When I was in Junior High school (back in the mid 70’s) I sat next to a guy in my English class. He was pretty nice and seemed perfectly normal and did well in school. Although he wasn’t a close friend, I considered him to be a friend and thought he was a good guy. Well, when I was in 12th grade, this same guy, who also went to my high school, but I didn’t see him too much at this point, shot and killed 2 people in one of our local parks. From what I recall, he and another boy were high on drugs and he just found this random couple sitting in their car and they killed them, no robbery or anything like that. It was all over the news. I never would have thought in a million years that he could have done something like that.
On the other hand, the place that I used to work had a brief policy of hiring temporary security guards, instead of having guards that worked directly for our company as regular employees. This one dude, who I will refer to as Baby Huey, scared the poop out of me. Whenever me or any other female employee would walk past him, he would give us a long, scary stare. On many occasions, when I was coming down the hall into the room where he was working (but there weren’t any patrons) he would be making these weird arm and body movements, kind of like someone doing tai chi, but it looked like they were semi-violent moves that he saw in some movie or video game (little kids do it all the time, especially if they’ve watched Iron Man or the Last Airbender, but I never feel scared when they do it). And other employees said that he had made several comments about weapons and guns. He ultimately did something like make inappropriate sexual comments to a female employee which got him fired. I always thought that I would definitely see him in the papers related to some type of mass shooting. So far, I haven’t.
One of my former neighbors, was this mean old man (actually he was only middle aged, but seemed like a cranky old geezer) who would never come out of his house except to get his mail or to yell at little kids and people walking their dogs, and when he was retrieving his mail, he would never look up or say hello to anyone. All of the other neighbors were pretty close and friendly on our block and everyone had been inside each other’s homes and even held neighborhood holiday parties, but this dude never came to any of the parties, even though he was invited and no one ever set foot inside his 4 bedroom house (he was the only person living there). He made several un-warranted complaints about our neighbor across the street’s dog. Then the dog turned up dead, having been poisoned. We all suspected that it was this hideous neighbor that killed our friend’s dog, but we had no way to prove it. Everybody kept a close eye on this guy after that, and finally he moved away about a year after that incident. There’s a sweet older lady with a little dog that lives there now. She threw a meet and greet party the week that she moved in. She said the house was in immaculate shape when she bought it, probably because the former owner never used any of the rooms. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this dude on TV someday for killing a bunch of people.