On Thursday, a motive for the shooting remained as much a mystery as it was Tuesday evening, when law enforcement officials said Tristyn Andrew Terrell, 22, stood up from a desk at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, pulled out a handgun and shot at students, killing two and injuring four others.
But his grandfather, who struggled to understand what happened — and why — said his grandson should never have been allowed to own a gun.
“I want people to know that guns are too accessible,” said Paul Rold, 79, in a phone call from his home in Texas. “If people for whatever reason decide to do what he did, it should be next to impossible for them to get a weapon.”
“It could have been averted,” he went on, his voice quickening. “Our legislators have to value human life more than they do re-election.”
Terrell was formally charged with two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder Thursday but chose not to appear at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse as the charges were read against him.
Rold, who lives just a mile from his grandson’s childhood home, said the young man had grown up isolated from his peers but close to his father, an accountant, and his mother, an educator. In jail, his main concern, Terrell’s court-appointed lawyer told his family, has been “how is my dad doing, how is he taking all of this?” said Rold.
Terrell grew up in Texas, the second child in an athletic family with a pool in the yard. He had little or no interest in guns, his grandfather said. His family learned his grandson had autism when he was about 4 years old, Rold said. The diagnosis was difficult on both parents.
In recent years, reports that some perpetrators of mass shootings had autism has left an impression that it is associated with premeditated violence. But experts have said that there is no evidence that people with autism are more likely than those of other groups to commit violent crimes, and that in the case of mass shooters, autism may simply be existing side by side with other factors that can prompt violence, like psychopathy or a history of trauma.
As a child, Terrell was studious but stubborn, distanced from people his age, Rold said. Then, when he was 15, his mother died after a battle with breast cancer that had lasted for most of his childhood.
His grandfather said that he had always been a bit withdrawn but was especially so after his mother died.
“He wasn’t a happy person,” Rold said. “It wasn’t that he didn’t laugh or didn’t ever smile, but I would say less so than normal. He didn’t have highs and lows, he wasn’t outgoing and bubbly, but then he didn’t seem to be depressed. I think he felt that life had dumped on him, losing his mother. The first thing he said when she passed was: ‘It’s not fair.’”
After his mother’s death, Terrell moved to North Carolina with his father, where he enrolled in high school and then at Central Piedmont Community College in Mecklenburg County, which he attended from the fall of 2015 to last spring. His grandfather said his grandson was interested in languages and had taught himself French and Portuguese using a computer program.
The last Rold had heard, his grandson wanted to be an accountant, like his father, but wanted to work in South America.
Terrell enrolled at UNC Charlotte and took a course described by the instructor as the anthropology and philosophy of science. It met at 5:30 p.m. in Kennedy Hall.
One of his classmates, Cooper Creech, 21, said Terrell wore dark clothing and stayed mostly quiet, chiming in just once or twice with a comment. Students in the class were assigned to small groups of four or five people, and the students were generally talkative and social — except for Terrell, he said.
“It never seemed like anyone bothered him,” Creech said. “He seemed relatively ostracized, but only by his own choice. He didn’t talk to us and we didn’t talk to him.”
The course was taught by Adam Johnson, a professor whom Creech described as welcoming and hip. He wore skinny jeans and asked that everyone call him by his first name.
In a blog post published after the shooting, Johnson said that Terrell, whom he refused to identify by name in the post, had initially seemed engaged in the coursework, asking questions about the lessons and answering questions posed to the class. But at some point in January, the young man withdrew from the class.
Johnson wrote that he later ran into the student on campus “and conveyed that it was a shame that they had to leave the course but I understood. It is important to prioritize.”
On Tuesday evening, the student returned to class, just moments into the final class of the semester. This time he had a gun, the police said, which they said he purchased legally.
“Without warning, earsplitting bangs ring throughout the room, off the glass walls, creating a terrible reverberation,” Johnson wrote. “My emotions are currently high and I am absolutely heartbroken.”
Two students died, Ellis Parlier, 19, and Riley Howell, 21. Police said Howell tackled the gunman, likely saving lives.
Until recently, Terrell’s grandfather said, he lived with his father. He moved out, Rold said, for reasons that were not clear to him.
“I’m hoping that he gets the help, psychiatrically, that he needs,” Rold said. “Reasonable people don’t do what he did.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.