This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Sulejman Talovic is a cypher.
An 18-year-old high school dropout - that, we know. A refugee of Bosnia's civil war. Alienated loner, a "hermit," his neighbor said. Older brother and son. And, obviously, a deliberate and seething killer.
What we don't know is why. And everyone has a theory. Everyone needs a theory.
In the days since Talovic stalked through Trolley Square with a shotgun, killing five, armchair psychiatrists have blamed everything from violent video games to his religion.
The blogosphere erupted with xenophobia as some posters noted that Talovic was Muslim and concluded the rampage was a terrorist act. The Tribune also has been criticized for not mentioning his religion in every story. The assumption, apparently, is that all Muslims are violent.
"I had my suspicions immediately," one YouTube poster wrote. "I'm willing to bet they will find American hating evidence in this guy's home, computer, etc. Am I racist? No. I'm a realist. We are at war folks!"
Others speculate that Talovic played violent video games. Attorney Jack Thompson, who is lobbying Utah lawmakers to punish those who provide games that make child's play out of murder and mayhem, sent an e-mail to reporters with the headline: "Salt Lake City Teen Probably Trained on Grand Theft Auto Video Game." That rumor was stated as fact Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
In the post-Columbine conventional wisdom, high school bullies often take the blame. Callers to KUER's RadioWest on Wednesday figured Talovic must have been persecuted at school, pushed into a Trenchcoat Mafia-like nihilism that eventually made him break.
The truth is, we may never know what made a boy barely a man become an adolescent mass murderer.
But there are clues.
University of Utah psychiatry professor David Tomb says Talovic was a "poster boy" random shooter. Most have few if any friends and minimal job skills. Many have been abused and are depressed. Feeling belittled and forgotten, they seek out activities that make them feel important. Most of the time, they leave no diary or blog to explain. Virtually all are set off by a trigger. To those around them, the trigger seems insignificant.
But Talovic had a background different from most teenage killers - he witnessed the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia as a young boy in stark and painful detail. The Associated Press reports from Sarajevo that Talovic and his mother fled their village of Talovici on foot when Serb forces took it over in 1993. His father went into the mountains with the other men. The boy and his mother arrived in Srebrenica on a U.N. truck. The father arrived two years later. All escaped the Srebrenica massacre, where thousands of men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serb soldiers.
The 1995 peace accord left their village in the Serb-controlled half of the country. Their home was rubble. The family lived as refugees for three more years before coming to the United States. They settled in Utah. Talovic was 10.
The details are antiseptic, written in journalistic shorthand. No gory details about homes being burned, fathers marched off to concentration camps or mothers and sisters raped.
Whether or not Talovic witnessed such atrocities, the upheaval in his young life undoubtedly affected him, Tomb says. And the years between 4 and 10 are the "prime time to become alienated."
Perhaps in this case, violence led to violence, post-traumatic stress became mass murder.
Tomb says Utahns searching for answers may end up disappointed. "Sometimes, there is no clear explanation. We can't fall back on 'A-ha, that's why it happened. That's what separates this boy from all the other teen-agers in the valley,' " Tomb says. "There is not necessarily going to be that kind of satisfaction. He clearly was different from most people. You can make a case that he was unique."
No explanation, no motive will satisfy the larger question of what makes one man kill five people he did not know before forcing police to kill him.
And in the end, there's no excuse for what Talovic did.