What Motivates School Shootings?

Elizabeth Bush

“There was a deep part of me that just exploded,” eighth-grader Elizabeth Bush said after she walked into her school cafeteria in 2001 and shot her closest friend, Kimberly Marchese. “I’m not normally like that.”Bush claimed she’d been bullied by her classmates at Bishop Neuman Junior-Senior High School in Pennsylvania. “They’d just call me an idiot, stupid, fat, ugly, whatever,” she said. “One incident was I was walking home from school and five or six kids were behind me and they started throwing stones at me . . . They were just kind of laughing and I don’t know why they were doing this but they were barking at me.”In a fit of depression, Bush started cutting herself. It was a secret she only revealed to Kimberly Marchese. Soon, though, Bush was overcome with a paranoid sense that Marchese had told others. She swore revenge, saying, “I wanted her to know my pain.”

But Marchese, who survived the attack, thinks everything Bush described was happening in her head. Bush, she said, “wasn’t in the best health mentally.” She had told Marchese that she was “able to talk to God.”Despite the fight Bush had imagined, Marchese insisted after the shooting, “I haven’t talked to Elizabeth Bush for about a week or two, and there was no argument before the shooting whatsoever.”This, to Marchese, was just another one of her friend’s outbursts. “I know she sometimes says stuff and then she’ll regret it,” Marchese has said. “I think that’s just what happened to her at the shooting.”