Dr. Gerilyn Utter

Yeah, with something like this, Nancy, a lot of questions that's probably going through folks' head is why her?

This 18-year-old girl, she's beautiful.

She's way at her first year of college.

And when we look at something like this, we look at psychologically a concept called target substitution.

So what that means is she may not have been somebody that was stalked by this particular individual, but in the moment, the decision was made that it would be her.

So though the intent initially may not have been her or that she was being stalked, it was definitely something that was planned in that moment that he made the decision that of those other folks that she was the one that was potentially going to be targeted.

So we call that target substitution targeted.

And from the perpetrator's perspective, it usually comes from a place of no empathy, grievance, control, anger.

He's angry about something, though it may not be her specifically, it may be something that she represents and he wanted to basically institute a lot of pain and suffering for other folks.

Take it one minute.

one hour, one breath at a time.

It feels, you know, what we wanna do is we wanna not blame, but we wanna find a way to make it better for maybe other students.

So if they're pointing their attention to the university,

That's an outlet of grief.

It may also be a way to activate them to say, I don't want this to happen to anybody else.

I don't want my daughter's life to have been in vain, like her life taken in vain.

I want to kind of make sure I can create something, a legacy, something to change for the good to protect other kids.

I can't even imagine.

There's no textbook answer, Nancy.

There's nothing that I can say, hey, why don't you do this because it'll help you.