School Shooters Connect Online

Columbine MySpace page links Finnish gunman, US teen who planned massacre
By Katherine Thompson,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 10, 2007 6:40 AM CST
School Shooters Connect Online
This undated picture taken from an internet website shows Pekka-Eric Auvinen who police say killed eight people before turning the gun on himself in a shooting rampage Wednesday at Jokela High School in Tuusula, Finland, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the capital, Helsinki. Auvinen was a social...   (Associated Press)

The internet may be a training ground for teenage killers who were previously considered to be desperate loners, suggests the Times of London. Helsinki police believe that Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the Finnish 18-year-old who murdered eight fellow students before shooting himself Wednesday, had spoken in online message boards with Dylan Cossey, the Philadelphia teen arrested last month for planning an attack on his school.

The two boys may have connected through a MySpace page devoted to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, and another page called "Natural Selection." Cossey, whose mother is charged with supplying him with weapons, considered the Columbine killers to be "heroes," while Auvinen's YouTube rant referenced the language of the Natural Selection group. (More Pekka Eric Auvinen stories.)

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