As the debate continues on whether more or less gun control is needed, there is also a debate about how much responsibility we have to report people we suspect of committing mass murder, especially if that person is your child. This mom called the authorities on her teenage son after she discovered his notebook which detailed his plans to carry out a shooting at his high school. The mother made the unthinkable choice to turn her own son after she discovered the then 17-year-old’s journal was filled with a detailed plan to commit a mass murder at his high school.
“Your first instinct as a parent is to protect your child,” the mother, Nichole Schubert, reportedly told Good Morning America. “But at that point I felt like if he is actually going to do these things, he would be safer in jail.” During an interview with GMA, the mother talk about the extremely difficult decision she made in 2019. “It was very descriptive. It was just heartbreaking.”
She made the horrifying discovery while cleaning her house. Schubert found her son’s notebook, which contained detailed plans about killing her before attacking his Washington state high school. Within a few hours Schubert was on the phone with police. Despite wanting to protect her son, she also wanted to protect the hundreds of people her son planned to attack.
“It wasn’t just about me and him at that point. It was about a whole school – hundreds of people, hundreds of kids, children,” the mother also said.
Schubert handed police her son’s notebook and informed them that her son, who was 17 at the time, had previously made what she believed was a pipe bomb.
The teen was arrested and plead guilty to a felony charge and misdemeanors. He underwent a mental evaluation and completed a rehabilitation program and community service.
After turning her son in to police, Schubert has a message for all parents.
“Just be aware and watch for signs. Kids will normally tell you by their actions when something is wrong.”
The mother spoke about how she made the difficult to decision not just to save the lives of others but her own son’s too.Though her 20-year-old son still remains upset with her, she said his life is back on track thanks to the intervention.
“As hard as it was to turn him in, I don’t have any regrets,” she told The Wall Street Journal.
The mother described coming across her son’s journal in their home in September, 2019, where she found his plans laid out in detail. In the journal, her son reportedly wrote about carrying out a shooting on April 20, 2020. He planned to begin his massacre at 5 a.m. that morning by murdering his mother and her boyfriend, and would begin shooting up his school at 12:20pm later that day.
Few months before discovering the journal, the mother reportedly found what appeared to be a pipe bomb and bomb making materials in the bedroom of her son, who she said was also fascinated by mass shooters, the Daily Mail reports.
Schubert’s son reportedly plead guilty to two misdemeanors and a felony threat to bomb or injure property. He reportedly maintained the contents of the journal were merely a fantastical story he’d written and not something he planned to actually do. He received mental evaluation, was given 18 months of community supervision and 20 hours of community service.