Too Young to Kill (16 page)

Which changed everything.

29

Cory Gregory never had a reputation for being a tough kid. Those at Black Hawk who knew of him saw Cory as another Juggalo who liked to do drugs, drink booze, smoke cigarettes, stick to Sarah Kolb like pants, and follow the crowd with whom he ran—whatever it was they decided to do on any given day.

“If Cory was ever to try to step up on you,” a former Black Hawk student recalled, “you would just have to say ‘shut up,’ and get up in his face, and he would back
right
down.”

And yet, others said Cory had a mean streak you didn’t want to mess with. A temper that, same as Sarah’s, erupted at any given moment for no apparent reason.

Nate Gaudet and Cory were tight. They went back five years, to grammar school. But that anger inside Cory exposed itself inside the dynamic of their friendship every so often. There was one day when Cory and Nate were driving around the QC. Cory sat in the front. Nate drove. There was another kid, a Juggalo, in the backseat. There wasn’t much talk going on inside the car. Music played. They smoked cigarettes.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Cory punched Nate on the side of the head as Nate drove. No love taps here; these were hard shots to the face and head that rattled Nate’s cage damn good.

“What the
fuck
?” Nate said.

Cory laughed.

“Come on, man. What’d you hit me for?”

Cory replied with a straight face. “I done felt like it, that’s all.” He laughed then and raised his fist, without hitting Nate, kind of taunting him.

“That’s how Cory was sometimes,” said a source. “He would snap. He gave Nate a few bumps on the face that day. Nate never said or did nothing about it. And we’re talking these two were ‘supposedly’ best friends.”

Then there was the pot-smoking side of Cory. He loved to get high, as often as he could. And what would he talk about afterward, with the mellow buzz of the weed fueling an inherent desire he harbored for freaking people out?

“How he wanted to set up a chain on girls with a bunch of kids and fuck them,” said a friend. “Nate Gaudet was into this, too.”

Cory and Nate often talked about what they called “tag teaming” girls. And the most shocking part about this, perhaps, was that they rarely had a hard time finding a girl to take part. In fact, there was a time in the basement of Nate’s when twenty or so kids got together and listened to music, drank, and got high. Nate and Cory and a few others set up a train on a girl and videotaped it.

Nate’s father found the tape after kicking the kids out of his house.

“You’d be surprised at how many of the girls we knew were open to it,” said a source.

One more sign that this group was out of control.

Nate, Sarah, Cory, and several others hung around what was a genuine party house located outside Moline in Rock Island. Nate met Sarah through Cory. For just about a two-year period leading up to January 2005, Nate, Sarah, and Cory spent most of their time together.

“Nate seemed like a normal kid,” said a former classmate. “He was another one of those adolescent kids that was trying to be what he
wasn’t
.”

Maybe they all were.

Sarah, Adrianne, and Cory fell into that same clique. They fit themselves into a group of Juggalos more than the group fit into who they were. Juggalos not only dress a certain way, but true Juggalos speak their own language and drink a beverage called Faygo, an inexpensive soft drink. Being a Juggalo wasn’t the same as belonging to the 4-H club or Boy Scouts—it was a way of life.

A religion.

Juggalos will say they are misunderstood. That society doesn’t quite “get” who they are, or what they represent. According to some, however, the attitude many in the East Moline sect of the group (aptly called the QC Juggalos) routinely displayed was “I’m better than you,
so shut the F up
and stay out of my way.”

Badass people haters. Counterculture wags.

“Social rejects,” one Juggalo from the area explained to me. “We do not like society,” he added. “Society judges us. We hate people. Society is nothing but a bunch of ignorance. Everyday people are just ignorant. They choose not to open their eyes to the things that are happening right in front of them.... They want to blame everything negative that happens with kids on music. I’m sorry, but if you are that fucking stupid that you’d listen to a song and that makes you kill someone, you’re a problem to begin with. Would you blame country music for a redneck guy who goes out and drives his truck drunk? Or beats his wife? Course not. You’re not going to blame that on the country music. But if a kid does it, you’re going to say it was the music he listens to that made him do it.”

