Shooter Languished Between Delusions, Despair

And it was easy for Sforza to see why, when he came home from VCU in Richmond one autumn weekend and realized that his friend was losing his grip on reality.

"He really wanted all these thoughts to end," Sforza said. "He wanted to figure out the problems and why he was thinking this way. . . . He couldn't figure it out."

Kennedy, who had a part-time job at a CVS, stopped working near the end of the year and gave up on college. When he talked with friends while in a delusional state, they noticed that his fantasies were becoming more intricate and bizarre. At other times, when he seemed fairly rational, they could tell he was sinking deeper into despair over his problems.

In February, after he shot and wounded his family's dog, Duke, Kennedy told the ex-girlfriend that he had planned to commit suicide but experienced a religious revelation that changed his mind. He said the gun went off accidentally as he was putting it away and Duke, a spaniel, was hit.

Psychiatric Centers and Jail Cells

Winter became spring, and his descent accelerated, his friends said. Although medical tests, including a CT scan, found no clear physical abnormalities, Kennedy's parents "are still thinking it was some kind of brain tumor" that caused his erratic behavior, the adult acquaintance said. He said the couple has not seen a report of their son's autopsy.

On April 16, Easter, he said, the parents took Kennedy to Woodburn, an outpatient facility. After being examined and sent home with medication, Kennedy was back at the center two days later. That time, the acquaintance said, Woodburn officials called other psychiatric facilities to find a bed for him and arranged for him to be admitted to Potomac Ridge. "His mother drove him straight there," the acquaintance said.

He stayed at Potomac Ridge for about seven hours April 18 before climbing out a window in the early evening. After carjacking a Toyota by bluffing that he had a gun, he drove from Rockville back to Centreville, to the ex-girlfriend's house.

"He just started going off on one of his weird conversations," she said. It was past 9 p.m. as they stood in her driveway, the Toyota parked at the curb. "He right away told me he stole the car. He said he had gone to some mental hospital and was being treated like an animal, and he couldn't stand being there." She urged him to surrender to police. "I yelled at him a little bit, but I didn't want to get him mad, because I was really afraid."

Kennedy then drove to the home of another friend, Brendan Baker, 18. "When I opened the door, he goes: 'Brendan! It's time! It's time!' " Baker asked, time for what? But he got no clear answer. "He just started talking crazy stuff. . . . Then he said all he wanted to do was die."

Baker said he and two other young people at his home persuaded their troubled friend to turn himself in, and those two teenagers followed Kennedy as he drove to the Sully station.

The experience of being locked up seemed to aggravate Kennedy's mental instability, said his friends and the acquaintance who has spoken with his parents. Besides his brief stay at Potomac Ridge, Kennedy spent about 66 hours in the Fairfax County jail, then a night in a Montgomery County cell after he was extradited there on the carjacking charge, before he was released on bond April 22.

In the final two weeks of his life -- as Kennedy reached out more often to friends on the Web, by phone and in person, at all hours -- he complained bitterly about the treatment he had received behind bars. But it was hard for those listening to discern which stories were true and which were products of his increasingly confused mind.

Brendan Cowan, 21, was among the last to see him. He picked up Kennedy at his home Saturday morning, May 6, and they drove to a Starbucks.

Cowan, a devout Christian, said he asked Kennedy whether he thought Satan was responsible for his visions. Kennedy shrugged, listlessly, and gestured to pedestrians and motorists. "He said that when he looked at all these people, it was like looking at dead people," Cowan said. "He would look into their eyes, and their eyes were just solid white, like they had rolled back into their skulls."

He said Kennedy sounded "really, really saddened by what he saw."

Satan was in his thoughts two days later. Before he gathered up the guns, carjacked a minivan near his home and drove to the Sully station, Kennedy messaged Sforza in his VCU dorm room, and the two chatted for a while on the Web.

"He told me he wanted to get an exorcism," Sforza said. This was about an hour before the 3:52 p.m. shootings. "And I was like, 'Do they even still do exorcisms?' We joked around a little bit. . . . I don't really remember how we ended the conversation. . . . We really didn't say goodbye. It was like we just stopped talking."

Sforza said he went back to his schoolwork, untroubled. The chat had not been much different from many others between him and Kennedy in past months.

"When I would talk to him," Sforza said, "I often felt like he thought he was at war with the world. It was him versus everyone else, because no one else understood what was happening to him."