The Fatal Link; The Connection between School Shooters and the Brain Damage from Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol

The Fatal Link is a groundbreaking book. This book reveals the undeniable connection between school shooters and their mother’s alcoholic behaviors. The author, Jody Allen Crowe, is uniquely positioned to identify this never before seen profile of school shooters. He is an educator who gained his knowledge working in the epicenters of violence and abnormal behaviors.

’The author spent 18 years on reservations where he learned first hand the devastation of prenatal exposure to alcohol. He developed and implemented award-winning school programs. He studied the research on fetal alcohol syndrome in order to develop programs that worked for brain-damaged children. His experiences in these schools give the reader a sense of what he learned throughout his tenure in Indian education.

Crowe was a fifth grade student in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, when the first school shooting fatality in the nation occurred in 1966. When he graduated from high school, he was presented an award named for the administrator slain in the school shooting. After he became an educator, Crowe would compare what he knew about the Grand Rapids shooter with the other school shootings. When the Red Lake School shooting shocked the nation, Crowe realized the shooter had academic and behavioral patterns similar to the students from the reservation school where he had worked. The Red Lake shooter’s fourth grade picture showed evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome. The media reported the shooters mother was a severe alcoholic. Not once did the author see or hear any connection made in the media between the shooter’s actions and the evidence of fetal alcohol syndrome.

This spurred Crowe to begin looking into his hometown shooting that had happened nearly 40 years earlier. He was interested to see if that shooter displayed any of the same academic and social behaviors as the Red Lake shooter and if the shooter’s mother drank alcohol. His research expanded to include 4 other school shooters in Minnesota and Wisconsin and one who was born in Minnesota. He went to the communities to visit with the officers who arrested the shooters. He pursued every lead he could to find out if the mothers of the shooters drank alcohol when pregnant with the shooter. He researched news stories, website, web forums, and blogs to find any evidence of the behaviors of the shooters and mothers.

What Crowe found is irrefutable. Every school shooter in Minnesota and Wisconsin fits the profile of prenatal exposure to alcohol. Four of the six mothers have been confirmed to have heavily exposed the shooter to alcohol in utero, with two other mothers confirmed to be habitual binge drinkers in their early childbearing years.

The Fatal Link takes the reader through the author’s journey toward finding the link between the mother’s drinking and the behaviors of school shooters. He takes the reader back to 1966 to his hometown to tell the story of the first school shooting fatality in the nation. His experiences with brain damaged violent students are a part of the journey. He tells of the guns he had to take from students in his schools who could have become school shooters. The reader will gain a wealth of knowledge about the brain damage from prenatal exposure to alcohol. Then he details his study of the remaining five school shooters from Minnesota and Wisconsin. He reveals the startling connection of the shootings of forty years ago to the most recent school shootings, including Jonesboro, Arkansas and Columbine, Colorado.

Additionally, the author studied forty school shooters in the Secret Services study ordered by President Bush and twenty-three other shooters across the nation to determine the probability of prenatal exposure to alcohol. He provides the reader with the results of his study in an addendum.