Hanging out together as a group, Juggalos found solace in one another. Camaraderie. A common understanding. A bond. It was a brotherhood, a place wherein everyone agreed that society didn’t know jack shit about who they were or what they felt.

The connection between the QC Juggalos, it is safe to say, was also fueled by the drugs they used.

“God yes,” said that same QC Juggalo.

Their everyday lives were centered on drugs.

When one looks deeper into the Juggalo group Sarah and Cory were now a part of, however, a skinheadlike undertone emerges. For example, Sarah kept a club in her car, half of an old broom handle, duct-taped on one end. She had a name for it: the “nigger stick.” And there’s no hiding the fact that although Juggalo sects have been popping up all over the country, a majority of the groups are from the Midwest and the South; and more and more, these groups have been associated with violence against African Americans and other nonwhite groups. In Seattle, for instance, seven people were arrested in 2009. They ranged in age from fourteen to twenty-nine. They had been charged, according to a
Seattle Times
article, with attacking a group of park dwellers. The victims explained in police reports that the gang
carried machetes, beat and robbed people and threatened decapitation.
Two kids from the group admitted
they were Juggalos,
the
Times
reported, and
that Juggalos have become increasingly ganglike.

In another example reported by the
Times,
an eighteen-year-old Juggalo entered a known Massachusetts gay bar yielding
a hatchet and gun and assaulted three patrons.
The kid ran off to
Arkansas,
the report said,
where he killed a female companion and a police officer before police shot him dead.

On his website, the kid had posted a simple—but telling—message: Are you a Juggalo?

30

Brad Tobias had moved to the QC from Texas not long before the 2004 Black Hawk Outreach semester began. When he heard Adrianne was from a town in Texas not far away from where he had been born and raised, Brad wanted to meet her.

“When I first met Adrianne, I found her to be giddy,” Brad recalled. “Bubbly. Friendly.”

They were interested in each other from the start. As if in junior high again, Adrianne wrote their names all over her notebooks, with hearts and
XOXOXO
around the names.

But as Brad got to know Adrianne more personally, he began to see that she was trying to be somebody she was not. Adrianne was never one to spike her hair, he said, or wear black clothes and dark makeup, Goth-like. Yet, when she started to hang out with, and grow affection for, Sarah, Brad said, “Adrianne changed.” Now she wanted to be a Juggalette, same as Sarah. But only because she believed it allowed her to fit in with Sarah and that group of people Sarah ran with, including Cory and Nate.

“What Adrianne was,” Brad remembered, “was a goody-good girl.”

Adrianne was bisexual, Brad said. “She told me. We discussed it.”

And now Adrianne wanted to date Sarah.

Brad was curious. Adrianne was talking about Sarah one afternoon: Sarah this. Sarah that. All things Sarah.

Adrianne was infatuated with Sarah and her lifestyle, and she wanted in on it.

“What is the interest in Sarah?” Tobias asked Adrianne. He and Adrianne were dating by then, but they had an open relationship, one could say. It was the first week of December 2004.

Adrianne shrugged. Smiled. “I think Sarah’s cute.”

“How?”
Brad wondered, a laugh in his voice. He was shocked by the comment. He found nothing about Sarah “cute.” Sarah was an angry girl, more Joan Jett than Jordin Sparks. Rough around the edges. Even dirty and crude. There were times when she didn’t bathe regularly. What was so darn attractive about any of that? Brad wanted to know.

Adrianne saw something different in Sarah, she explained.

“She’s popular,” Adrianne said.

And there it was: the true attraction Adrianne had for Sarah in this courting stage of their relationship. Adrianne wanted to be popular. Same as Sarah. She wanted the kids to notice her. Same as they did Sarah. She felt that if she hung around with Sarah, that mystery surrounding the girl with a face full of piercings and badass attitude would rub off on her.

Sarah was one of only a few Juggalettes in that Black Hawk sect of the group—and Adrianne was now desperately seeking to be the next.

“Adrianne was all about making friends,” Brad observed. “If Adrianne could have made everyone her friend, that would have made her the happiest, the best day of her life.”

