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197
Non-Music Shit / Tape Deck Maintenance
« on: July 01, 2008, 02:47:52 PM »
What's the best way to clean up the heads/insides on an old dirty tape deck that sounds like crap? Looking for some home remedies, not buying a headcleaning kit. Bradx, I'm thinking you can help me for some reason.
198
Music Shit / RIP MATT ODIETUS
« on: June 30, 2008, 09:56:46 AM »
"Guitarist Matthew Odietus of the legendary punk band THE CANDY SNATCHERS died on June 28 in his hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia. An official cause of death has not yet been released.
Taking their name from an obscure, bizarre, and trashy 70's horror flick late one night after drinking heavily, THE CANDY SNATCHERS formed in 1992. According to a November 2006 write-up on ToeStubber.com, "the band's tried-and-true array of destructive gimmicks kept the bookers guessing. Depending on mood, singer Larry May or axer Matt Odietus would sometimes cut their own scalp, '70s pro-wrestler style ? up by the hairline or wherever the blood would flow most effusively. Once, at CBGB, Matt bled out so much he almost fainted, and eventually had to be carted off to the ER with a t-shirt turban wrapped around his noggin. Larry would smash glass bottles at random. Willy used lighter fluid to set his bass on fire, with the aid of excited audience members who?d often get outta hand with the flammables and torch Willy himself. Drums were routinely collided with and obliterated."
In November 2006, Matt spent 17 days in jail. When asked how long he had been out a short time after he was released, he said, "four scores and seven eight balls ago they let me out," and "went on to tell of the good times he had, friends he had made, the free food, and needed rest he got," according to the band's MySpace page."
Odietus was an under-appreciated guitar god. Always ripped it every time I saw them play, and was a genuinely nice guy as well. Sucks, I hoped I'd see the Candy Snatchers again someday.
Taking their name from an obscure, bizarre, and trashy 70's horror flick late one night after drinking heavily, THE CANDY SNATCHERS formed in 1992. According to a November 2006 write-up on ToeStubber.com, "the band's tried-and-true array of destructive gimmicks kept the bookers guessing. Depending on mood, singer Larry May or axer Matt Odietus would sometimes cut their own scalp, '70s pro-wrestler style ? up by the hairline or wherever the blood would flow most effusively. Once, at CBGB, Matt bled out so much he almost fainted, and eventually had to be carted off to the ER with a t-shirt turban wrapped around his noggin. Larry would smash glass bottles at random. Willy used lighter fluid to set his bass on fire, with the aid of excited audience members who?d often get outta hand with the flammables and torch Willy himself. Drums were routinely collided with and obliterated."
In November 2006, Matt spent 17 days in jail. When asked how long he had been out a short time after he was released, he said, "four scores and seven eight balls ago they let me out," and "went on to tell of the good times he had, friends he had made, the free food, and needed rest he got," according to the band's MySpace page."
Odietus was an under-appreciated guitar god. Always ripped it every time I saw them play, and was a genuinely nice guy as well. Sucks, I hoped I'd see the Candy Snatchers again someday.
199
New Releases For Sale/Distro Updates / BRAINBOMBS - LIVE AT LUND 12"
« on: June 28, 2008, 07:17:48 AM »
Courtesy of the good people over at Testostertunes/Richie Records.
Preorder info:
http://testostertunes.blogspot.com/
Preorder info:
http://testostertunes.blogspot.com/
200
Non-Music Shit / Happy Birthday Mel Brooks
« on: June 28, 2008, 06:39:06 AM »
Been thinking a lot about Mel Brooks lately, and it happened to be his birthday oddly enough. Watched History of the World Part One the other night for the first time since I was a kid and really still enjoyed it. Young Frankenstein is probably in my top ten favorite films of all time. Not to mention High Anxiety, Blazing Saddles, the original Producers, Silent Movie and even Spaceballs. Plus, he was responsible for getting Lynch's The Elephant Man made as well as Cronenberg's The Fly. And one of the few people to win an Oscar, Tony, Grammy and Emmy. Creator of Get Smart. One of my all-time favorite Jews. TB salutes you Mel Brooks.
