Who was Asa Coon?

Some of the kids called him Jack Black, the loud, chubby, long-haired actor in the movie "School of Rock."

He could be loud sometimes, all right, and his appearance cried for attention: his shock of wavy brown hair, his fingernails painted black, the dog collar around his neck, his faded rock concert T-shirts under a trench coat.

But there was another Asa Coon, an Asa Coon far more menacing than the loopy kid with the unkempt hair and faux Gothic look.

This was the Asa who always seemed to be in fights at school. This was the Asa who slapped around his mother. This was the Asa who talked about suicide.

And it was this Asa, authorities say, who walked into SuccessTech Academy Wednesday with a satchel full of guns and ammunition and opened fire on teachers and students.

"In the end, you never know who is going to snap," classmate Aaron King said while heading home through a cold afternoon drizzle. "You have to watch who you make mad."

What apparently pushed Asa's troubled young mind over the edge was an argument with classmates about the existence of God. It happened a few days ago in reading class.

Asa said he worshipped rock star Marilyn Manson. He flashed the other kid an obscene gesture.

Some youngsters say Asa was goaded into fights and picked on. Even before the fight, he confided to friends that he was going to shoot up the school.

"I thought he was just kidding," said Demar Tabb, 15, a classmate. "I probably should have said something, but I didn't think anything would actually happen."

True to his word, Asa entered his school on a steel-gray October day looking for revenge. He shot two teachers and two classmates before he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was 14.

Asa Coon grew up in a family where violence seemed commonplace. His older brother, Stephen, was twice charged with both domestic violence and assault by the time he was 13. He was recently released from prison.

The Department of Children and Family Services was called to the Coon home in 2000 because Asa had burns on his arms and scratches on his forehead.

When he was 12, Asa was charged in Juvenile Court with domestic violence. His mother, Lori, had called the police and told them that Asa slapped her and called her a vulgar name. She had been trying to intervene in a fight between Asa and his twin sister Nicole.

"He's a very hyper kid," said Rachel Metzger, who lives near the Coons. "He's constantly yelling at his mom or anybody else. He's pretty violent."

Once in court, a magistrate ordered Asa to undergo psychological testing and follow the orders of doctors. The magistrate also ordered the family to undergo therapy together.

Asa immediately refused to obey probation rules. He threw the paperwork on the floor and charged out of the office, nearly knocking his mother to the ground.

After that, the magistrate wanted to send Asa to the Youth Development Center in Hudson. While waiting for a spot to open at the center, the boy was placed in the Jones Home, an interim shelter care facility on the West Side. He attempted to kill himself there.

Eventually, Asa was sent to the downtown detention center and placed on two medications, Trazodone, a anti-depressant and sedative and Clonodine, a medicine meant to treat high blood pressure but sometimes used to treat ADHD.

He spent a few days at Laurelwood Hospital before being released to home detention. The Laurelwood staff concluded that Asa had suicidal tendencies and was trying to push all "their buttons." They thought he may be bipolar but agreed he needed more evaluation.

The relationship between the boy and his mother remained combative, Juvenile Court records show. One time, in front of a home detention officer, both of them screamed and cursed at each other because Asa had refused to take his medication.

His home detention officer also noted that the house Asa lived in on West 43rd Street was in a neighborhood plagued by drug trafficking and gangs. He wrote that the Coons' front yard was cluttered with debris and dog feces.

Less than a month after the suicide attempt -- Asa, then a seventh-grader at Thomas Jefferson School -- was suspended for attempting to hurt another student.

"He had issues," a teacher who once worked at the school said yesterday. "I was not surprised at all he was the shooter."

There were times when it looked like things might improve. The home detention officer said Asa showed up for his appointments and was courteous.

Last November, Asa had completed his counseling, anger management classes and community service. After five months without incident, he was released from probation.

With all of his problems, nobody denied that Asa was smart. His friends say he liked to talk about the space program, the FBI and global warming.

They remember Asa building fantastic towers out of nothing but paperclips. He could take appliances apart around the house and put them back together. He also liked to help adults fix and build things.

"As long as he was busy with his hands, he was cool," said a family friend who had known the boy since he was 6. "But when he was bored, he would lash out."

Asa and his twin sister, Nicole, were total opposites, she said. He was somewhat withdrawn, had dark hair and preferred to sit inside and draw. She is outgoing, blond and preferred to play outside.

But Nicole Coon was inside her house when the police pulled up on a cool and rainy Wednesday afternoon with the bad news. Moments later, the girl bolted out the front door and collapsed in the street.

"My brother!" she cried as her mother climbed into a police cruiser and headed downtown. "Oh my God!"

I read a few other stories on this kid. He was a white kid named Coon with a psycho mother living in downtown Cleveland and going to a school that is almost entirely black. The squalid home life and psychotropic drug regimen were covered pretty well in the article you posted, but there are some more details in this AP story. It appears to me that this kid was used as a punching bag and pumped full of dangerous drugs.

Link: 5 Hurt, Gunman Killed in Ohio School

A 14-year-old suspended student, dressed in black, opened fire in his downtown high school Wednesday, wounding four people as terrified schoolmates hid in closets and bathrooms and huddled under laboratory desks. He then killed himself.

