A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

was not “cool” at all. He wasn’t anything but average. He didn’t drink or go to parties. He didn’t date. “He was a very quiet kid,” one male classmate said. “Not a troublemaker.”
    It was faint praise. When members of the Class of 1973 were approached by the media to give quotes, few of them had anything to offer more than speculation about why
somebody
would shoot a bus driver; few even remembered who Silas was, or if they did, they could not recall a single anecdote involving him.
    His English teacher in tenth grade saw the story on the television news and said, “I found it very hard to sleep last night. People are obviously very different the rest of their lives than they were in tenth grade, but he was a really nice kid and he fit in.” He said Silas had laughed at jokes, once someone made the effort to draw him in.
    Silas’s biology teacher remembered a loner, but one who showed no sign of problems. “He was what I would call a straight-arrow kid, typical student, clean-cut—but you never know what’s going to happen in someone’s lifetime that would make them do something like he did in Seattle. I’m flabbergasted.” His journalism teacher said he had been “sweet and kind,” but that he had never stood out from the crowd.
    It was the same at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Silas had attended classes there from September 1975 to June 1978. He had gotten an A in statics, the study of forces in structures, but that was one of his few outstanding grades. His professor couldn’t recall him. “No one remembers him specifically,” Frank Rubino said, “but when they check back in their record books, everybody finds him . . .”

    No one knew Silas Cool when he was a teenager, and no one knew him when he was forty-three. He seemed to have spent his whole life on the edges of other people’s lives, a person of so little importance that few remembered him.
    In his Seattle apartment, he was “S. Cool,” the man whom his neighbors didn’t know.
    Seattle reporters flew to New Jersey to try to get an inside look at Silas Cool’s life there. Eric Sorensen of the
Seattle Times
managed to obtain an interview with Daniel and Ena Cool. He found them in their very small, one-floor home, decorated modestly with some of the things they had brought back from their travels. The pair of bronzed baby shoes were from Singapore and had a little plaque reading, “Silas Cool, May 14, 1955.”
    Ena Cool, seventy-seven, spoke with a South-African accent, still, as she echoed the bewilderment of her husband. “I can’t believe Silas is dead,” she said. “I can’t believe he’d do something like that. He was here only a month ago, and he didn’t give any indications he would do such a thing. You always think—if you’re left alone, you’re going to have your son around. But it’s not happening that way.”
    Ena Cool said that she had been forty-three when Silas was born, and Daniel was forty-seven. As older parents, they accepted his quietness happily. “He was quiet, unassuming, a mind-his-own-business type. He never bothered anybody,” Daniel said proudly.
    Ena and Silas were always close. After he graduated from high school, she recalled that he had gone with her back to South Africa when her mother became ill. While he was there, he had trained as an architect for the engineering department of the City of Durban. She said he was very good at the kind of drawing architects and engineers use—all straight careful lines and angles.
    After he drove his Mustang out to Seattle, his parents had never really been sure what Silas’s life was like—apart from his back problems. They lived their lives 3,000 miles apart except for his yearly October visits. Although they believed he had scoliosis, he had never been treated for it in the traditional way—by wearing a full body cast to straighten out the curvature of the spine.
    They didn’t know about his jobs out west, except that he lost them often. Ena Cool remembered visiting her son in Seattle in 1991, but, oddly, she described an apartment at a different address than the one he had lived in since 1985. Either she was mistaken on the date, or her son had rented a clean, nicely decorated apartment on a temporary basis so that she would not be disappointed in him. She was positive the nice apartment was on Taylor Avenue N. Silas Cool could not have taken his mother into an apartment with photographs of naked women on the walls and