THE WEIS MARKET TRAGEDY: The Randy Stair Story.

The dark loneliness

There is no more fitting story for a first publication than the story of a young boy whose life was spent in darkness, loneliness, and finally an obsession that led to a tragic end that left a mark on four families. Randy's story teaches us about the importance of building a healthy social environment that is based on mutual understanding and support. It also teaches us about the need for an outlet to help us pour out negative emotions such as anger and resentment before they completely poison our minds and lives. In the following lines, you will find out why Randy's story is foundational and the lessons that will guide us in our next explorations.

On the surface

But first, who was Randy Stairr? Born in Dallas, PA in 1992 Randy grew up in the family of Robert and Lori Ann Stair, along with his younger brother Jeremy. Randy didn't share much about his parents, suggesting his dislike for them, as well as their absence (literally and figuratively) in what the boy would become.

In the course of his growing up, Randy was a very withdrawn boy to the point where he would burst into tears when his parents dropped him off at school. Needless to say, Randy didn't have many friends. When he was ten years old, he became passionate about the art of filmmaking after he and his best friend at the time, Matt, played around with a video camera, shooting various home videos and parodies of popular movies. It was a turning point in Randy's life that set the germ for the creative endeavors that followed.

That germ began to sprout thanks to another friend of Randy's, James, who was also into movies. At the time, Randy's relationship with Matt began to cool after the latter got a serious girlfriend and the two began spending less time together. In Randy's class, various cartoon characters were talked about more and more and with increasing admiration, and this left a mark on the boy's mind. The desire to be idealized in the same way began to creep into his thoughts. It was then that James told him about the existence of YouTube and Randy saw the opportunity to get the attention he had been dreaming of. In the beginning, Randy posted events from his life and eventually moved on to comedy skits inspired by Fred Figglehorn, the first creator on the platform to reach a million subscribers.

At the time, no one could have imagined that Randy Stair's entry into YouTube was the key that opened Pandora's box in his mind.

Spiral to the Abyss and the Birth of a Monster

The exact chronology of Randy's gradual descent into darkness is hazy and unclear. So instead of trying to sort it out, let's get inside Randy's mind and try to understand what drove him toward the monster he eventually became.

What we do know is that since ninth grade he was attracted to girls and women, but not in the way we understand it. He didn't fantasize about girlfriends and/or sexual relationships like most of his peers. Randy felt like a woman trapped in a man's body. This is called gender dysphoria and is characterized by feelings of distress and anxiety that a person experiences due to a discrepancy between their gender identity - their personal sense of their own sex - and the sex they were assigned at birth. Randy idealized femininity to the point of deifying it and despised everything masculine - appearance, habits, behavior, machoism. Moreover, Randy found sex disgusting and ugly. These feelings played a role in subsequent events. They reveal to us some of Randy's motives for what he was about to do, but I leave it to you to judge their degree of importance.

At that time, people still relied on the weekly television program, hoping to catch their favorite shows and movies. Occasionally, Randy would stumble across a children's series called Danny Phantom. This is another turning and pivotal moment in our history, the significance of which will become clearer in the lines that follow. The series tells the story of Danny Fenton, a boy superhero who falls victim to an accident involving the development of a portal between the world of humans and the world of spirits, turning Danny into a hybrid between human and spirit. Over the course of the episodes, Danny faces a rogue gallery of different villains, including Ember. Ember is a teenage rockstar who dies in a fire and is reincarnated as a ghost with the ability to hypnotize anyone with her music. This character unlocked something in Randy's soul and he began to feel some strong invisible connection between him and Ember. It was not without some irony that he felt himself being completely absorbed (or even hypnotized) by the song Remember, in which Ember poured out all her pain and talked about her death. Whenever Randy felt himself slipping into his own darkness, he would play the song and be filled with an inexplicable sense of comfort. He understood her. In fact, his obsession with this character went so far that he learned to do animation and began incorporating variations and alter egos of Amber into his own videos. She was the voice that encouraged Randy's dark thoughts, and made him more and more devoted to them, to following them. Gradually her image, the idea of Amber, became an integral part of Randy's being. He wanted to be like her, to be a ghost girl.