202
Music Shit / I Dreamt of Venom
« on: June 07, 2008, 07:39:03 AM »
I had a dream last night that I was at some show, I forget who was playing, but there was a "special guest" band headlining, and no one had any idea who it was. It was at some fictional warehouse, and a bunch of us are standing around waiting for the "special guests" to take the stage. Then from deep in the warehouse you start to hear Venom's "Black Metal" cranking up. A huge crowd starts running down all these passages trying to get to the band, people are getting trampled like it's a fucking Judas Priest show, and we round a corner and it's vintage 1981-looking Venom fucking cranking it out, except theyre all like ten feet tall and thrashing so furiously they look like the cover of Paranoid and they are surrounded by like black mirrors and it looks fucking insane. Fucking awesome, then all these crazy biker looking bodyguards with riot helmets come running over and tell us we can't look at the band, so we all have to turn away from the spectacle but can still feel the thrash burning through my body. I turn to my left and one of my old metal friends from high school who I havent seen in ten years is standing next to me with a terrified look on his face and crying. I decide to turn around and gaze at the band...as I turn Cronos comes whipping into me all blurry and alive with action and screaming lyrics in my face and it's fucking TERRIFYING. I think they were doing "Welcome to Hell" at this point. I forget what happens, I got so scared to death I blacked out or something, but the next thing I remember is the show is over and they're having this free record give away, which entails some guy throwing a bunch of records on a huge conveyor belt and people scrambling across it to try and grab records before they fall off into this pit. I remember seeing all these crazy Black Flag LPs that don't really exist but had incredible covers (I remember one was like a Rise Above 12", with just a huge picture of Ginn on it) that I kept trying to grab before they fell off. Then I woke up. Best show I was never at. This is the type of dream you have after drinking too much cheap beer and seeing the Black Lips play before you go to sleep.
203
Music Shit / Olga de Volga RIP
« on: June 03, 2008, 07:49:07 PM »
Did we talk about this already? Happened in March I guess. I forget if it was posted here ever, I just saw it on another message board...
http://www.punkglobe.com/olgadevolgatributemay08.html
http://www.punkglobe.com/olgadevolgatributemay08.html
205
Music Shit / New Tunnel of Love LP?
« on: May 24, 2008, 05:39:44 AM »
Any US Distros getting this pup in?
http://www.profetrecord.com/
There's a new Jack of Hearts 7" on Nasty Product out too.
Need 'em both. Help.
http://www.profetrecord.com/
There's a new Jack of Hearts 7" on Nasty Product out too.
Need 'em both. Help.
207
Upcoming Shows/Tours/Events / PIONEERS OF PUNK - SF
« on: May 20, 2008, 08:06:42 PM »
Just found this in my inbox. I'd probably go if it was in my town. Obviously not a real great idea either.
PIONEERS OF PUNK
FLIPPER
AVENGERS
THE MUTANTS
NEGATIVE TREND
TARGET VIDEO
SATURDAY JULY 26TH
THE FILLMORE SAN FRANCISCO
$25
PRE-SALE SUNDAY MAY 18TH (friends & fans) Ticketmaster. com LiveNation.com Fillmore Box Office
1805 Geary Boulevard. san Francisco, CA 94115
OFFICIAL ON SALE DATE SUNDAY JUNE 1ST
ALL AGES
PIONEERS OF PUNK
FLIPPER
AVENGERS
THE MUTANTS
NEGATIVE TREND
TARGET VIDEO
SATURDAY JULY 26TH
THE FILLMORE SAN FRANCISCO
$25
PRE-SALE SUNDAY MAY 18TH (friends & fans) Ticketmaster. com LiveNation.com Fillmore Box Office
1805 Geary Boulevard. san Francisco, CA 94115
OFFICIAL ON SALE DATE SUNDAY JUNE 1ST
ALL AGES
208
Non-Music Shit / eBay Feedback Changes
« on: May 20, 2008, 04:46:02 PM »
Anyone else looked at this yet? Is it just me, or does this pretty much leave it wide open for buyers to fuck sellers with no way to retaliate now? What the fuck?
Justin Collectorscum, whats your take? You always seem to have a logical perspective on these things.
Justin Collectorscum, whats your take? You always seem to have a logical perspective on these things.
210
Non-Music Shit / JOHN JUSTICE
« on: May 13, 2008, 10:04:54 PM »
When I was a little kid, this happened in the next neighborhood over. The house we bought last year is now two blocks from where this went down. Being a Dungeons & Dragons playing metalhead at the time, parents were freaking the fuck out about this shit. 'Snakeland' was an abandoned grain mill where we used to go fuck around and drink and get the shit scared out of us by older bigger kids. Its now torn down. Justice got out of jail in 2005 and went back in 2007 for violating parole. Fucking loser. Just saw this on a local message board and remembering the big scare...what was that anti-D&D TV movie with Tom Hanks where they freak out and kill people for real while LARPing? Crazy shit.
