Evan Ramsey
“What I wanted,” Evan Ramsey told a reporter, years after walking into Bethel Regional High School in Alaksa in 1997 and shooting two of his classmates with a 12-gauge shotgun, “was to get people to leave me alone.” Ramsey spent most of his childhood moving through foster homes, most of which were, in his words, “fairly abusive.” His mother had been a binge drinker, and his first foster father had beaten him with a bungee cord.It took years before he moved in with a mother who took good care of him. Still, Ramsey struggled with bullying at school, and after telling his foster mother about it, he decided to do something about it. She told him to “do the mature and adult thing and report all incidents of bullying to the principal,” Ramsey told a reporter, before shrugging and adding, “Didn’t seem to work.” “I decided I needed to do something to stand up for myself,” Ramsey said. “I chose to kill.”