Randy thought a lot about death and believed that it was the true meaning of life. Thus were born his first suicidal thoughts. During this period he experienced several personal tragedies in which he lost classmates and relatives. Although these left a mark, something far more disturbing began to take root in his mind. The Columbine High School mass murder committed by high school students Eric Harris and Dillon Klebold is well known to Americans. And while everyone sent their prayers to the victims and their harsh judgments to the perpetrators, Randy had a different view. He didn't just idolize the two high school students who killed 12 students and one teacher. Randy sincerely believed that Eric Harris and Dillon Klebold were, in fact, the real victims. Moreover, as a tribute to them, Randy began wearing a Natural Selection T-shirt, the same one Eric Harris had been wearing at the time of the murders.

Meanwhile, his hatred for humanity and for his own parents grew. His videos began to include more and more violence. He worked at Weis Market for several years and often imagined hurting customers and co-workers. As his anger grew, so did his desire to take his own life. He began to plan his suicide, now giving up, now renewing his thoughts about how to remove himself from the world.

These thoughts and feelings had no particular consistency in Randy's mind. He experienced them simultaneously, all the time. Out of their totality and synergism emerged something far more sinister - EGS.

The EGS Doctrine

Ember's Ghost Squad (EGS) is a pantheon of cartoon ghost girls. When you die, your soul falls under their gaze and, as long as they decide you are worthy, they will help you be reborn as a ghost girl and as part of their pantheon. Perhaps Randy wouldn't express himself as flatly about them as we do here, but you get the basic idea. To many of us, that would sound like the idea for some weird cartoon. To Randy, EGS were deities (there is some irony here, as he was an atheist and often spat on religion and faith). As you've probably guessed by now, these spirits are entirely based on Amber, as well as the variations and alter egos created by Randy. For him, however, they were a reality he wanted to reside in forever.

If you didn't know who Randy Steer was and only knew him as the creator of EGS, you probably wouldn't think anything of it. You would have found the idea odd, or perhaps interesting, but there would have been nothing disturbing about it. However, now that you know who Randy is, you understand why it was a ticking time bomb.

Countdown and the Weis Market Tragedy

Randy bought a shotgun, which he named Mackenzie (it's the same name as one of the EGS characters Randy had a special fondness for). When practicing on the range, what he lacked in coordination and shooting skills, he made up for in enthusiasm, never failing to wear the notorious Natural Selection t-shirt. Since much of his paycheck went to ammunition, he ate sparingly.

However, Randy still wasn't sure if he wanted to kill before joining the dreaded EGS. He wasn't quite sure how the girls felt about killing, but eventually he decided he would think about it when the time came. He'd been picking a target for some time, and his parents were included in those calculations. What made him hesitate were not moral inhibitions. He wanted to make sure that after his act he would have enough time to end his life before he was caught.

In the end, he chose the store he worked at, Weis Market, as his target. But he still wasn't sure whether to go through with his plans. So he left it all to fate, flipping a coin three times in a row.

And that's how, in the wee hours of June 8, 2017, Randy Steer killed three people in Weis Market, Eaton Township, Pa. All were colleagues of Randy's - Victoria Brong, 25, Brian Hayes, 47, Terry Lee Sterling, 63. Randy subsequently took his own life. He was only 24 years old.

Reflections

A few hours before the atrocity, Randy posted all his thoughts, collected over the years, in the form of diaries, videos and audio clips. Everything we know about Randy's inner world is thanks to these materials, which have sunk into oblivion or are closely guarded by the Pennsylvania police.

It is clear from Randy's diaries that he struggled to escape himself. We're not talking here about gender dysphoria or his hope to reincarnate as a ghost girl named Rachel. Even in his lifetime, shortly before the murders, Randy Stair liked to venture out as Andrew Baze. It was under that name that he committed the heinous acts.

Randy was a loner, filled with anger at himself and the world. Alienated from his family and friends, in the company of only his dark thoughts, he sank deeper and deeper into darkness to the point where he began to feel comfortable there and only there.

In conclusion

Our history is incomplete, but the missing elements don't add any new dimension to what we already know about Randy Steer - they only reinforce it. The boy's inability to cope with the outside world alone is indicative of the importance of building a stable and healthy social environment based on mutual understanding, good communication and support.

The truth is that none of us would have coped alone. Without our families, friends, even classmates and colleagues, we are all one bad day away from becoming Andrew Blaze.