I’ve been following this story out of Pierce County, Washington, for months now, and somehow it keeps getting worse while everyone involved keeps pretending it’s getting better.
Back in early September, deputies arrested a 13-year-old boy after tips came in about his social media activity. Investigators said he was making threats, showing off guns, and talking about killing people.
When deputies hit the house in the middle of the night, they didn’t find one or two weapons tucked away in a closet. They found more than twenty firearms, many of them 3D-printed, along with ammunition, writings about mass shootings, and magazines labeled “school shooter.” His room looked less like a teenager’s bedroom and more like a militia bunker.
The deeper investigators looked, the worse the story got. The teen hadn’t been in school since 2021, when he was nine years old. Four years where no teacher, counselor, or adult outside that house had eyes on him. During that time, he drifted into the online world, where he found the so-called True Crime Community around the age of nine or ten. Instead of learning from history, he absorbed it like a script. He dressed like past killers, idolized them, and started building his own narrative.
Somewhere along the way, he decided he wasn’t just going to watch. He was going to participate instead.
Investigators say the teen recorded videos laying out his plans, talking about body counts, even saying he wanted to surpass ten victims. He showed off loaded magazines he reportedly took from his father’s room. He talked about carrying a rifle in a mandolin case, like another kid who thinks he’s El Mariachi instead of what he really is, which is a child playing dress-up with mass murder.
Deputies said it plainly. They stopped something very bad from happening.
At first, the system acted like it understood that. The teen was taken into custody, then released to home monitoring, then sent back into custody in November after prosecutors showed he was still posting online about mass shootings. That should have told everyone involved exactly what they were dealing with.
Now we get to where the case stands today. The teen has pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including attempted threats and unlawful possession of firearms. A judge sentenced him to 90 days in detention, which he had already served, along with nine months of probation and court-ordered behavioral treatment at a facility in Utah.
On paper, that sounds like accountability. In reality, it feels like a pause button.
This is the same kid who openly talked about committing an attack in the future. Not vaguely, not hypothetically, but with a timeline, saying he planned to do it at 21. That wasn’t buried in some obscure corner of the internet. That was part of the case against him. And yet the outcome is time served and a plan that depends entirely on compliance from the same environment that allowed all of this to happen in the first place.
There are details in the latest reporting that try to explain how he got here. His parents pulled him out of school during COVID, which a lot of families did. Around that same time, his mother was dealing with breast cancer. That’s not something to minimize. Anyone who has seen what cancer does to a family knows how overwhelming that can be. But COVID restrictions didn’t last four years. At some point schools reopened. At some point there was an opportunity to put him back into a structured environment with actual oversight. For some reason, that didn’t happen.
Instead, homeschooling fell apart, isolation set in, and the internet filled the gap. The result is what deputies found in that bedroom.
So now the questions get harder.
What is the current status of the guns that were in that house? Are they gone for good, or are we just supposed to assume they’ve been secured this time? Why were there more than twenty firearms, some unsecured, accessible to a 13-year-old in the first place? And why, after all of this, are there no charges against the parents who allowed that environment to exist?
The court is betting that counseling and probation will fix what years of neglect and exposure created. Maybe it will. Maybe this is the intervention that finally breaks the cycle.
Or maybe it isn’t.
Because from where this stands now, it looks less like resolution and more like delay.
(Source)
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