Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried ‘shaken up’ over thwarted shooting at daughter’s N.C. school

RALEIGH, N.C. >> Mayor Dave Fried and his wife were “shaken up” when they learned their daughter, Ashley, a freshman at High Point University, lived in the floor above a university student arrested Tuesday with guns and ammunition in his dorm room.

Paul A. Steber, a 19-yearold freshman from Boston attending High Point University, had studied mass shootings and was making plans to kill his roommate and himself if he didn’t get into a fraternity, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

He was charged with two felony counts of having a gun on campus and a charge of making threats of mass violence, the High Point Police Department said in a statement.

“That was my scare for the week,” Fried told The Trentonian on Thursday. “It’s insane. Talk about scary, right? We just moved her in last week.”

No one was hurt and there was no immediate threat to others on campus, the university said in a separate statement. Another student turned Steber in, the statement said.

“This incident illustrates the importance of the public reporting suspicious activity to authorities,” the police statement said. “Information from the public is often the critical first step in preventing acts of mass violence.”

Steber had been watching videos to learn how to carry out a mass shooting, Assistant District Attorney Lori Wickline said in court.

“He told officers that he definitely had a plan, something that he had been thinking about since Christmas of last year,” she said.

She later added: “And he had been recently watching videos of the Charleston mass shooting down in South Carolina and other mass shootings so that he could learn what to do and what not to do.”

Fried said his daughter didn’t know Steber and never ran into him at the university dorms. The mayor received a phone call from his daughter about the same time that news broke about the thwarted school shooting, he said.

“My wife and I were debating hopping in the car and going to get her,” Fried said. “She’s surprisingly resilient. She has just been going about her day. Her mother and I are more shook up than she was. It really is a crazy story.”

Steber had bought the guns within the past week and planned to shoot himself and his roommate if Steber didn’t get into a fraternity and the roommate did, Wickline said. She said it wasn’t clear if he bought the guns legally.

She said Steber didn’t appear to have any criminal history. The court set his bond on the firearms charges at $2 million.

His father, who came down from Massachusetts, sat in court for the brief hearing where Steber appeared via video link.

“This is any parent’s worst nightmare,” defense attorney John Bryson said in court. “He’s obviously very concerned about his son.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report