When James Alex Fields, Jr. drove his car into a crowd full of protesters, killing one and injuring 19 others, Fields’ former classmates, teachers, and neighbors rushed forward with stories of a boy infatuated with Adolph Hitler and the Nazi movement.
The one oddly discordant voice was that of Barbara Brady, a spokeswoman for Boone County (Kentucky) Schools, where Fields was a student. In what smacks of a school district striving to cover its own butt, Brady said there were never any negative complaints about Fields’ behavior during his time in Boone County and suggested the young adults interviewed about him were merely hungry for media attention.
“Now they are crawling out of the woodwork to get their 15 seconds of fame,” Brady said in an email exchange with the Cincinnati Enquirer, “and say they knew something back then.”
And they certainly did come out. In publication after publication, those who knew Fields’ as a student at Cooper High School portrayed him as a quiet but anti-social boy who had long taken a liking to Nazi ideology, spewing bigotry against non-whites and glorifying Germany’s actions in World War II.
Former classmates at the small, predominantly white high-school he attended told Vice News that Fields was fond of wearing a belt with swastikas on it, drawing swastikas all over his things, and picking (verbal) fights about race-related topics. Keegan McGrath, who roomed with Fields on a school trip to France and Germany, told the Associated Press that Fields spent the trip praising Hitler, explaining why the French were inferior to Germans, and refusing to associate with French students. Another ex-classmate said Fields would often call a Muslim female student a terrorist.
Caitlin Wilson, who went to school with Fields for years, told the Enquirer that he was drawing swastikas and talking about his love for Hitler as early as middle school.
Derek Weimer, a former teacher at Cooper High School, told WKRC Cincinnati that Fields was not a behavioral problem but “it was clear. He loved Hitler and he loved the Nazi movement. They were all geniuses and, you know, the whole white supremacy thing.” (At home, however, his behavior was a different story: 911-call transcripts show Fields’ mother, widowed and wheelchair-bound, feared for her own safety around her son sometimes.)
Weimer and several Cooper High School alums said they talked to school leaders about Fields.
Brady alleged the district had received no such reports, from either Weimer or former students. She then used this alleged lack of official complaints as a way to discredit their accounts.
“How can you trust that information now if they didn’t do anything about it then?” Brady asked in the email to the Enquirer.
Of course, multiple folks say they did raise flags about Fields. But beyond that, not every doodled swastika or bigoted remark from a fellow student is the kind of thing kids would report to authorities. A lack of tattling to the principal that Fields said something nice about Hitler doesn’t mean he didn’t say nice things about Hitler.
And regardless of whether reports were made, the district may have lacked grounds to act, at least in a diciplinary manner. High-school students still have First amendment rights, and we don’t know if Fields’ former antics ever crossed the line into prohibited speech or actual misconduct.
Still, this incident could serve as a good jumping-off point for exploring what roles and responsibilities that school officials, teachers, classmates, and community members do (and don’t) have when it comes to young people and radically racist rhetoric or extremist views. It’s sad that school bureaucrats in Boone County seem more concerned with deflecting potential criticism in any way possible—even if that means casting aspersion on alumni simply for speaking out—than fostering a fruitful discussion about how to prevent domestic terrorism.
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