Iowa school shooter’s parents break silence
Dylan Butler, 17, opened fire inside Perry High School in Iowa last Thursday as students returned from their Christmas break
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The parents of the 17-year-old who carried out a mass shooting at his Iowa high school have said they “had no inkling he intended the horrible violence he was about to inflict.”
Dylan Butler, 17, opened fire inside Perry High School in Iowa on 4 January as students returned from their Christmas break.
One sixth-grader, 11-year-old Ahmir Jolliff, was killed and seven others were injured, including Perry High School principal Dan Marburger – who is believed to have put himself in harm’s way in an apparent effort to protect students – as well as two other staff members and four students.
Butler, a former student at the school, was found dead on the scene. Police said the teenager died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.
While the teenager’s motive for the attack is now under investigation, his parents have spoken out, describing his attack as “senseless”.
“As the minutes and hours have passed since the horrors our son Dylan inflicted on the victims, the Perry School and the community, we have been trying to make sense out of the senseless,” Jack and Erin Butler said in the statement. “We are simply devastated and our grief for the deceased, his family, the wounded and their families is immeasurable.”
They added that they are cooperating with investigators as they try “to provide answers to the question of why our son committed this senseless crime”.
Investigators have said they are reviewing reams of electronic and physical evidence they’ve gathered and are interviewing dozens of witnesses to better understand what happened and why.
Authorities are also analysing Butler’s posts on TikTok and Reddit in the lead-up to the shooting.
Moments before the shooting, Butler posted a final chilling video on his since-deleted TikTok account. In the video, Butler posed in a bathroom stall at the school with a blue duffle bag at his feet along with the caption: “now we wait”.
It was accompanied by the song “Stray Bullet” by the German band KMFDM – also used on the personal website of Eric Harris, one of the shooters involved in the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
Investigators also found other photos Butler posted posing with firearms, according to the Associated Press.
Butler, who authorities said acted alone, was described as a quiet person who had been bullied for years by his former classmates.
Sisters Yesenia Roeder and Khamya Hall, both 17, said that Butler had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school.
They added that the bullying had escalated recently, when his younger sister started getting picked on, too. Officials at the school didn’t intervene, they said, and that was “the last straw” for the shooter.
“He was hurting. He got tired. He got tired of the bullying. He got tired of the harassment,” Yesenia Roeder Hall said.
“Was it a smart idea to shoot up the school? No. God, no,” she added.
Khamya described Butler as “the kindest person ever”.
“He was there for us when we needed him, and we tried to be there when he needed us, which clearly we weren’t there for him enough,” she added through tears.
Following the shooting, several hundred students and other protesters marched on the state Capitol on Monday in Des Moines about 40 miles away from Perry to push for tighter gun control laws in the state.
As of July 2021, Iowa does not require a permit to purchase a handgun or carry a firearm in public, though it mandates a background check for a person buying a handgun without a permit.
In light of the shooting, the White House urged Congress to pass gun control legislation that would enact universal background checks, ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require safe storage of firearms and pass a national red flag law.
“Our students and teachers deserve to know that their schools are safe spaces and to focus on learning, not duck and cover drills. More must be done to keep our schools and communities safe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.