‘Rage of Evil’ documentary recounts would-be school shooter’s road to redemption
On November 10, 1982, more than 15 years before the landmark Columbine High School massacre, 18-year-old T.J. Stevens entered Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Va. intending to kill others and then himself. He began shooting erratically—into an office, down the hall, out the window—but hit no one.
“By the time I arrived at that school, I didn’t see human beings,” Stevens, 55, told Christianity Today. “I saw prey. The crazy thing is, when I shot, I shot above their heads. I don’t know why.”
He took 10 hostages, firing at the ceiling to prove that this wasn’t a drill. Police arrived, and a harrowing 21 hours of negotiations ensued.
Stevens’s story from troubled childhood to almost-shooter is recounted in a new documentary short, The Rage of Evil: Thoughts from a Former School Shooter, directed by Carolyn McCulley of Citygate Films. The 16-minute film is currently making its rounds on the festival circuit, including the 2019 Austin Film Festival & Conference on October 29.
The night before the shooting, Stevens had nearly attempted suicide in his home. He said he had been interrupted by voices—not audible voices, but more thoughts that seemed to originate outside himself. The voices told him that to find peace, he must drive to the school to kill others first. Stevens felt that to banish the evil invading his mind he either had to carry out the murders or kill himself.
At the school, hostages looked on as Stevens placed the barrel of a Mossberg hunting rifle in his mouth. Stevens recounts in the documentary that one of the hostages, a woman, “fell down to her face screaming and crying. I jerked my head over with the barrel in my mouth. She said, ‘Don’t ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2qqjvIT
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