Driven by His Long-Buried Rage, a 17-Year-Old Honor Student Lethally Lashes Out at His Family
By Joshua Hammer
Autumn in Kenmore, N.Y.?a tidy, working-class suburb on the banks of the Niagara River near Buffalo?is a time of rejuvenation and purpose. On Highland Parkway, on the outskirts of town, Kenmore West High School resounds once again with the noises of youth in captivity. On homecoming weekend, cars and pickup trucks, swathed in blue-and-white streamers, wheel through town with horns blaring, while raucous students shout their allegiance to the Blue Devils football team. The after-school hangouts fill up once more along Delaware Avenue. And Kenmore's seniors, feeling the heat of the January application deadline, begin to turn their attention to college.
To many who knew him, John Justice, 17, a shy, bespectacled honor student with a passion for math and science, seemed typical of Kenmore's brightest and best. "He was the kind of kid you loved to teach," says Peter Pavlakis, 55, his chemistry instructor. The boy had spoken of going to Harvard or Yale, and he dreamed eventually of becoming a marine biologist or a chemical engineer. In any case, his teachers agreed he was a kid destined to escape from the apparent drudgery of his parents' lives.
Then, on Sept. 16, something happened. It was a sunny Monday afternoon, and rock music was blaring from John's stereo around 3 p.m. as his brother, Mark, 13, opened the front door of the Justices' white-clapboard house and stepped into his first-floor bedroom. A police source says that John approached his younger brother from behind and stabbed him eight times in the back with a five-inch hunting knife, killing him instantly. Forty minutes later the boys' mother, Mary Justice, 36, a swing-shift worker at the town's Du Pont manufacturing plant, pulled her 1980 Chevrolet into the driveway and came through a side door into the narrow hallway where John was apparently waiting in ambush. He struck furiously, says an officer, knifing her, pushing her down the basement steps, then attacking again when she fell. The coroner would later count 14 stab wounds.
According to a policeman, Justice then washed the blood off his hands, changed his clothes and took the car to pick up his father, a maintenance worker at the Tonawanda Coke Corp. The two drove home in silence. Apparently the boy let his father enter the house first, then struck from behind once again. Moments later the senior John Justice lay dead, with four stab wounds, on the living room floor of the house at 308 Mang Avenue.
Now, for the first time, the son seems to have faltered. Steeling himself with two glasses of Kahlua, creme de menthe and orange juice, he took two razor blades from the bathroom cabinet and slashed both his forearms, but apparently lost courage before he could kill himself. ("It was like Friday the 13th in there," a Kenmore police officer would say later, "and most of the mess was his own blood.") Climbing behind the wheel of the Chevy, he drove a half mile from his house at more than 50 mph into the rear of a 1965 Ford Mustang that was stopped at a traffic light. The driver, Wayne Haun, 22, a student at Buffalo State University, was killed instantly, and the Mustang exploded in flames. When police arrived, they found John Justice huddled beneath the Chevrolet's dashboard with minor injuries?as if, just before the collision, his will to live had taken command.
"I killed my family! I killed my family!" the 17 year old screamed to one of the first officers on the scene, says an investigating detective. The policeman looked around in bewilderment. "But you're the only one in the car," he replied.
"Teen Facing 4 Murder Charges," proclaimed the Buffalo News in a banner headline the following day. "Kenmore Suspect Had Bright Future." Meanwhile John Justice was locked away in the prison wing of the Erie County Medical Center, leaving dazed friends, teachers and relatives to ponder the unanswerable question?why?
A few of the rumors were simply bizarre. Some Kenmore residents suggested that Justice was a member of a teenage satanic cult that met weekends in an abandoned granary called "Snakeland." Others said John was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee who had sacrificed his family on his Dungeon Master's orders. John Justice's purported explanation was far more mundane: He had been desperate to go to college, desperate to get away, desperate to be something his parents could not be?and through it all, his mother had thwarted him. The final provocation, according to a police source, had been a Sunday night argument over household chores that John believed interfered with his studies. Previously his mother had repeatedly refused to give him a penny for the college education he wanted, despite the fact that she and her husband earned more than $50,000 a year between them. "He told me he killed his mother because she was against him for everything he ever wanted to do," says Dr. Tim Rasmusson, who treated Justice at the hospital. "He said he killed his brother and father out of love?so they wouldn't feel hurt when he and his mother were gone."
