‘I hate my school’: why are more British teenagers plotting shooting attacks? | Crime

On the morning of 13 September, 18-year-old Nicholas Prosper was arrested while walking on a residential road in Luton. Minutes before, he had murdered his mother, younger brother and sister, shooting them dead in their family home.

Neighbours called police after hearing gunfire coming from the flat in Leabank tower, on Luton’s Marsh Farm estate, and officers found Prosper shortly afterwards on Bramingham Road. Later that day, searches of the area uncovered a loaded shotgun and more than 30 cartridges hidden in a nearby bush.

Police now believe Prosper had only carried out the first half of his plan, and was plotting a shooting at St Joseph’s Catholic primary school, where he and his siblings were pupils years before. The location where the teenager was detained sits on the most direct walking route between his home and the school, meaning the incident could be the closest Britain has come to a school shooting since the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

Police revealed the plot after Prosper pleaded guilty on Monday to murdering his mother, Juliana Falcon, 48, sister Giselle Prosper, 13, and brother Kyle Prosper, 16.

Detective Chief Inspector Sam Khanna, from the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Major Crime Unit, said: “What was uncovered during our investigation left no doubt as to his intentions to carry out an attack at a school, but fortunately Prosper was apprehended before he could cause any further harm.”

The case is one of a growing number of school-shooting plots detected in the UK, where young men and boys are being inspired by online material glorifying US massacres, including the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. In the year to March 2024, 162 referrals were made to Prevent (the government-led counter-terrorism scheme) related to interest in school massacres, up 2% on the year before. Only 19 resulted in people being adopted for intervention and mentoring under the programme.

Under current laws, would-be school shooters who lack an ideological aim cannot be prosecuted for preparing acts of terrorism. Cases have therefore been dealt with using a wide range of laws, including conspiracy to murder and possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life.

Jonathan Hall KC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, said these cases were a “worry” and that tracking the extent of the problem was difficult. “School shooting obsessions crop up in a lot of counter-terrorism casework,” he told the Observer. “The question is … is the size of the problem fully recognised, and is there something so unique about this cohort that additional ways of managing the risk needs to be found?”

Hall said that school-shooting plots that do not involve an ideological cause do not come under the legal definition of terrorism, but appear to be “very appealing to individuals with a strong sense of grievance”.

“Given the young age at which people are now coming across the counter-terrorism radar, perhaps it’s not surprising that a major source of grievance is their school,” he added.

Three days before Prosper lodged his guilty pleas, an unnamed 17-year-old boy admitted wanting to carry out a mass shooting at his school in Edinburgh, having “idolised” the Columbine killers and openly talked to fellow pupils of his admiration.

Last January, a gun-obsessed Lidl warehouse worker was found to be building an armoury of homemade firearms and explosives for both a “hitman-style attack” on police and his work colleagues, and a separate bombing and mass shooting plot against his former school. Reed Wischhusen, then 31, again took inspiration from the Columbine massacre, as did Gloucestershire teenager Kyle Davies, whose own plans were foiled when authorities intercepted a Glock handgun and ammunition he ordered online.

Weeks after Davies was arrested in 2018, two boys were jailed for plotting a mass shooting at their Yorkshire secondary school when they were just 14. Thomas Wyllie and Alex Bolland idolised the Columbine shooters and a judge found that they wanted to create “terror on the scale of the school shootings that have been seen in America”, having drawn up a hit-list including fellow pupils and teachers, collected explosives manuals and planned to steal shotguns for the task.

“If this is found I have committed one of the worst atrocities in British history or I killed myself,” Wyllie wrote in his diary. “I hate my school. I will obliterate it. I will kill everyone.”

While only a small number of school massacre plots have been formally confirmed and prosecuted in the UK, many more have been suspected. Police who investigated the Southport attack believe that Axel Rudakubana’s original target may have been his former secondary school, but that he changed his plans after his father prevented him taking a taxi there on the last day of term, which was a week before his attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. In 2019, he had been reported to Prevent after a teacher saw him researching US school shootings during an IT class.

Prosper, meanwhile, will be sentenced later this month, and his guilty pleas mean that the details of his inspiration, planning and preparation have not yet been made public.

But the Observer has seen several online accounts used by the teenager which show a strong interest in school shootings and violence. Videos uploaded on his YouTube channel demonstrated an obsession with a video game, with a vow to “mutilate” his sister for “making the incorrect choices” relating to a child character. Prosper called himself the character’s “chosen one”, saying he was guided by the fictional eight-year-old girl “as Christans are guided by Jesus Christ”.

His online footprint also indicated a strong interest in school shootings. Email addresses linked to the teenager appeared to pay homage to Adam Lanza, who carried out the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, while his Instagram page included drawings of Lanza and the Columbine shooters.

All three men are widely glorified in online communities that focus on mass killings, with TikTok videos, drawings and fanfiction regularly posted online by fans around the world. Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have been tracking these online movements, where they say young people are forging an “emotional connection” and “parasocial relationship” with past mass shooters.

Senior analyst Cody Zoschak said the forums were driving a “combination of self-radicalisation and group-enforcing radicalisation” towards violence. “The subcultures are very closely intertwined with each other and with ideological communities, particularly the far right,” he added.

“But right now, there’s no bucket for these people to be put in by the authorities, so they’re being treated like ideologically motivated individuals, or they’re slipping through the cracks because they don’t fit the criteria.”

Gina Vale, a University of Southampton criminologist who co-authored a landmark report on teenage terror offenders in England and Wales, said that school shooters are “leading by example” for British children who aspire to their own attacks.

“School shootings in the US perpetrated by teenagers provide a tangible example to children and young people in the UK of committing mass violence,” she said. “The massacre at Columbine High School has become prominent among violent extremist youth who seek to emulate not only the achievement of mass casualties, but also the symbolism of the attackers – down to and including the distinctive clothing worn during the massacre.”

Zoschak believes the phenomenon is part of a wider trend towards “nihilistic violence” that is markedly different from the ideological terrorism that security systems in the UK were designed to tackle. “The violence is emotional and self-serving rather than political or ideological, and there’s really no desired consequence – the violence is the point,” he said.

A government spokesperson said an independent inquiry into the Southport killings will be looking at the wider challenge of rising youth violence and extremism to ensure no one falls through the cracks.

“We continue to work at pace to identify the nature and scale of a growing cohort fixated with violence and to improve multi-agency interventions to manage the risk they pose,” they said.