Shooter Languished Between Delusions, Despair
Teen Who Killed 2 Fairfax Officers Had Reached for Help

By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006

In his lucid moments, Michael W. Kennedy longed to have his mental health back, saying he felt tortured by strange delusions and might kill himself to find peace, say teenagers who were close to him and an adult who has spoken with Kennedy's parents.

They said that when Kennedy, 18, fired more than 70 shots outside a Fairfax County police station last week, mortally wounding two officers, it marked the end of a half-year descent from normalcy to homicidal madness. His decline began suddenly in the fall, they said, with the unexplained onset of chronic severe headaches and bouts of sleeplessness.

One friend, Daniel Sforza, 18, who saw Kennedy late in the summer before going away to college and then hung out with him in the fall on a weekend visit home, said he was stunned by the "drastic" change in his friend's mental condition. "Mike was totally different," Sforza said, recalling the bizarre, disjointed delusions that Kennedy rambled on about in the fall.

"I mean, totally off-the-wall different," Sforza said.

Before then, his friends said, Kennedy, who was killed by police during the attack, seemed healthy and content, a sociable teenager with a quirky, carefree personality. He was a gun enthusiast, they said, but did not fit the profile of a would-be mass murderer. Far from being a brooding loner, they said, he had a wealth of friends at Fairfax's Westfield High School, from which he graduated last spring, and his behavior there never hinted at the trouble to come.

Late last year, as delusions haunted Kennedy more and more, his friends said, he agonized in moments of clarity.

"It seemed like he was two personalities," said a former girlfriend, now 17, who did not want her name published for privacy reasons. She stayed close with Kennedy to the end. "He could be this crazy-talking person. And then he would come back to his normal self and be like, 'I can't live like this! Something's wrong with me!' "

Headaches, Insomnia, Ramblings

When his mental problems took hold in the fall, Kennedy, an aspiring graphic artist, was a student at Northern Virginia Community College in Manassas.

"We can't put a finger on any one moment or cataclysmic event that started the downfall," said the adult who has talked regularly with Kennedy's parents since the shootings.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because the attack is being investigated by police, the parents' acquaintance said that Kennedy's headaches and insomnia were aggravated by the delusions. During those spells, which grew more intense and prolonged over the winter, he rambled incoherently about God, Hitler, aliens and a coming apocalyptic battle in which he was destined to play a key role, his friends said.

Through all this talk of an epic struggle for dominion over the Earth, Kennedy's friends said, they never heard him threaten to attack the police or anyone specifically. However, the former girlfriend said, "you knew in the back of your mind that if he honestly thought he was talking to God, then he might do something dangerous."

His parents, Brian and Margaret Kennedy, were distraught over their son's worsening condition and took him to "a number of doctors" for a variety of tests, including at Prince William Hospital, the Woodburn Center for Community Mental Health in Annandale and Potomac Ridge Behavioral Health Center in Rockville, the adult acquaintance said. He said Kennedy was given medication, but he did not know exactly what kind.

Brian Kennedy is a meat manager at a supermarket, and his wife works in an optical store. Within the limits of their health insurance, the acquaintance said, the parents "went everywhere they could" in search of help for their only son.

"From the parents' standpoint, they were never given a diagnosis," he said. "They were never told what was wrong with him. Nobody figured it out."

Several of his close friends, as well as the adult acquaintance, said that when Kennedy's delusions subsided and he could think relatively clearly, he openly anguished over his mental problems, telling people he desperately wanted to be normal. They said he often talked of killing himself as an escape.

"He would tell his parents that he couldn't go on anymore unless he got some help," the acquaintance said. The ex-girlfriend said, "He told me he was going to shoot himself, and then he had some revelation where he decided not to."

Another friend, also a teenage girl, said: "One time he told me he was thinking about hanging himself. But he didn't do it because he thought God wouldn't let him do it, that God would . . . hold him in the air and not let him suffocate."

Instead of committing suicide, Kennedy armed himself May 8 with seven guns, carjacked a minivan, drove into a parking lot reserved for police personnel at the Sully District station in western Fairfax -- a few miles from his Centreville home -- and opened fire with an AK-47-style assault rifle and possibly two other weapons.

Detective Vicky O. Armel, 40, died that day. Officer Michael E. Garbarino, 53, died early Wednesday.

Kennedy's parents, who have not spoken publicly about the attack, left their Centreville townhouse after the shootings and went into seclusion with their other child, a 9-year-old girl. As of yesterday, authorities said, the couple also had not talked with Fairfax police detectives, who have repeatedly sought to interview the Kennedys about their son.

When police searched the unoccupied townhouse after the shootings, they said, they found nine guns strewn about the home. As for why the parents kept firearms, given their son's mental state, their attorney has said in a statement that the guns had been locked in two containers. "The family can only surmise that their son broke into one of the containers" before going to the police station, the statement said.

'He Couldn't Figure It Out'

At Westfield High, Kennedy "was always a little eccentric," said the former girlfriend, echoing others. "Not weird in a bad way," she said. "Just weird like in, you know, everybody's trying to find their own individuality."

Kennedy was artistic and a military buff, an offbeat kid who often dressed in camouflage pants and combat boots, knew a great deal about guns and devoted a lot of time to the student literary magazine, Calliope, contributing photos and computer graphics. As a senior, he managed the magazine's twice-yearly "coffeehouse," a fundraiser featuring music and poetry readings. "He was really into that," the ex-girlfriend said.

In the fall, he enrolled in community college as a liberal arts major. The college would not disclose his grades, but Sforza, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Kennedy told him in Internet chats "that he wasn't doing well at all."

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."