Aaron Stark | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1979 (age 44–45) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | North High School (dropped out in sophomore year) |
| Known for | Mental health advocacy, nearly committing a mass shooting |
| Children | 4 |
Aaron Stark (born 1979) [1] [2] is an American mental health advocate [3] who is best known for planning but not following through with a mass shooting in 1996. [1] [3]
Stark spent most of his childhood in Denver, Colorado. [2] According to Stark, he had grown up in a dysfunctional family: his biological father, a Vietnam veteran, [2] was abusive and violent towards him, his brother, and his mother, [2] while his stepfather and mother struggled with substance abuse. [4] [5] [6] According to Stark, he had seen his mother being beaten and raped during his childhood. [7] Due to his family being constantly on the run from law enforcement, [6] Stark never attended the same school for more than six months, and went to 40 different schools. [3] [8] According to himself, he was obese, awkward, dirty (because his home lacked running water), [9] and was bullied at school. [2] [3] [10] He began cutting himself at the age of 14 or 15. [6] After being kicked out of his house at the age of 15 or 16 and becoming homeless, and resorting to sleeping in his friend's shed, [3] he sought mental help. [6] [8] [11] Social services allegedly brought his abusive mother to the meeting, who accused him of fabricating his mental health issues. [3] Reportedly, his mother had told him after the meeting that she would buy him sharper razor blades if he planned to slit his wrists to commit suicide. [6] [9] According to Stark, after he had sought mental help a second time, his psychologist told him that nothing could be done, and refused him inpatient care. [3] [5] [7] He dropped out of high school at age 17. [2]
In 1996, while homeless, Stark began planning to attack either North High School or the food court of a nearby mall and to then commit suicide afterwards. [2] [6] Stark had planned to trade cannabis to obtain a gun from his family's drug dealer. [3] [6] According to him, his primary motive was to make his parents feel shame for creating him, and not out of a specific hatred of anyone in the school or mall. [2] [11]
Stark was days away from committing the mass murder when he changed his mind. [4] [6] His friend, Mike Stacey, [2] who was unaware of Stark's plans, [4] had invited Stark in for a shower and some food, [1] after Stark had visited him with the intent of saying goodbye. [3] He ended up staying for five days at Stacey's house. [2] Stark credits this incident, and his inability to obtain weapons, with stopping him from committing the mass shooting. [2] [7] [12] [13] [14]
Months after the incident, Stark was on the verge of suicide again, but was dissuaded after his friend Amber Schneider [2] invited him to a movie and baked him a blueberry-peach pie for his birthday. [5] [12] [15] [16]
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Stark's 2018 TEDx speech |
Stark lives in Denver, Colorado, [2] is married, [1] has four children, [2] and maintains friendships with both Schneider and Stacey. [2] [3]
Stark went public about his former plans to commit a mass shooting via an open letter to 9News in Denver in 2018, one day after the Parkland shooting. [12] [17] A TEDx conference speech Stark made has gone viral, [9] with over 15 million views on YouTube as of March 2024. [6]
The Columbine High School massacre, commonly referred to as Columbine, was a school shooting and attempted bombing that occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States. The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher. Ten of the twelve students killed were in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently committed suicide. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was also exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, until it was surpassed by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, and later the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until the Parkland high school shooting in February 2018. Columbine still remains both the deadliest mass shooting and the deadliest school shooting to occur in the U.S. state of Colorado.
A school shooting is an armed attack at an educational institution, such as a primary school, secondary school, high school or university, involving the use of a firearm. Many school shootings are also categorized as mass shootings due to multiple casualties. The phenomenon is most widespread in the United States, which has the highest number of school-related shootings, although school shootings have taken place elsewhere in the world.
Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold were American high school seniors who perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 in Columbine, Colorado. Harris and Klebold killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 24 others. After killing most of their victims in the school's library, they died by self-inflicted gunshot wounds. At the time, it was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.
A copycat crime is a criminal act that is modeled after or inspired by a previous crime. It notably occurs after exposure to media content depicting said crimes, and/or a live criminal model.
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A mass shooting is a violent crime in which one or more attackers kill or injure multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm. There is no widely accepted definition of "mass shooting" and different organizations tracking such incidents use different definitions. Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare and sometimes exclude instances of gang violence, armed robberies, familicides and terrorism. The perpetrator of an ongoing mass shooting may be referred to as an active shooter.
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James Eagan Holmes is an American mass murderer responsible for the 2012 Aurora theater shooting in which he killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a Century 16 movie theater on July 20, 2012. He had no known criminal background before the shooting occurred. Before the shooting, Holmes booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which were defused one day later by a bomb squad.
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Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm related violence. Definitions vary, with no single, broadly accepted definition. One definition is an act of public firearm violence—excluding gang killings, domestic violence, or terrorist acts sponsored by an organization—in which a shooter kills at least four victims. Using this definition, a 2016 study found that nearly one-third of the world's public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012 occurred in the United States, In 2017 The New York Times recorded the same total of mass shootings for that span of years. A 2023 report published in JAMA covering 2014 to 2022, found there had been 4,011 mass shootings in the US, most frequent around the southeastern U.S. and Illinois. This was true for mass shootings that were crime-violence, social-violence, and domestic violence-related. The highest rate was found in the District of Columbia, followed by Louisiana and Illinois.
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