Greenbrier, Arkansas, is the kind of place that shows up in a news cycle for maybe a day before everyone forgets it exists again, and normally that’s fine. That’s how small southern towns are supposed to work. But last week the FBI and local police made sure that wasn’t going to be the case here, because they caught 21-year-old Abilene Almanza allegedly planning to walk into her old elementary school and start shooting.
Almanza was arrested last month after the FBI flagged messages she was sending on Discord about a school shooting, and once local police brought her in, the story that came out was worse than originally thought. She told investigators she wanted to shoot up Eastside Elementary School specifically, the school she attended as a kid.
Eastside was the target because that’s where she said she was bullied the most and because she figured security would be lighter than at a middle or high school. She even scouted a fence line on a street near the school as a shooting position before deciding against it because she figured the kids would just scatter. That’s not someone venting. That’s someone doing recon.
You know what else is a crime? Sending kids to school in the south in August. But I digress.
Anyway, between the Discord activity, the part where she told the investigator she views past school shooters as basically her friends even though they’re dead, and her saying the world is a messed-up place and she just wants to mess it up more through a school shooting, this reads a lot like someone who’s fallen deep into what gets called the True Crime Community, or TCC.
If you’re not familiar, TCC is an online subculture, mostly on Discord and TikTok, built around obsessive fandom for real killers and mass shooters. It’s not the podcast-and-Dateline crowd. These are forums and servers where people trade manifestos, rank shooters, romanticize perpetrators, and sometimes egg each other toward violence. Almanza name-checking prior shooters as “friends” isn’t a throwaway detail. It’s the language of someone who may have found community in exactly the wrong places.
Almanza was also on probation and legally barred from owning a gun, so naturally she told police her plan was to steal one from her aunt, specifically a shotgun and a Glock. Given that this is Arkansas, I don’t think she’d have had much trouble. Guns in this state pass through family houses like hand-me-down furniture. And “barred from owning a gun” has never meant much when there’s an unlocked gun safe down the hall.
Arkansas is no stranger to this particular nightmare, either. Back in 1998, two boys, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, ages 13 and 11, pulled a fire alarm at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro to draw students and staff outside, then opened fire on them from the woods with a small arsenal they’d stolen from Golden’s grandfather.
Four students and a teacher were killed, and ten others were wounded. It was one of the deadliest school shootings in the country at the time. Because the shooters were so young, it became a grim case study in how early this kind of violence can take root. Almost thirty years later, here we are again, with someone plotting the exact same thing against the exact same kind of target, just a generation removed.
Let’s not forget that Almanza is 21. Assuming she graduated on schedule, that’s about three years removed from high school graduation. I know everyone processes this stuff differently, but once I left high school, I never gave my bullies a second thought.
So I have to wonder whether it was actually years of dormant trauma that got her here, or whether it was other people in these online spaces picking at an old wound and steering her toward doing something with it. Because here’s the thing about people who claim they were bullied and want to make the world pay for it. They almost never go after the people who actually bullied them. It’s always strangers and kids who had nothing to do with it.
Maybe TCC doesn’t stand for True Crime Community after all. Maybe it stands for That Coward Crowd.
(Sources)
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