A fellow student at SuccessTech Academy alternative school said Asa H. Coon, who was suspended for fighting two days earlier, had made threats in front of students and teachers last week.

"He's crazy. He threatened to blow up our school. He threatened to stab everybody," Doneisha LeVert said. "We didn't think nothing of it."

Coon was armed with two .38 caliber revolvers, and police found a duffel bag stocked with ammunition and three knives in a bathroom, officials said. Parents were angry that firearms got into a school equipped with metal detectors that students said were intermittently used.

Officials said two teachers and two students were shot, and that a 14-year-old girl fell and hurt her knee while running out of the school.

Witnesses said the shooter moved through the converted five-story downtown office building, working his way up through the first two floors of administrative offices to the third floor of classrooms. Officials said he was wearing a black Marilyn Manson concert shirt, black jeans and black-painted finger nails.

The first person shot, student Michael Peek, had punched Coon in the face right before the shootings began, said student Rasheem Smith, 15.

Coon "came out of the bathroom and bumped Mike and he (Mike) punched him in his face. Mike started walking. He shot Mike in the side." Peek, 14, didn't know Coon had a gun, Smith said.

Antonio Deberry, 17, said he and his classmates hid under laboratory tables and watched the shooter move down the hallway. "I saw him walking past. He didn't see us, we saw him." The shooter swore and shot several times, Deberry said.

LeVert said she hid in a closet with two other students after she heard a "Code Blue" alert over the loudspeaker. She said she heard about 10 shots.

Darnell Rodgers, 18, was walking up to another floor when the stairway suddenly became flooded with students.

"It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I was actually shot, when I felt my arm burning in the area, that's when I realized that I had got shot," Rodgers said.

"They were screaming, and they were saying, 'Oh my God, oh my God.' I knew something was wrong, but thought that it was probably just a fight, so I just kept going," Rodgers said.

Rodgers was released from a hospital after treatment for a graze wound to his right elbow.

Coon had been suspended since Monday for fighting near the school that day, said Charles Blackwell, president of SuccessTech's student-parent organization. He did not know how Coon got into the building Wednesday.

Blackwell said that there was a security guard on the first floor, but that the position of another guard on the third floor had been eliminated.

Student Frances Henderson, 14, said she often got into arguments with Coon, who once told her, "I got something for you all." He was a "gothic" who usually wore a trench coat, black boots and a dog collar, she said.

Students stood outside the building, many in tears, hugging one another and on cell phones. Others shouted at reporters with TV cameras to leave them alone. Family members also stood outside, waiting for their children to be released.

Math teacher David Kachadourian, 57, was in good condition; Michael Grassie, a 42-year-old teacher, was in surgery, but his condition was unavailable. The other two injured teens were taken to a children's hospital, which would not release their names, ages or conditions.

Deberry's mother, Lakisha Deberry, said she was upset that metal detectors at the school were not always in use.

"You never know what's going on in someone's mind," said Deberry, adding that she was required to go through a metal detector and present an identification card whenever she wanted to drop off something at school for her children.

The shooting occurred across the street from the FBI office in downtown Cleveland, and students were being sent to the FBI site.

Classes at all schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District will be canceled Thursday, said Eugene Sanders, chief executive officer of the district. Counseling will be available Thursday for students at recreation centers throughout the city, Sanders said.

SuccessTech Academy is an alternative high school in the public school district that stresses technology and entrepreneurship. It is housed on several floors of the district's downtown Cleveland Lakeside Avenue administration building.

"It's a shining beacon for the Cleveland Metropolitan School system," said John Zitzner, founder and president of E City Cleveland, a nonprofit group aimed at teaching business skills to inner-city teens. "It's orderly, it's disciplined, it's calm, it's focused."

The school has about 240 mainly black students with a small number of white and Hispanic students.

Coon was white and Henderson, the student who said she frequently argued with him, is black, but she said she didn't believe race played a role in the shootings.

The school, opened five years ago, ranks in the middle of the state's ratings for student performance. Its graduation rate is 94 percent, well above the district's rate of 55 percent.

Associated Press writers James Hannah, Terry Kinney, Thomas J. Sheeran and Andrew Welsh-Huggins contributed to this report.

All the money in the world and sometimes all the family love doesn’t help kids like this either.

I don’t know why they turn out like this, but both my brothers were crazy like this too. The family tried all they knew to do and it all failed.

Maybe it has to do with drinking, drugs, etc. during pregnancy or heavy metals that are known to create behavioral problems...

What I do know is if they don’t lash out in high-school like this, they lash out in their adult years typically ending in suicide. I lost one brother to suicide on a motorcycle and the other was suicide by cop.

They didn’t have or lacked a coping mechanism. Any little perceived slight to their ego would send them on a rage. I live(d) in fear for my life until last year when my brother pulled the suicide by cop.

To say he didn’t know about his ‘flaw’ is a lie. He had all the counseling etc. You could sit and talk with him and he would acknowledge it and admit he felt helpless to change it. Sometimes you could just see the ‘danger’ flash across his eyes. He became so good at hiding it from the professional therapists, that they would release him.

When all the interventions fail...they finally snap.

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