’s red, spiral-bound notebook before that night, but now, as Catherine O’Connor sifted through its pages for the first time, what she read astonished her.
“School Shootings,” Joshua O’Connor had titled the first page, above a reconstruction of the Columbine High School massacre that left 13 people dead. In the pages that followed, Joshua, who’d just turned 18, described a detailed plan to carry out his own massacre: the shotguns, pistols, assault rifle and ammunition he would buy and the bombs he would build; the doors he would zip-tie “so bitches can’t escape”; the spot by the bleachers where he would set off the first explosion; the route he would take on his killing spree; the moment, when it was over, that he would end his own life.
“I Need to make this shooting/ bombing... infamous,” he wrote in early 2018. “I Need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can.”
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