But bitterness over his dashed college plans may have been just one aspect of a deep-seated hatred, says officer Thomas Hinchey, head of the Kenmore police's Juvenile Aid Program. The few people who knew the Justice family describe young John as an exceptionally bright but emotionally unstable teenager who had grown to feel intolerably frustrated. His father, a high school dropout who had come to Buffalo from Shelbyville, Ind., was an emotionally closeted man, who spent his days repairing conveyor belts and his evenings bowling with his wife. Mary Justice led a life that seemed equally stifling. "The work was grueling, and Mary was often depressed," says a female co-worker who sanded bathroom vanities with her for six years. "I was always trying to coax her out of her rut?get her to take vacations with my family. But they never wanted to do anything."
The monotony, though, did not bring tranquillity. Police were repeatedly summoned to 308 Mang to break up fierce domestic squabbles between the parents or to answer neighbors' complaints about Mark Justice, a troubled boy who was constantly having problems?once even crashing through a storefront on his skateboard?or mocking the elderly man next door who had lost his larynx to cancer. "His father was a typical blue-collar kind of guy," says Hinchey. "We'd come by to report the complaints, and he'd say, 'That sonuvabitch complaining again? Don't bother me?it's just kid stuff!' " Paul Eigenmann, 27, a steelworker who has lived on the Justices' block for 16 months, took Mark away on a group camping trip last summer and was stunned by his parents' lack of concern. "Every other parent insisted that their kids call them a couple of times during the seven-day trip, but Mark's never said anything," he says. "Then, on the day we brought him back, his parents weren't even home to meet him."
Within this emotional vacuum, young John Justice seemed almost a father figure to his little brother, yet also appeared to resent him. "John was never with friends, he had no social life, no interest in girls," says Eigenmann. "He lived for his computer and his books. Yet you got the sense his parents weren't proud of him." A close friend of Mary Justice insists otherwise?that the mother used to boast about her son often at work. Still, the woman believes, the Justices were a family divided. "Each of them went their separate ways," she says. "John was highly intelligent, his father wasn't so smart, his brother had a learning disability?who did he have to relate to there?"
At Kenmore West the few classmates who got to know John Justice well say that beneath the agreeable facade he presented to teachers lurked an immature, angry, frustrated boy. "He wasn't a typical honors student," says Laura Ferry, senior class vice president. "He really hated high school. If he got a poor grade on a test, he'd be so devastated that he'd be uncommunicative for a week. He put so much pressure on himself."
Most disturbing, say several classmates, was Justice's growing obsession with death. He spoke of becoming a terrorist?"We jokingly named him most likely to assassinate a foreign leader," says a friend?and talked of killing his whole biology class, as well as the teacher. "He'd open his eyes wide and mumble to himself?and be absolutely serious," says the student. "After awhile even his few friends stopped hanging around him."
Classmates who bothered to notice suspected that John was weathering some kind of ordeal at home?a place none of them had ever visited. "After the weekend he'd come to school and he'd be in a total daze?like he was possessed," remembers one student. "You'd ask him, 'What's wrong?' and he'd just stare. It was weird. Looking back, I'm not surprised these killings happened on a Monday." Yet whatever torments John was enduring, he never complained and never explained. "If there had been warning signs which we had received and ignored, I'd have felt bad," says Hinchey, who knew the Justice family and had picked John to participate in Kenmore's Juvenile Court, a screening committee that judged other teenagers' petty crimes. "But he never once said, 'Help me.' "
One thing was clear: As friends and neighbors agree, college was becoming the focal point of John's hopes, fears and imperfectly buried rage. When Justice won early acceptance, late in his junior year, to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, he was elated, says Pavlakis. But his delight was squelched by his parents' apparent refusal to help with tuition. Remembers Paul Eigenmann: "They were always telling him, 'We had to work all our lives for everything?and so do you. Go out and get a job for a couple of years.' "
In July, at his mother's insistence, Justice gave up plans to work as a volunteer on a Buffalo State University research project on the effect of unemployment on families and instead took a minimum-wage job washing dishes at an Italian Restaurant. When school opened in September, Justice began working the 8 p.m.-to-midnight shift in the meat locker of Bell's supermarket. The work made it impossible for him to practice with his school's It's Academic team, which competed on TV in a sort of College Bowl quiz program. "I told him he was ruining his prospects for making the first team this year," says Pavlakis. "He just shrugged in resignation."
