As you may recall, on August 21st, 18-year-old Liam Nebel walked into Brinell School in Fagersta, Sweden, armed with a sword, and killed a 17-year-old girl while wounding three other students.
He was reportedly dressed similarly to Anton Lundin Pettersson, the guy who did almost the exact same thing with a sword back at Kronan School in Trollhättan in 2015, right down to the mask and the helmet. I covered that 2015 attack when it happened, and I never expected to be citing my own decade-old posts as source material for a copycat attack, yet here we are.
Officially, prosecutors have confirmed a second suspect was arrested and is accused of assisting with the murder and attempted murder, though they’ve kept the details deliberately thin. No age of the suspect has been released, and no explanation of how they’re connected to the crime. However, it’s believed that the second suspect was not at Brinnel School during the attack.
I also received some unconfirmed information from a reader from Sweden. According to the reader, it’s already been established that the second suspect was in contact with Nebel, though police won’t confirm whether the two of them ever actually met in person. The reader also mentioned that part of the secrecy might come down to the suspect being a minor, which would explain why Swedish authorities are being so tight-lipped compared to how openly they’ve discussed Nebel. The second suspect may have also been planning an attack of their own. While I have no reason to doubt this information, I do have to stress that this is only speculation at this time.
But again, it seems that none of these guys ever seem to operate in a total vacuum anymore. Nebel copied Pettersson’s whole aesthetic. His TikTok was stuffed with tributes to other mass killers, including Breivik. And now there’s apparently a second person who may have been talking to him before any of this happened, possibly with plans of his own. That feels like an entire ecosystem of copycats, which is exactly what I mean when I keep bringing up the TCC on this blog.
These aren’t isolated kids who each independently arrived at the idea of hurting a school full of people. They’re finding each other online, trading the same cowards’ biographies back and forth like trading cards, and every single one of them thinks he’s the first person clever enough to combine a costume with a body count. He isn’t. None of them ever are.
At this point I could write the outline for the next attack before it even happens, and sadly, it will happen.
(Source)
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