FOOTNOTE NO. 3 Cautionary Notes on Dehumanizing Perpetrators 1 Timothy K. Snyder S ince December of last year, I have been closely following the events that unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut. At the time, my interest was centered around the public responses and practices of memorializa- tion found on social media. While I continue to be interested in how rep- ertoires of memorialization overlap with religious discourses and practices, I have now turned my attention to a more existential question: How are perpetrators remembered in our public memory of such tragedies? This essay explores how public narratives of December 14, 2012, account for Adam Lanza, the young man who shot and killed twenty chil- dren, seven adults, and, ultimately, himself. In particular, I consider how public narratives often minimize mental health as a contributing factor to such tragedies. By maintaining a social imagination which considers mental health in an atomistic paradigm, such public narratives remem- ber perpetrators in simplistic and dehumanizing ways. This essay resists such narratives by framing mental health as a social problem, one shared by all in a responsible society. I begin with a media narrative which tells the story of Eric Mueller, a fifty-nine-year-old art teacher at a nearby local school, and the roadside memorial he constructed within hours of the shootings. His story is an instance of the personal becoming public. I then turn to a more official narrative: the report of the State of Connecticut’s Attorney. This official, public narrative testifies to what the state’s investigation learned about the events that led up to the shooting and sheds light on Adam’s trou- 30 . CROSSCURRENTS © 2014 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life