Justice spent Saturday, Sept. 7 at the Erie County Library in downtown Buffalo, says Pavlakis, persuading librarians to put together a list of 50 available college science scholarships. By Monday that glimmer of hope seemed extinguished. "He came into class that day with a punk haircut, and he looked even more abject than usual," says a classmate. "He shoved a desk in the corner at the back of the class and sat there silently. The teacher asked him, 'Why are you sitting back there?' John wouldn't answer."
The following Sunday night, after the final family battle, Justice left for his job at the supermarket. A co-worker recalls that he was uncharacteristically sullen that night and strangely apathetic; by the time he finished mopping up at midnight, according to one report, Justice had already begun to consider killing his family. "I think what he did was his way of quitting," says a onetime friend. "Now he doesn't have to deal with anything anymore."
John's remaining family in Buffalo?his maternal grandfather, his aunt and his uncle?has maintained an angry silence about the case, though the grandfather, Andrew Dubill, hired one of Buffalo's most prominent criminal attorneys, Joel L. Daniels, to defend John. The boy's paternal grandmother, Rachel Justice, who flew to Buffalo from Indiana following the killing, is less reticent though almost totally baffled. "I seen him at the Holding Center," she says. "He looked at his aunt and said, 'You saw it coming. Why didn't you help me?' All I know is I love Johnny and I'll do anything I can to help him. He's all I have left. I feel he needs me now."
Officer Hinchey is less sympathetic. "When you see the bodies of a whole family you knew lying on slabs, you say to yourself it's amazing what human beings are capable of doing to each other," he says. "It's a terrible waste of this kid, but I don't feel sorry for him. I just hope that justice is meted out." To that end John Justice is being held without bail at the Erie County Holding Center in Buffalo, charged with four counts of second-degree murder. Friends who have visited him say he shows no remorse over killing his family, though he was said to be deeply upset over the death of Wayne Haun. Indeed he seems almost reconciled to the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. "All through the night at Erie County Medical Center he kept asking me one thing," recalls Dr. Tim Rasmusson. " 'What kind of education can I get in jail?' "
Driven by His Long-Buried Rage, a 17-Year-Old Honor Student Lethally Lashes Out at His Family
By Joshua Hammer
Autumn in Kenmore, N.Y.?a tidy, working-class suburb on the banks of the Niagara River near Buffalo?is a time of rejuvenation and purpose. On Highland Parkway, on the outskirts of town, Kenmore West High School resounds once again with the noises of youth in captivity. On homecoming weekend, cars and pickup trucks, swathed in blue-and-white streamers, wheel through town with horns blaring, while raucous students shout their allegiance to the Blue Devils football team. The after-school hangouts fill up once more along Delaware Avenue. And Kenmore's seniors, feeling the heat of the January application deadline, begin to turn their attention to college.
To many who knew him, John Justice, 17, a shy, bespectacled honor student with a passion for math and science, seemed typical of Kenmore's brightest and best. "He was the kind of kid you loved to teach," says Peter Pavlakis, 55, his chemistry instructor. The boy had spoken of going to Harvard or Yale, and he dreamed eventually of becoming a marine biologist or a chemical engineer. In any case, his teachers agreed he was a kid destined to escape from the apparent drudgery of his parents' lives.
Then, on Sept. 16, something happened. It was a sunny Monday afternoon, and rock music was blaring from John's stereo around 3 p.m. as his brother, Mark, 13, opened the front door of the Justices' white-clapboard house and stepped into his first-floor bedroom. A police source says that John approached his younger brother from behind and stabbed him eight times in the back with a five-inch hunting knife, killing him instantly. Forty minutes later the boys' mother, Mary Justice, 36, a swing-shift worker at the town's Du Pont manufacturing plant, pulled her 1980 Chevrolet into the driveway and came through a side door into the narrow hallway where John was apparently waiting in ambush. He struck furiously, says an officer, knifing her, pushing her down the basement steps, then attacking again when she fell. The coroner would later count 14 stab wounds.
