He was trying to scare me, and he did.” But if Brown attacked, “I knew which hand it was coming from.” He was whittling on his left arm” with the one in that hand, “making small cuts. Vernon watched what Brown did with his knives and learned. “I gave them the cue to get the heck out of there, and, boy, they did that! Quick, like rabbits,” Vernon said. “He backed away when I’d get closer.” With a few steps, Vernon put himself between Brown and the room’s door, with the children under the tables behind him. He said his life 'sucks.' That’s a quote.”Īs Vernon spoke, he stepped closer to Brown. I asked him if he was from Morton, did he go to high school. “I didn’t, but I did deflect his attention” from the children “and calmed him a bit. Local newspaper reporter Michael Smothers spoke to Vernon afterward about what happened: He immediately stepped forward into Brown's path, trying to distract the young man-but also hoping to see which hand he might use to attack. Though Vernon had spent his career in IT at the local Caterpillar plant, he had taken knife-fight training in the Army many decades before. Brown held a knife in each hand as he entered the conference room, he screamed out, "I'm going to kill some people!" Advertisement Inside the conference room, 75-year-old instructor James Vernon looked up from a chess board and saw Brown running toward him. He opened his backpack and pulled out the knives. Furious at the legal charges against him, Brown saw a way to exact a twisted form of revenge against children. A chess club was meeting in the library conference room, and Brown watched the 16 children-some as young as seven-with rising rage. Morton, a 17,000-person village just outside of Peoria along I-74, bills itself as the "pumpkin capital of the world." Its claim to fame lies in its thousands of acres of pumpkin farms, along with an enormous Nestlé plant that cans Libby's puréed pumpkin. Directly behind the Nestlé plant, across the railroad tracks, sits the town's single-story brick library. At 3:25pm, Brown walked inside and sat down at a table.
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