In an Instant, Message Has a Lasting Impact

The difference is, unlike Virginia Tech gunman Seung Hui Cho, who left behind a trail of warning signs, Caparelli has no such trail. He said he never has fired a gun, that he owns no weapons, "not even a pocketknife." He was not considered an angel at Robinson, but he was no troublemaker, either. He sometimes worked as the announcer for junior varsity football games, and he took a class that entailed looking after preschool children.

"He was very aggressive on the football or lacrosse field, but he certainly did not bring that into the hallways," Robinson Principal Dan Meier said. "He was a fine young man. He was motivated to get to the college level and he was hardworking."

In his first extensive interviews since the incident, the 20-year-old Caparelli, with close-cropped dark hair that gives his active eyebrows and deep-set Tootsie Roll-colored eyes plenty of leeway, comes across as relentlessly contrite, and he is running out of self-critical adjectives to describe what he did.

Earnest and agreeable but tinged with a certain toughness, he said he had never before posted such violent content online.

"It was a dumb, immature, ignorant joke, but to me, it was a joke," Caparelli, clad in Wake Forest workout gear, said recently in between weight room sessions at Robinson. "I didn't even think about it. I just put it up there and maybe took for granted that people that know me know I'm not a crazy kid and how I would never ever harm anybody.

"The way it's worded, it's going to look like I wanted it to be seen, and I wanted people to read it. But I kind of put it out there . . . almost talking to myself. I didn't send it to anybody. It wasn't directly toward anybody specifically."

His "bonehead move" was reported nationally by major news outlets. In the 10 weeks since, he has worked at an Italian-food restaurant chain that also employs his mother. He has kept in shape at Robinson. And he has tried to explain his side of the story in a series of awkward and humbling encounters with old classmates and their parents, Robinson supporters who know Caparelli as a running back who scored 66 touchdowns in high school, not as a menace to society.

On his since-shuttered Facebook page, the contents of which are part of a Wake Forest police search warrant affidavit, Caparelli listed one of his many interests as "Letting flow through writing." His "favorites" ranged from children's book "Stuart Little" to rap group Three 6 Mafia. Some of his "favorite quotes" were sexual or violent in nature, but not as pointed, or as agitated, as his Wake Forest-related postings from that Sunday afternoon.

"I felt very bad, not just because of the situation that I'd put myself in but because of the people I had let down," Caparelli said. "That was probably the hardest thing for me because there are people that I wanted to talk to, but at the same time, when I would see them, it was hard, because I knew they knew. . . . I don't want them to think, 'I thought I knew Luke, but I guess I didn't.' I want them to know that the kid that they've always known is the same guy."

A month after Caparelli's posting on Facebook, a former graduate student at Northern Illinois University drove to the school's DeKalb, Ill., campus and killed five students and wounded 18.

Caparelli's parents, Guy and Jessica, who are divorced, each say that they understood why Wake Forest had to take the threats seriously in light of the Virginia Tech shootings and other incidents of campus violence.

"I was flabbergasted," Jessica Caparelli said. "It's just not in Lucas's nature to have any propensity for violence or thoughts like that. He's always liked the ability to express himself. He's tried to write lyrics to rap songs. He's part of that culture that gets into that kind of language. I know he wouldn't follow through on anything like that."