The Boy-Shooter at The Paramus NJ Mall

“I don’t know Richard Shoop’s whole story. I know well the pizza place where he worked, and the supportive family who run the place. I’m sure Richard’s handed off pizzas to my husband at our front door here in Teaneck. Everyone knows and loves Victor’s: the best slices in town. I went round there after the fact to ask if there was anything at all we, in the community, could do for the Shoops. The owners were serving food to a full house, as usual, but ashen-faced and silent. A 20-year-old in America is still a boy. It takes so long for boys to become men here; so long for them to shed the delusions and trappings of youth. Up until recently, this prolonged adolescence has been one of the great luxuries of America: but it has long since become a liability. When I read the stories referring to ‘Mr. Shoop’ this and ‘Mr. Shoop’ that, I want to scream. No. It takes fully 50 years to bring an American male to maturity.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”―David Foster Wallace

“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, ‘He fought so hard.’ And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”―Sally Brampton, Shoot The Damn Dog: A Memoir Of Depression

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—11/18/2013—All day long the day after the shooting at the Garden State Mall, I was on the internet and the phone, trying to learn, after the fact, whether Richard Shoop, aged 20, of Teaneck, New Jersey, the town just outside New York City where I and my husband live, might easily have got mental health care here in the run-up to his suicide.

I knew the answer, of course. I “suffer from” (now there’s a phrasal verb that does not carry its weight!) Major Depressive Disorder, myself, and have not been able to find help hereabouts in the 14 years since I moved north from Upstate South Carolina where, believe me, mental health care was much more plentiful and varied.

No, I find. Richard Shoop would have been up a creek without paddles. Like me. Mental health support groups run by physicians (or other qualified professionals), reasonably priced and easily accessed outpatient psychiatric care, or even a knowledgeable person on the other end of the phone at a hospital or hotline, if an actual person should happen to answer the phone: these things are as rare as pileated woodpeckers in Teaneck.

I knew all this before I began my series of fruitless phone calls and internet searches, but I felt I owed Bergen County the due diligence. Yet again.

That said, if the calls I made, and the people I managed to reach―including the woman who hung up on me at Hackensack Hospital, having asked me who the hell I thought I was, God?―are anything to go by, I’d say just talking to most of the folks tasked with helping the depressed, addicted and/or disturbed in northern New Jersey would have pushed Richard Shoop just a bit more quickly over the edge.

The woman at Hackensack told me their outpatient mental health services cover only brief medication consults. I followed up with, “What? No actual therapy?” She said no, and I answered, “Well, then, you’re doing about a fourth of what you should be doing for all of us, and this is perhaps one reason several very young people I know in this county have taken their own lives.” Click. Great work, Hackensack! At least this woman’s not manning a suicide prevention line.

But this is just what I’ve come to expect of New Jersey, one helluva place to fall ill with an “invisible illness.” They do pretty well around here with kidney stones and heart attacks, but front up with bipolarity, any of the personality disorders, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD or, God help you, suicidal depression, and the best you can expect is a brief stint on Holy Name’s psych floor, on your own dime; the very worst is to be thrown into a two-week-circle-of-hell at Bergen Regional.

I think of all the veterans returning to Bergen County from Afghanistan and Iraq, suffering from addiction, PTSD, and MDD, and I wonder how many of them will end up turning to the barrel of a gun when there’s just nowhere else. (Our nearest VA Hospital’s in East Orange; according to a recent NBC story, 30 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have considered suicide: I would not want to be coming home to Bergen County seeking mental health care.)

I don’t know Richard Shoop’s whole story. I know well the pizza place where he worked, and the supportive family who run the place. I’m sure Richard’s handed off pizzas to my husband at our front door here in Teaneck. Everyone knows and loves Victor’s: the best slices in town. I went round there after the fact to ask if there was anything at all we, in the community, could do for the Shoops. The owners were serving food to a full house, as usual, but everyone was ashen-faced and silent.

A 20-year-old in America is still a boy. It takes so long for boys to become men here; so long for them to shed the delusions and trappings of youth. Up until recently, this prolonged adolescence has been one of the great luxuries of America: but it has long since become a liability. When I read the stories referring to “Mr. Shoop” this and “Mr. Shoop” that, I want to scream. No. It takes fully 50 years to bring an American male to maturity.

This boy, in his black leather jacket and visored black motorcycle helmet (with its red stripe), shooting his brother Kevin’s gun (“modified to look like an AK 47”―so, not even the real McCoy) into the air at Garden State Mall “liked to drive both his blue Nissan 300ZX car and motorbike at high speeds,” friends said. He’d put up a profile on exploretalent.com, and imagined he had a shot at TV pilots, modeling gigs, feature film parts. Like that was going to happen.

How and why do all our kids get these ideas into their heads? “America’s Got Talent,” perhaps? Well, America’s got precious little talent, and zero common sense. In the depths of the Second Great Depression, we’re all still waiting “to be discovered,” to be cast, to be stars.

Shoop had had skirmishes with the law, according to neighbors―involving setting off fireworks at night, marijuana and, of late, harder drugs. He was still a kid, the middle child of three, but the word on the street is that he’d got mixed up in dealing. He’d been in rehab. He’d been on Molly.

. . . and he’d been brought up on America’s mass pop culture of violence, guns, dramatic endings, big finishes.

We don’t have the full story, yet. We will never have the full story.

But we do know that the story appears to be repeating itself, over and over and over, from Newtown to Aurora to LAX to Teaneck.

Disturbed and delusional kids get readily-available guns, usually from just down the hall in a mother or brother’s room, and proceed to take their own lives and/or the lives of others. They go out with a bang and, if they’ve asked, called, or screamed for help beforehand, there’s never enough help (and there’s no help in Hackensack).

From what I’ve heard thus far, and there’s been precious little in the press—after all, this is America, where “only one death” isn’t much of a news story—I would bet Richard Shoop was desperately, suicidally depressed. I would wager something down-shifted him from depressed to actively suicidal but that, at 20, as an American “boy,” immersed in the unreality of our virtual culture, he really never took on board (till the analog metal hit him) the finality of what that bullet would do inside his skull. Oh, he could imagine it in 3-D, so to speak, but not in reality.

He was a buff kid, with an earring in each ear, and had come up with the money for tattoos. At some recent point in the past, he had cared about his body, about his motorcycle, about delivering pizzas while they were still hot.

Politely, we hear, he didn’t point his gun at other people in the mall. He shot at the ceiling, at security cameras, perhaps seeking a “man with a gun” to shoot a “boy with a gun.” There is one report that he waved, in friendship, at shopkeepers. And, when no man stepped forward to stop him, Richard Shoop descended into the bowels of the vast mall complex, an area under construction, away from the frenzied crowds, and turned a gun he perhaps could not imagine was real upon himself.

Note: Some reporting used in this column derives from: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/nyregion/mall-shooting-garden-state-plaza-paramus-new-jersey.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0.http://, www.ibtimes.com/nj-mall-shooting-who-richard-shoop-all-about-westfield-garden-state-plaza-shooter-photo-1455950, and http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/surveillance-footage-shows-gunman-strolling-new-jersey-mall-shoppers-scramble-article-1.1518098?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nydnrss%2Fentertainment%2Fculture+%28Culture%29.