
Pushed out for being ‘weird’
The teenage boy, who’s on the autism spectrum, wore a black trench coat every day as a comfort garment. He talked obsessively about video games and guns and carried a left-handed scissors to cut fabric in theater-tech class. Classmates at his Portland, Oregon high school considered him weird. A librarian overheard a student call him “Shooter.” A parent thought he might be dangerous. The “threat assessment” process, including a police search of his home and random searches at