Dustin Brown wanted a secure grip on the two knives he had selected to slaughter the children.

Before leaving his Morton, Illinois, home on the afternoon of October 13, the 19-year-old wrapped each knife's handle carefully with duct tape. He then pulled on a pair of grippy gloves. The one-mile journey to the public library gave Brown one final chance to rehearse the plan he had contemplated for the last two weeks. Five-inch blades jingled together in his backpack all the while.

Hanging over everything, child pornography charges threatened to ruin Brown's life. Despite some rudimentary precautions, his online cache of videos had been unearthed by investigators earlier in the year. Serched, arrested, and eventually expelled from Morton High School, Brown felt he had nothing left to live for. In this lowest of moments, he wanted only to destroy the lives of others before turning his duct-taped knives on himself.


Morton, a 17,000-person village just outside of Peoria along I-74, bills itself as the "pumpkin capital of the world." Its claim to fame lies in its thousands of acres of pumpkin farms, along with an enormous Nestlé plant that cans Libby's puréed pumpkin. Directly behind the Nestlé plant, across the railroad tracks, sits the town's single-story brick library. At 3:25pm, Brown walked inside and sat down at a table. He looked around. A chess club was meeting in the library conference room, and Brown watched the 16 children—some as young as seven—with rising rage. Furious at the legal charges against him, Brown saw a way to exact a twisted form of revenge against children. He opened his backpack and pulled out the knives.