According to a policeman, Justice then washed the blood off his hands, changed his clothes and took the car to pick up his father, a maintenance worker at the Tonawanda Coke Corp. The two drove home in silence. Apparently the boy let his father enter the house first, then struck from behind once again. Moments later the senior John Justice lay dead, with four stab wounds, on the living room floor of the house at 308 Mang Avenue.
Now, for the first time, the son seems to have faltered. Steeling himself with two glasses of Kahlua, creme de menthe and orange juice, he took two razor blades from the bathroom cabinet and slashed both his forearms, but apparently lost courage before he could kill himself. ("It was like Friday the 13th in there," a Kenmore police officer would say later, "and most of the mess was his own blood.") Climbing behind the wheel of the Chevy, he drove a half mile from his house at more than 50 mph into the rear of a 1965 Ford Mustang that was stopped at a traffic light. The driver, Wayne Haun, 22, a student at Buffalo State University, was killed instantly, and the Mustang exploded in flames. When police arrived, they found John Justice huddled beneath the Chevrolet's dashboard with minor injuries?as if, just before the collision, his will to live had taken command.
"I killed my family! I killed my family!" the 17 year old screamed to one of the first officers on the scene, says an investigating detective. The policeman looked around in bewilderment. "But you're the only one in the car," he replied.
"Teen Facing 4 Murder Charges," proclaimed the Buffalo News in a banner headline the following day. "Kenmore Suspect Had Bright Future." Meanwhile John Justice was locked away in the prison wing of the Erie County Medical Center, leaving dazed friends, teachers and relatives to ponder the unanswerable question?why?
A few of the rumors were simply bizarre. Some Kenmore residents suggested that Justice was a member of a teenage satanic cult that met weekends in an abandoned granary called "Snakeland." Others said John was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee who had sacrificed his family on his Dungeon Master's orders. John Justice's purported explanation was far more mundane: He had been desperate to go to college, desperate to get away, desperate to be something his parents could not be?and through it all, his mother had thwarted him. The final provocation, according to a police source, had been a Sunday night argument over household chores that John believed interfered with his studies. Previously his mother had repeatedly refused to give him a penny for the college education he wanted, despite the fact that she and her husband earned more than $50,000 a year between them. "He told me he killed his mother because she was against him for everything he ever wanted to do," says Dr. Tim Rasmusson, who treated Justice at the hospital. "He said he killed his brother and father out of love?so they wouldn't feel hurt when he and his mother were gone."
But bitterness over his dashed college plans may have been just one aspect of a deep-seated hatred, says officer Thomas Hinchey, head of the Kenmore police's Juvenile Aid Program. The few people who knew the Justice family describe young John as an exceptionally bright but emotionally unstable teenager who had grown to feel intolerably frustrated. His father, a high school dropout who had come to Buffalo from Shelbyville, Ind., was an emotionally closeted man, who spent his days repairing conveyor belts and his evenings bowling with his wife. Mary Justice led a life that seemed equally stifling. "The work was grueling, and Mary was often depressed," says a female co-worker who sanded bathroom vanities with her for six years. "I was always trying to coax her out of her rut?get her to take vacations with my family. But they never wanted to do anything."
The monotony, though, did not bring tranquillity. Police were repeatedly summoned to 308 Mang to break up fierce domestic squabbles between the parents or to answer neighbors' complaints about Mark Justice, a troubled boy who was constantly having problems?once even crashing through a storefront on his skateboard?or mocking the elderly man next door who had lost his larynx to cancer. "His father was a typical blue-collar kind of guy," says Hinchey. "We'd come by to report the complaints, and he'd say, 'That sonuvabitch complaining again? Don't bother me?it's just kid stuff!' " Paul Eigenmann, 27, a steelworker who has lived on the Justices' block for 16 months, took Mark away on a group camping trip last summer and was stunned by his parents' lack of concern. "Every other parent insisted that their kids call them a couple of times during the seven-day trip, but Mark's never said anything," he says. "Then, on the day we brought him back, his parents weren't even home to meet him."
Within this emotional vacuum, young John Justice seemed almost a father figure to his little brother, yet also appeared to resent him. "John was never with friends, he had no social life, no interest in girls," says Eigenmann. "He lived for his computer and his books. Yet you got the sense his parents weren't proud of him." A close friend of Mary Justice insists otherwise?that the mother used to boast about her son often at work. Still, the woman believes, the Justices were a family divided. "Each of them went their separate ways," she says. "John was highly intelligent, his father wasn't so smart, his brother had a learning disability?who did he have to relate to there?"
