BY BILL RIGBY
(Reuters) – A high school student believed to have shot to death a classmate and wounded four others on Friday at his campus north of Seattle was a popular homecoming prince but appeared on social media as a heart broken and sometimes angry adolescent.
Police offered no motive for why Jaylen Fryberg, a freshman at Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Marysville, walked into his school cafeteria and shot his fellow students.
Rebecca Cooley, the mother of a boy at the school, said Frysberg was a well-known football player who recently was on the homecoming court at the school.
His Twitter feed, however, hints at a disappointment of some sort over the past week.
“It won’t last…. It’ll never last….,” read Fryberg’s last tweet, from Thursday.
In the three days leading up to that, he sent a series of tweets suggesting he was going through a painful breakup.
“I should have listened…. You were right… The whole time you were right…,” said one tweet.
Another said: “It breaks me… It actually does… I know it seems like I’m sweating it off… But I’m not.. And I never will be able to..”
And in a pair of tweets in August, Fryberg appeared to display an angry side.
“Your gonna piss me off .. And then some shits gonna go down and I don’t think you’ll like it … Your not gonna like what happens next,” he wrote.
Fryberg’s Facebook page shows a happier side: photos of him with unidentified girls, posing with a rifle and a slain deer on a hunting trip, and on a boat with Orca whales swimming close behind.
Such images are not out of the ordinary for the coastal area where he lived, in Tulalip Bay, Washington, some seven miles northwest of Marysville.
Photos on Fryberg’s Facebook page also shows he was active in sports and played football and basketball, and that he was a member of, and worked for, the Tulalip Tribes, a native American organization which operates two casinos and an outlet mall.
(Additional reporting by Victoria Cavaliere in Marysville, Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Sandra Maler)