In Another World - Pekka-Eric Auvinen and the Internet (originally posted 9.12.2008)

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We have exceptionally held over this lengthy and disturbing article from last week owing to international interest.
     
      By Teppo Sillantaus
     
      It is the morning of Wednesday November 7th, 2007. The time is precisely 11:42.
      The door to the boys’ WC opens in the downstairs hall of the Jokela School Centre, a complex housing a comprehensive school and an upper level secondary school.
      Out into the corridor steps a young man, dressed in a leather jacket. In his hand is a pistol.
      Without a word, he points the gun at an upper secondary school pupil standing nearby, and he fires off several shots. Then he retreats back into the toilets.
      A few moments later he comes out again. Now he shoots a woman who has come to the aid of the stricken pupil.
      Both victims die at the scene, and before very long seven others will be dead.
     
November 7th, 2008, and the clock is ticking towards 11:42.
      A girl sits at the kitchen table in an apartment in a northern Helsinki suburb. Her flat-mate is at school.
      The girl is 18 years old, and small in stature. She is wearing a hooded sweatshirt and fluffy slippers.
      She has kindly eyes, and looks sensitive.
      Normally she talks brightly, with a lively sense of humour, but today she spends long periods in silence and thought. The only sound is the spoon tinkling in a glass of tea.
     
The girl is clearly uptight and nervous. But the previous day her mood had been even stranger. She had been thinking of her dead friend.
      “In the evening, when I was on the PC, I had this huge longing that Pekka would come online. Really very weird.”
      A year earlier, exactly this had happened. The night before the murders at Jokela High School, the girl had chatted online with Pekka-Eric Auvinen via the Windows instant messaging client, Live Messenger.
      They were friends, even though they had never met, save through the medium of their computer screens.
      The girl had been depressed. Pekka was depressed. He had his call-up for national service in two weeks.
     
Pekka wrote that he had decided to go through with it. To carry out a mass killing at the school.
      The girl asked him to elaborate on what he had just written, but Pekka told her nothing more.
      She thought that Pekka was presumably planning to carry out his plans on the anniversary of the shootings at the Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, which took place in April, a whole five or six months away.
      She would have time enough to talk him out of it.
      A dog jumps into the girl’s lap. It is still really only an overgrown puppy, less than a year old.
      “You are sooo sweet”, the girl says to the dog, and she kisses it on the nose.
     
The girl and Pekka had met one another through IRC-Galleria, a hugely popular Finnish social networking site set up in 2000 as a photo gallery spin-off from IRC, or “Internet Relay Chat”, a real-time online chatroom system.
      IRC-Galleria is used something like 60% of all Finnish young people, with hundreds of thousands of members in countless online communities.
      Someone had set up a community around the figures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
      Harris and Klebold were the two American teenagers who in April 1999 shot 12 people at Columbine High School before turning their guns on themselves.
      An IRC-Galleria chat community had been established for people interested in them and the Columbine case.
      The girl had seen hard times in her life. She had begun to take an interest in accidents and disasters.
      Initially her interest had been directed towards catastrophes. She had, for instance, read online the entire accident investigation board report on the sinking of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic in 1994, involving the loss of more than 800 lives. Then she discovered Columbine.
      An entire night went in front of the computer monitor as she devoured everything she could find on the Net about the shootings.
     
There were roughly a dozen members of the Harris & Klebold community.
      When someone going by the nick of Sturmgeist joined their number in the spring of 2007, the discussion immediately became more active.
      Sturmgeist was Pekka-Eric Auvinen’s online monicker. It was at approximately this time that Pekka had begun to harbour plans of a mass school killing.
      He and the girl kept the discussion ticking over. The other members were left largely in a secondary role, a chorus commenting on their posts.
     
The members were Eric & Dylan specialists, steeped in the background to the shootings, who were infuriated by the abject lack of knowledge of outsiders.
      It’s really dumb, too, that most people still think they were both bullied at school and solitary, marginalised types, wrote Sturmgeist, who was himself precisely in that particular category.
      Only a very few have bothered to look into their thinking and their philosophy.
      The girl agreed with this assessment:
      Right, it pisses me off so much that they are just seen as nutjobs and psychopaths and so on.
     
As with all fans, they, too, had their own special predilections and favourites.
      I’ve just got so into Dylan, wrote the girl.
      It feels as though everything that I have ever believed and everything I’ve ever thought comes originally from Dylan’s head.
      Sturmgeist admired Eric rather more:
      Dylan’s writings about his self-loathing and his love problems are pretty pathetic when you compare them with Eric’s existentialist ideas.
      They were both fascinated by destruction and by violent death, and their humour was at times as black as ink. On April 20th, Sturmgeist wrote:
      April 20th is a great day!
      It was the anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
      And life is a gift, and all that, the girl wrote on one occasion, adding a heart-shaped emoticon for good measure.
      Huh, life is no gift..., retorted Sturmgeist.
      Sarcasm, my dear, sarcasm, the girl replied.
     
