Ohio shooter’s ex-girlfriend wrestles with regrets
DAYTON, Ohio — Adelia Johnson thought she understood where Connor Betts was coming from when he shared that he’d contemplated suicide, and even when he once told her in a drunken call about wanting to hurt people.
As they dated this spring, they bonded over their struggles with mental illness, she said, so his dark thoughts didn’t seem so abnormal. Not to her, as someone familiar with the alarm bells therapists listen for. Not at the time.
Now? Now investigators are trying to figure out why Betts, 24, gunned down nine people, including his own sister, and wounded many more Sunday outside a strip of bars in Dayton, Ohio, before police shot him dead.
And Johnson is playing those old episodes back over in her mind, the yellow flags turning red, wondering whether she should have broken his confidence to tell someone — and if she had, whether it would have mattered. At a minimum, she regrets not telling his parents he needed serious help.
“It seems easy on the outside looking in, what calls to make,” Johnson said Tuesday. “And looking back, I’m like, ‘Of course I should have done that.’ But in the moment it was complicated, it was weird and I cared about him. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Besides, she said, reaching for a phrase favored by mental health professionals: “He didn’t have any concrete plans.”
Johnson’s lengthy essay posted not long after the massacre and her interviews with The Associated Press and others offer a rare, raw glimpse into the dilemma facing those close to people who voice such demons.
When is it just someone trying to exorcise those thoughts by saying them out loud? When does it foreshadow the worst? And does intervention run the risk of pushing the person even further toward violence?
Complicating that calculus: Mass attacks involving mental illness aren’t about that condition alone, or about an event that sets someone off. Experts say there are multiple factors — access to guns, a history of violence, substance abuse, financial trouble, a disconnect from society.
“There are many, many, things that go into dictating what pulled the trigger,” said Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and professor at Vanderbilt University. “There’s no tool you can have to determine when someone is going off.”