LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010306/t000019840.html
Tuesday, March 6, 2001
Suspect Described as Troubled, Puny and Picked-On
Personality: Scrawny Andy Williams tried hard to be cool and tough,
schoolmates say, but it seemed to be just a pose.
By NANCY WRIDE, NORA ZAMICHOW, Times Staff Writers
SANTEE, Calif.--At Santana High School, freshman Charles Andrew
Williams was considered a scrawny punk, a pint-sized 15-year-old openly
ridiculed for his passivity, small size and pale skin.
Kids stole shoes off his feet or stuff from his backpack and he never
fought back. Twice, his skateboard was snatched away.
Friends say he began threatening a month ago that he was going to
shoot kids at school. He repeated his menacing words over the weekend, say
friends who dismissed his banter as the idle chatter of a puny weakling
trying to act tough.
Katie Hutter, 12, said she told Williams on Sunday, "You don't have
the guts to do it.
"Next thing I heard, he shot at my sister. And that is just not
cool."
No matter how much he tried, and try he did, nothing about Williams
seemed cool. Nice but dorky, as one friend says, a skateboarder who
couldn't do tricks. A mediocre bass player. He talked a good game,
acquaintances say, but was really just a poser, covering festering
resentment.
"Even the people who got picked on picked on him," said Scott Wilke,
16, a sophomore at Santana.
"He would never defend himself at all. You could take the money out
of his wallet, you could take the shirt off his back and throw it in the
gutter and he would just walk away."
"He always told me he was going to get people back but I never
thought he would shoot people," said Wilke, who saw Williams five minutes
before he allegedly opened fire with a .22-caliber revolver at school
Monday, smiling as he felled 15 people, killing two teenagers.
Afterward, the youth, clad in cargo pants and a blue sweatshirt with
a Navy insignia, did not explain his actions, witnesses said.
"I think he thought everybody was going to stop picking on him," said
Dustin Hopkins, a 15-year-old sophomore.
Even in Maryland, where he once lived, Williams was known for being
bullied. When he moved to Santee last summer with his father, he hoped to
start afresh.
Instead, he got more of the same.
Even the breakup with his 12-year-old girlfriend turned into a lesson
in humiliation, friends say.
A week ago Saturday, friends accused Williams of trying to ply the
girl with alcohol. When word spread at the skate park, where he hung out,
one of the youngsters there went after him.
"He pounded him badly, punched him in the face four times," said Tony
Friends, 14, who lives in El Cajon and takes the bus to the skate park
nearly every day.
Some of Williams' friends say that, although they never saw violent
outbursts, he did behave like a kid left too much on his own.
Last week, said 15-year-old neighbor Vanessa Willis, Williams and a
friend filled squirt guns with urine and shot people in the hallways of an
apartment complex.
None of that mattered to her. Nor did Monday's shootings discourage
her loyalty.
"He's still my friend I'm not going to dislike him just because he
killed people. He's not sick in the head like those people from Columbine.
He's a nice guy. He wasn't an outcast. He had a lot of friends."