Lisa Ling talked to Charles Andy Williams who is serving 50 years in a California prison for a school shooting.
On March 5, 2001, 15-year-old Williams opened fire in Santana High School in Santee, California, and killed two students and wounded 13 others.
In the recently-released deleted scene from her show on OWN, Our America, Lisa Ling talked over the phone to Williams who is serving his time at California’s Ironwood State Prison about the shooting and his relationship with his father Jeff over the past few years. Since Williams was three years old, Jeff was a single dad.
“I know it’s been a very long time and you have had many years to think about what happened,” Ling says, “but is there any way you can talk about why you think you might have done what you did?”
“Dying seemed like a good option for whatever reason,” says Williams in the interview. “I didn’t know how to communicate that something really, really bad was going on. I didn’t know how to talk about it. So I felt like the easy way out would be to not talk about it.”
“When these kinds of things happen, immediately people think that the parents should have born more responsibility,” says Ling. “Was there anything that you think your father could have done to prevent you from doing what you did?”
“Looking back, he did every single thing he could,” says Williams. “My dad noticed my grades slipping; he goes, ‘You’re skipping school.’ I would come home with bruises and lie to him. A lot of people noticed a lot of things, but for whatever reason, I refused to talk about it.”
You can watch the interview here.