At Kenmore West the few classmates who got to know John Justice well say that beneath the agreeable facade he presented to teachers lurked an immature, angry, frustrated boy. "He wasn't a typical honors student," says Laura Ferry, senior class vice president. "He really hated high school. If he got a poor grade on a test, he'd be so devastated that he'd be uncommunicative for a week. He put so much pressure on himself."
Most disturbing, say several classmates, was Justice's growing obsession with death. He spoke of becoming a terrorist?"We jokingly named him most likely to assassinate a foreign leader," says a friend?and talked of killing his whole biology class, as well as the teacher. "He'd open his eyes wide and mumble to himself?and be absolutely serious," says the student. "After awhile even his few friends stopped hanging around him."
Classmates who bothered to notice suspected that John was weathering some kind of ordeal at home?a place none of them had ever visited. "After the weekend he'd come to school and he'd be in a total daze?like he was possessed," remembers one student. "You'd ask him, 'What's wrong?' and he'd just stare. It was weird. Looking back, I'm not surprised these killings happened on a Monday." Yet whatever torments John was enduring, he never complained and never explained. "If there had been warning signs which we had received and ignored, I'd have felt bad," says Hinchey, who knew the Justice family and had picked John to participate in Kenmore's Juvenile Court, a screening committee that judged other teenagers' petty crimes. "But he never once said, 'Help me.' "
One thing was clear: As friends and neighbors agree, college was becoming the focal point of John's hopes, fears and imperfectly buried rage. When Justice won early acceptance, late in his junior year, to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, he was elated, says Pavlakis. But his delight was squelched by his parents' apparent refusal to help with tuition. Remembers Paul Eigenmann: "They were always telling him, 'We had to work all our lives for everything?and so do you. Go out and get a job for a couple of years.' "
In July, at his mother's insistence, Justice gave up plans to work as a volunteer on a Buffalo State University research project on the effect of unemployment on families and instead took a minimum-wage job washing dishes at an Italian Restaurant. When school opened in September, Justice began working the 8 p.m.-to-midnight shift in the meat locker of Bell's supermarket. The work made it impossible for him to practice with his school's It's Academic team, which competed on TV in a sort of College Bowl quiz program. "I told him he was ruining his prospects for making the first team this year," says Pavlakis. "He just shrugged in resignation."
Justice spent Saturday, Sept. 7 at the Erie County Library in downtown Buffalo, says Pavlakis, persuading librarians to put together a list of 50 available college science scholarships. By Monday that glimmer of hope seemed extinguished. "He came into class that day with a punk haircut, and he looked even more abject than usual," says a classmate. "He shoved a desk in the corner at the back of the class and sat there silently. The teacher asked him, 'Why are you sitting back there?' John wouldn't answer."
The following Sunday night, after the final family battle, Justice left for his job at the supermarket. A co-worker recalls that he was uncharacteristically sullen that night and strangely apathetic; by the time he finished mopping up at midnight, according to one report, Justice had already begun to consider killing his family. "I think what he did was his way of quitting," says a onetime friend. "Now he doesn't have to deal with anything anymore."
John's remaining family in Buffalo?his maternal grandfather, his aunt and his uncle?has maintained an angry silence about the case, though the grandfather, Andrew Dubill, hired one of Buffalo's most prominent criminal attorneys, Joel L. Daniels, to defend John. The boy's paternal grandmother, Rachel Justice, who flew to Buffalo from Indiana following the killing, is less reticent though almost totally baffled. "I seen him at the Holding Center," she says. "He looked at his aunt and said, 'You saw it coming. Why didn't you help me?' All I know is I love Johnny and I'll do anything I can to help him. He's all I have left. I feel he needs me now."
Officer Hinchey is less sympathetic. "When you see the bodies of a whole family you knew lying on slabs, you say to yourself it's amazing what human beings are capable of doing to each other," he says. "It's a terrible waste of this kid, but I don't feel sorry for him. I just hope that justice is meted out." To that end John Justice is being held without bail at the Erie County Holding Center in Buffalo, charged with four counts of second-degree murder. Friends who have visited him say he shows no remorse over killing his family, though he was said to be deeply upset over the death of Wayne Haun. Indeed he seems almost reconciled to the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. "All through the night at Erie County Medical Center he kept asking me one thing," recalls Dr. Tim Rasmusson. " 'What kind of education can I get in jail?' "
