STATE authorities spent $265,000 (£131,000) attempting to treat Robert Hawkins, the teenage gunman who killed eight people in a shooting rampage at a department store in Nebraska on Wednesday.
Hawkins spent four years in treatment centres, care homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.
Finally, in August 2006, social workers, the courts and his father agreed it was time for Robert Hawkins to be released -
nine months before he turned 19 and would have been required to leave anyway.
On Thursday, while some of those who knew Hawkins called the massacre at the busy Omaha mall unexpected, not everyone was surprised.
"He should have gotten help, but I think he needed someone to help him and needed someone to be there when in the past he's said he wanted to kill himself," said Karissa Fox, who said she knew Hawkins through a friend. "Someone should have listened to him."
Todd Landry, the state director of children and family services, said court records do not show precisely why Hawkins was released. But he said if Hawkins should not have been set free, someone would have raised a red flag.
"It is my opinion, it was not a failure of the system to provide appropriate services," Mr Landry said. "If that was an issue, any of the participants in the case would have brought that forward."
After reviewing surveillance tape, a suicide note and Hawkins' last conversations with those close to him, police said they do not know - and may never know - exactly why Hawkins went to the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall and shot more than a dozen people.
But he clearly planned ahead, walking through the store, exiting, then returning a few minutes later with a gun concealed in a rolled-up sweatshirt he was carrying, authorities said.
Debora Maruca-Kovac, a woman who with her husband took Hawkins into their home because he had no other place to live, told the Omaha World-Herald that the night before the shooting, Hawkins and her sons showed her a semi-automatic rifle. She said she thought the gun looked too old to work.
Police believe Hawkins was using that AK-47 when he stormed out a third-floor lift at the store and started shooting.
Police said they have found no connections between the 19-year-old and the six employees and two shoppers he killed.
"The shooting victims were randomly selected," as was the location of the shooting, Omaha Police Chief, Thomas Warren said.
Acquaintances said that Hawkins was a drug user and that he had a history of depression. In 2005 and 2006, according to court records, he underwent psychiatric evaluations, the reasons for which Mr Landry would not disclose, citing privacy rules.
In May 2002, he was sent to a treatment centre in Missouri after threatening his stepmother. Four months later, a Nebraska court decided Hawkins' problems were serious enough that he should be under state supervision and made him a ward of the state.
He went through a series of institutions in Nebraska as he progressed through the system: months at a treatment centre and group home in Omaha in 2003; time in a foster care programme and treatment centre in 2004 and 2005; then a felony drug-possession charge later in 2005. Mr Landry said court records do not identify the drug.
The drug charge was eventually dropped, but he was jailed in 2006 for not performing community service as required.
On 21 August, 2006, he was released from state custody.
Under state law, Mr Landry said, wards are released when all sides - parents, courts, social workers - agree it is time for them to go. Once Hawkins was set free, he was on his own. He was not released into anyone's custody. "When our role is ended, we try to step out," said Chris Peterson, director of the state Department of Health and Human Services.
About an hour before the shootings, Hawkins called Maruca-Kovac and told her he had written a suicide note, Maruca-Kovac said. In the note, Hawkins wrote that he was "sorry for everything" and would not be a burden on his family anymore. More ominously, he wrote: "Now I'll be famous."
Mrs Maruca-Kovac said on CBS network's The Early Show, "I was fearful that he was going to try to commit suicide, but I had no idea that he would involve so many other families."
The shoppers killed were Gary Scharf, 48, of Lincoln, and John McDonald, 65, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The employees killed were Angie Schuster, 36; Maggie Webb, 24; Janet Jorgensen, 66; Diane Trent, 53; Gary Joy, 56; and Beverly Flynn, 47, all of Omaha.
GUN CONTROL OFF AGENDA
ONCE again there has been a mass shooting in the United States. Once again there is no national outcry from any party for gun control.
The right to bear arms is fiercely defended as a constitutional right by large numbers of collectors, hunters and advocates of home security, cherished the way civil libertarians champion the right to free speech.
Yet the issue is controversial enough to draw in the US supreme court, which said last month it would review an appeals court ruling that struck down a 31-year-old ban on the private possession of handguns in Washington DC.
"Although people who favour increased gun control in the United States are a substantial majority, those who oppose it are far more intense in their opposition and far more likely to vote on the basis of that issue alone," said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
'I JUST DON'T WANT TO BE A BURDEN'
ROBERT Hawkins scrawled: "Just think tho I'm gonna be ******* famous," before he went on a shopping mall shooting spree, killing eight people and then himself.
His three-page message, released by police yesterday, reflected love for his friends and family and hatred for his random victims.
"I know everyone will remember me as some sort of monster but please understand that I just don't want to be a burden on the ones that I care for my entire life," he wrote. "I just want to take a few pieces of **** with me."
Hawkins left the note on Wednesday at the house where he lived, before he went to the Westroads Mall and opened fire in the Von Maur store.
The first page of the note was for his friends: "I love all of you so much and I don't want anyone to miss me just think about how much better you are off without me to support."
In the second page, addressed to his family, he wrote: "I've just snapped I can't take this meaningless existence anymore I've been a constant disappointment and that trend would have only continued."
He added "I love you mommy. I love you dad", and expressed love for several other people.
The third page was his will: "I'm giving my car back to my mom and my friends can have whatever else I leave behind."
The full article contains 1185 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