Adrianne reached out to Sarah during the latter part of that first week in December. She wrote a note to Sarah and placed it on her desk. Adrianne wanted Sarah to understand a few things about where she was coming from. The letter was neatly written in Adrianne’s near-perfect penmanship—an important point to note, because Adrianne apologized to Sarah in the letter for her “sloppy handwriting.”

Next to Sarah’s name, Adrianne drew a heart, half colored it in:

Hey babe, what are you doing? Nothing too much here except lying in bed being very bored.

All of the periods and dots above the
i
’s were hearts.

They had apparently made plans to go out, but Adrianne wanted to know if Sarah had decided what they were going to do. Adrianne said she had to work from either “eleven to two, or eleven to three.” She asked Sarah if she
just wanted to stay here (Adrianne’s house) and sleep until I get off work, or if you are wanting to spend the night with me.

Adrianne went on to warn Sarah that it would
be a few days before I could actually probably stay with you because I have to get on this birth control shot because my parents know how much I love kids and how bad I want them and they don’t want me to get pregnant.

Adrianne had been on birth control. There’s no obvious explanation as to why she felt the need to mention this, other than to test Sarah and see how she would react to the statement. It turned out to be a mistake on Adrianne’s part. She was telling Sarah that she was having sex with boys, which Sarah did not appreciate. Sarah demanded monogamous relationships, with boys or girls.

Near the end of the letter, Adrianne said she was bisexual and hoped Sarah didn’t have a problem with it. If Sarah was “straight lesbian,” Adrianne made a point, it didn’t matter to her.

It appears that Adrianne never heard back from Sarah.

Hey sweetheart,
Adrianne wrote a few days later,
do you like me at all? If so, in what way?

Adrianne needed to know if she and Sarah were becoming lovers, friends, or enemies:
I really like you, as in I’d like to go out with you. But do you like me enough that if we went out that you’d respect me enough to know that I’m not going to sleep with you right away?

In an attempt to find out if all the rumors she had heard about Sarah being a troublemaker with a cold heart were true, Adrianne asked Sarah straight out:
You wouldn’t do anything to put me in danger, would you?

Sarah had visited Adrianne at her East Moline house a few days before Adrianne wrote this latest letter. Adrianne explained that her brother (Jo’s son) thought Sarah was trying to come across as tough. He didn’t like it.

My brother thought you were trying to act hard,
Adrianne wrote,
so you could . . . do me a favor of just relaxing.

Then came more rules for the relationship. Adrianne wanted Sarah to dress nicely the next time she came over to her house:
And do something with your hair before you come and meet my dad. . . . DON’T WEAR BAGGY CLOTHES. PLEASE.

These letters are extraordinary if we note the timing. Adrianne was as confused as she was desperately reaching out a hand to a torn and tattered, angry Sarah Kolb. On that same day Adrianne had written to Sarah, she had also written a letter to a boy back home, telling him to relay a message to another boy:

I miss him and still love him with all my heart.

31

In the beginning, Adrianne Reynolds wanted nothing more than for Sarah Kolb to like her. She did what she could to get Sarah to understand that she wasn’t trying to be phony, and she yearned for nothing more than to be a part of Sarah’s life.

Sarah was leery, however.

Adrianne pushed the idea of a romance. And at first, Sarah seemed to be genuinely interested in dating her.

“I first saw her outside on one of our cigarette breaks,” Sarah later said. “I was very attracted to her. She was a very cute girl.”

Sarah had strict rules where “friends,” “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” fit into the scope of her life. She was outspoken about this, once saying, “A friend is somebody I like to spend my time with, share my thoughts with, hang out with.” Cory Gregory, in other words. “A boyfriend,” on the other hand, “or girlfriend, is someone that I’d like to get to know better, someone that I can, oh, what’s the word? I don’t know. ‘Understand.’ Someone that can understand me the same way. Someone that I would like to have a future with, maybe.”

Sarah admitted later that after meeting Adrianne she saw the possibility of there being the opportunity for them to have a lesbian relationship.