Aaron Stark

Absolutely. My name is Aaron Stark, and I am currently an assistant manager at Come and Go here in Denver, Colorado.

I have a wife and four kids, and I'm also a public speaker who flies around the country talking because when I was a teenager, I used to be a school shooter. So what was Stark thinking at the time? I was going to cause as much damage as possible, kill as many people as possible, including myself. But the actual targets, I wanted to make my parents deal with making me.

I wanted to make them deal with creating a monster.

I would say the biggest lessons from my story are to remember that up until the point that the kid actually pulls the trigger, that he can be helped, that he can be reached, that that is a kid that is falling down a path of destruction. He hasn't reached the end yet. And until you reach the end, you can still be pulled off of it.

And that the biggest thing that helped me was simple human compassion, simple connection. It wasn't someone coming to me with a program and someone coming to me with this project. It was a friend sitting down next to me and treat me like I was a human. I was covered in dirt and blood and nastiness and chaos. And he still treated me like I was a kid.

And that to me is the important thing we need to do. The failure that happens is trying to mitigate the after effects and trying to stop the damage afterwards and trying to put in all these band-aids to try to make the adults feel better.

If you talk to a kid in class, they know what kids in their class are super depressed, what ones are on the edge, what ones are living in hell, which ones are very abused. Which ones are very aggressive and stuck up and which ones have borderline personality disorders? Which ones are just having anxiety issues and need to have more care? No one ever talks to the kids who actually have the problem.

No one ever digs in to the actual human behind any of the story.

Failures of determination. Part of my problem was I did not ask... Enough questions. And failures that cut deep. I think that was my tipping point where I just went, I'm done. And it broke me.