She was born a girl and named Trinity, a word central to Christian cosmology, signifying the tripartite conception of God as the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
But last Tuesday she was arrested as Jamie, although sometimes she used Dex. This 18 year old girl-now-boy with three names, was taken into custody by a SWAT team after an anonymous FBI hotline tip: Trinity-Jamie-Dex appeared to be planning to commit a Valentine's Day massacre at her high school in Mooresville, Indiana, a holiday also rooted in Christian history and symbolism just like her birth name.
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"I'm close to shooting [my school] up. I have an AR-15...Parkland part two. Of course. I've been planning this for a YEAR," she told a friend on Discord.
Saint Valentine, martyred by the Roman Emperor Claudius Gothicus in 269 AD, is the patron saint of love, young people and happy marriages. By the world's standards, Saint Valentine died a tragic death - after refusing to renounce the Christ, he was beaten, beheaded and buried just north of Rome. That we still give candy and gifts in his name is a testimony to a deeper and more positive meaning to his life and death. The ancient Greeks expressed their view of human suffering, fragility and fate through dramatic Tragedies. And this story certainly has all the same elements.
From what few pieces of Trinity's story I can gather, Trinity - while young - long suffered from having neither love nor the Valentinian benefits of a happy marriage. Her mother died from an overdose some time ago. She "didn't even cry when his mother passed away," the detective recorded her saying in his probable cause affidavit.
"Trinity used to cut herself in the past because of anger issues. She is bipolar like her mother," the detective notes matter of factly, shifting back and forth with pronouns in his report.
Police found a journal in her bedroom that reads like a letter to someone unknown:
"My name is Dex I am eighteen years old...I currently live with my father, my mother passed away. I am also a transgender male. I have a lot of homicidal thoughts."
But on her bedroom walls weren't posters of women, but mass murderers - all men - Dylan Roof, Nicolas Cruze and Andrew Blaze - and another for a movie called "Zero Day" about two boys who conduct a school shooting. A framed picture of Roof sat on her bookshelf. A photo of Cruze was taped to the wall above the light switch. Another photo of Cruze served as a laptop wallpaper. Three little buttons with photos of each murderer were safety-pinned on her school backpack.
She was sick.
And the school counselor knew it. According to one news report, a school counselor "had been working with the student since he was a freshman." The probable cause affidavit, however, says only that "Trinity [had] sought mental health resources from the school all the way to when she was a freshman." Whether Trinity was "in" school counseling for four years or was only known to have sought school counseling over that time, the affidavit definitively makes clear that:
"She had expressed suicidal ideation in the past but nothing was significant enough to cause intervention."
I take this to mean a school counselor or support staff knew about the ideation, but declining to treat it seriously, failed to initiate any protocol to alert her father.
Despite this failure, the school counselor quickly blamed the father, telling the detective:
"Each time Trinity would try to receive mental health assistance, her father... would deny her the access to the resources. It was [the school counselor's] understanding that Mr. Shockley did not believe in mental health treatment, and did not take his daughter's conditions seriously."
We have no other context to these statements. But it's not unreasonable to surmise that by "access," the counselor is referring to outside professional mental health care. Yet if that counselor never sought an intervention with the child over suicidal ideation - and thus, presumably, never informed the father - this claim is a bit self-serving, isn't it?
Maybe he was suspicious of this counselor, the school district, and all these mental health programs. Maybe the school counselor tried the right thing and referred her out to resources, but the father said no, linking the changes in his daughter to a system he didn't trust.
Mooresville Schools district policy requires parental consent to make external mental health referrals - and, interestingly, prohibits school counselors from disclosing or making any diagnosis of a mental health condition unless licensed to do so by the state division of mental health and addiction:
If a referral was made conforming to policy, the reason for that referral would not mention suicidal ideation or any other identified behavior.
So, how far out is to believe the father was aware of his daughter's sexual confusion, the new names, the new identity - and associated that with her school counseling program? And on receiving the referral said, no, not any more of that?
The father is not talking to reporters now, but there's reason to suspect so.
In 2022 an Indiana high school counselor was caught secretly transitioning a child just less than an hour away from Mooresville after emails surfaced of the counselor telling colleagues not to inform parents if they aren't supportive of the district's gender support plans.
Lots of unanswered questions.
But what is clear to me - again - is that school counseling programs are doomed to failure if they do not engage the parents, do not seek out true, informed consent, and do not see parents as partners with ultimate authority to make mental health care decisions for their children. Parents must have a right to engage counselors that align with the philosophical, cultural, and religious (or non-religious) worldview. And if school counseling programs demonstrate a hostility to parent consent and contrary worldviews, parents are right to distrust them.
This is a sad case that could've been even more tragic.
I'll end with these thoughts.
I'd like to imagine Trinity's parents greeted her first breath in the world with hope, love, and at least the tacit promise of eternal devotion worthy of such a given name. But life makes it hard to hold true to our promises, no matter how lofty our aspirations.
We come into the world broken, not easily mended. Sometimes the cracks break deeper over time. Trinity's mother, in the dark clouds of her substance addiction, surely could not see what would happen to her daughter. Surely she wanted her to be happy in a way she herself wasn't. But no, for Trinity, those cracks would become chasms.
It's not Trinity's fault, the adults around her have not helped. There is tragedy enough for all around and Saint Valentine himself cannot restore what was lost. God bless her now.
Let's all do better.
End.
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