At the beginning of November, one member of the small online coterie made some comments about a shooting at a German school [in 2002] in which 17 people had died:
      Imagine the look of fear on their faces when you are pointing a gun at them.
      The girl wrote:
      If the nearest case to us was in Germany, it isn’t really a very long way from there to Finland.
      It was November 6th, the day before the Jokela murders.
     
The girl had fantasies about accidents and mass killings. But she did not herself wish to cause such things.
      She merely had a strong self-destructive streak in her, but to Pekka she was a good friend, even though they never met.
      When Pekka had not showed up on the community's pages for a while in September of last year, she sent him a private message:
      Where have U vanished to?
      On September 15th, the girl asked:
      Are you feeling any better?
      Something had clearly gone pear-shaped in Pekka's life.
     
Then again, it wasn't the first time. Things had been going wrong for Pekka on a regular basis ever since he was in junior secondary school.
      He had been bullied and teased at the school for years, and as a small boy Pekka had not been able to give back as good as he got.
      Online he came across as intelligent and confident to a fault, but in real life he would blush and have panic attacks when the going got heavy. He had been put on medication. The thought of call-up and conscription into the Defence Forces filled him with dread.
     
For five years, he had not had one friend worthy of the name.
      That is a cruel long time to be alone. Five years, from childhood to a young adult, without a single mate.
      It does something to a person.
      What you don't have, can't have, you start to hate. People, mankind itself.
      There was just his mother, his father, and a little brother.
      And the Net.
     
At the beginning of September 2007, Pekka wrote an instant message in Messenger: It is now my time for bad luck.
      The message went off to an English online friend, but she wasn't online to receive it.
      She was moving house at the time.
     
Pekka's English online acquaintance was a woman named Susan.
      She was 26 years old, and her life in August 2007 sucked about as badly as it could.
      Her lover drank, used drugs, and periodically beat her up. When the man went out on a bender, he might for instance remove all the lightbulbs in the house and lock them in a cupboard. He was also pathologically jealous.
      Susan no longer remembered whether the relationship had once been different, since she was only 16 when they started going out. Now they had a daughter, too, and Susan could not just up and leave.
      They lived in a small town in the Midlands. Where would she go?
     
The only good times were when the man was away. Then Susan could get on the Net, and log in and chat to normal people.
      More than a year earlier, she had bumped into a nice guy on a music discussion forum. He was only young, maybe not even seventeen, but he was always friendly and polite, and he didn't use rude language online.
      Initially they would converse via the forum threads and private messages, and then they exchanged email addresses. Before very long, they were chatting in real-time on Messenger.
      The boy had said his name was Eric. He was Finnish.
     
Susan had known Eric for over a year when one day her partner came home unexpectedly when she was in the middle of a chat on Messenger.
      In panic, she shut down the connection in a flash, without saying goodbye to Eric.
      The next time she got online, she had to explain to Eric what had happened. She told him about the beatings. Eric said she didn't have to tell him if she didn't want to.
      Susan was sure at this point that the schoolboy would sense she was bad news, and would drop her like a brick. But Eric did not disappear.
     
One night Susan logged on to Messenger after her man had gone out, following a particularly violent beating.
      Susan was down. Deep. Eric asked her what she wanted to do with her life. Did she want to see more bands live? Did she want to travel?
      Susan answered yes to all the questions he posed.
      Eric asked if the man in question was particularly large. No, not especially, Susan had replied.
      Then you have to fight back, typed Eric. You have to defend yourself.
      That evening when she was going to bed, Susan mulled over what Eric had written.
     
The next time the man hit Susan, she hit him back, and pushed him away.
      This seemed to work. Furious with rage, the man stomped off to bed.
      And the next time the man lifted his hands to her and started to beat her up, Susan fought back with everything she had, screaming and kicking and punching. The last thing she remembered was that he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and slammed her against the wall of the front hall.
      When she came to, she was lying in the hallway with her jeans around her ankles. The man had raped her and left.
     
Susan called the police, but she was told they could only hold the man for a few hours.
      At that point she decided to act for herself.
      She fed her daughter and got her to sleep. Then she dragged the sofa over so that it blocked the front door, and pulled the refrigerator across in front of the back door leading into the yard.
      She would not let the man back into the house again.
      Then she made a cup of tea, switched on her PC, and sent a message to Eric via Messenger: I've done. It's over.
      Eric's reply came by SMS message on Susan's mobile phone: My brave strong girl!
      Susan saved the message and thought of it often.
     
     
The article continues at the link(s) below.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in the December issue of the monthly supplement Kuukausiliite

More on this subject:
 In Another World - Part Two
 In Another World - Part Three
 In Another World - Part Four

TEPPO SILLANTAUS / Helsingin Sanomat
teppo.sillantaus@hs.fi