“I HAVE TO BEAT **** **** . .” he wrote nine days before the Sept. 28, 2016, shooting in a misspelled reference to the Sandy Hook killer,**** ****. “Atleast 40.”
Two days later, he debated whether he should attack his middle school, from which he’d been expelled, or his elementary school, just up the road.
He decided on Townville Elementary because it was closer and had no armed security.
“Itll be like shooting fish in a barrel,” he wrote his friends, whose identities remain unclear, along with whether the FBI has tracked any of them down. The agency declined to comment, citing Jesse’s open case.
In the chat, he said he had researched police response times for the area and found that it would take them 15 minutes to get there, maybe 45 for SWAT. He said he would throw pipe bombs into each classroom before he got in a shootout with police and killed himself with his shotgun. He said he had been planning a massacre for two years.