Death . . . the final solution

A troubled 19-year-old had some scrapes with The Man, some of the final bad moves of his tortured time on Earth. Then he got fired from Mickey D's.

THAT, APPARENTLY, turned out to be the last straw for the teen authorities identified as Robert A. Hawkins -- male, Caucasian, of Bellevue, Neb. KETV, Channel 7, has the details:

Hawkins, 19, had been arrested on a couple of misdemeanors in November and was due in court this month. One charge included minor in possession of alcohol. He was arrested on Nov. 24.

Sarpy County deputies said they are getting a warrant to search Hawkins' home in the Quail Creek neighborhood in Bellevue.

The woman who owns that house at 4302 McCartey Drive, who only gave her first name of Debra, said Hawkins had a lot of emotional instability. She said she thought he was turning things around. She said he had just learned that he was fired from McDonald's.

Debra said Hawkins was coming out of his room Wednesday morning when she last saw him.

"He said he'd gotten fired and was pretty upset and said, 'This is the only way,' and we tried to talk to him," Debra said. "He was just a very troubled -- I had no idea that he was this troubled. I don't know if it was because he got fired from McDonald's."

Debra said she saw Hawkins with a gun last night and thought he and her sons were going hunting, which they did quite often.

At 4:30 p.m., Rollie Yost, in the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office, said shortly after the shooting, Hawkins' mother walked into its office with a note that "could be interpreted as suicidal."

Yost said Sarpy County is working with Omaha police.

A friend of Hawkins, Shawn, told KETV NewsWatch 7 said Hawkins had been on antidepressants. He was staying with friends in Quail Creek, the friend said, and he said Hawkins had recently begun bouncing from job to job and making "some bad judgment calls." Shawn said he was shocked to hear it was the man he calls "Robbie." Shawn said he had heard through the grapevine on Wednesday that Robbie was suicidal.

Shawn said he last saw Hawkins a few months ago.

A KETV.com user e-mailed this:

"I went to school for seven years with (Hawkins) and he seemed to be a suicidal kid. During school, he would talk about killing or something along those lines."

WAS IT HAYWIRE brain chemistry, or was it a devil on his shoulder telling Robert A. Hawkins "Kill, kill, kill"?

Does it even matter? Whatever the source of the madness, the result was pure evil. The fires of Hell billowing up to Earth and into our lives.

Innocent lives snuffed out as quickly as rifle rounds could tear through flesh and bone. Death was the final solution for Hawkins, and he decided it would be the final solution for eight other Omahans he didn't know from Adam.

It seems to me that death has become our No. 1 solution for everything today.

Even for "an awesome kid," as related just now by one of his friends to a TV reporter keeping vigil outside the house where Hawkins crashed during his last days.

The friend found out this afternoon that his buddy had become Death, destroyer of worlds. TV viewers learned that this caused the lad to be "beat up about it for a while."

But then, in the span of a few hours, came the realization that "Life goes on, and I'll get through it."

Mass murder by your good bud. No biggie.

I REMEMBER reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in ninth grade, it must have been. It comes back to me in times like these, all the more as our society becomes all the more like "The horror":

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

"`The horror! The horror!'

"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt:

"`Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'

(snip)

"`His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, `was in every way worthy of his life.'

"`And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

"`Everything that could be done --' I mumbled.

"`Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth--more than his own mother, more than -- himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'

"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. `Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.

"`Forgive me. I--I have mourned so long in silence--in silence. . . . You were with him -- to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. . . .'

"`To the very end,' I said, shakily. `I heard his very last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright.

"`Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. `I want--I want -- something -- something -- to -- to live with.'

"I was on the point of crying at her, `Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. `The horror! The horror!'

"`His last word -- to live with,' she insisted. `Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved him -- I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"`The last word he pronounced was -- your name.'"

OUR NAME.

Mental illness, or demons, or just plain garden-variety despair, or just plain meanness all have been constants in the human experience. What is relatively new is efficient means for maximum annihilation of those around us, as well as the mainstreaming of maximum annihilation as a way of getting our "15 minutes of fame" on our way out of this vail of tears.

The horror. Our horror.