![]() He was also treasurer of the Eisenhower chapter of SADD, which stands for Students Against Destructive Decisions. "He would say things that would bring the conversation to a total stop, and you'd look at him and wonder, What was that about?" The closest he got to sports was Academic Decathlon, where he was the team's history whiz. "He would try to flirt with you and it would be, like, creepy," says a girl who graduated in the class ahead of Tony's. His efforts to connect with girls were awkward at best. Whereas his sister was a jock-she played on Ike's basketball and softball teams-Tony's most striking feature was his disproportionately large head. He signed e-mails "Tony $" or "To$y," and on his MySpace profile he wrote, "Some people consider me rich, but i don't like that saying, i prefer 'financially fortunate' lol." Tony could be arrogant about his family's wealth. Instead, he bought a forty-two-inch plasma TV that he hung in his bedroom in the Stancls' effusively gabled home in Country Estates, one of New Berlin's grandest developments. He might have imagined the trip as a kind of homecoming-Tony and his sister, Stephanie, were adopted as babies from an orphanage in Lima-but his parents told him the trip was too dangerous. He'd sold it the previous spring and planned to use the proceeds to do something constructive: He wanted to go to Peru that summer to build houses for the poor. There were times when he wished he still had his old car-a blue Audi A4 he'd kept wad and spotless. That afternoon he walked out of the building and got in his crappy green Civic. Maybe we will have off tomorrow since the "bomb" is suppose to go off tomorrow… Update: school is officially on lock down. No one is allowed in the halls unless they are supervised.… Cops are in the hallways too.ĩ:04 a.m. It was against school rules to use your cell phone in the building, but Tony had been surreptitiously Twittering about the bomb threat ever since school started that morning:ħ:28 a.m. Rebuffed, Tony shuffled into the hall and pulled out his BlackBerry. Fesenmaier," he said sternly, "what are you doing to protect us?"įesenmaier assured him, "I've got it under control," and turned back around. ![]() ![]() He was prone to officiousness, but even for him this drop-by was pushing it. The previous year, he worked there part-time, and people thought he was pleasant enough, if kind of lazy. Midway through one interrogation, Fesenmaier was interrupted, and when he turned around he was surprised to see Tony Stancl.Ī stooped boy of five feet eleven, Tony was a familiar figure in the school's front office. In his office, Fesenmaier had corralled a few known troublemakers in an attempt to get them to confess to vandalizing the bathroom wall. The principal, Michael Fesenmaier, had dealt with bomb threats before, but not during his four years at Ike.īy the following afternoon, authorities had found no sign of a bomb and no solid clues as to the source of the threat. on Wednesday, November 12, 2008, two frightened Eisenhower students told a teacher, who told the principal, that they had seen the phrase bomb 11/14/08 written on the wall above a urinal in a downstairs boys' bathroom. Certainly, that's the most comforting way to look at it.Īt 12:40 p.m. ![]() In it an Eisenhower mother was quoted as saying, "It was beyond what the kids could imagine, you know? They see a lot of things, they go to the theater and everything else, but this is so shocking." Like most people in town, she sees Eisenhower as a bastion of innocents, blindsided by a monster among them. The week after Stancl's arrest, The New York Times ran a story about the case, headlined sex predator accusations shake a wisconsin town. The New Berlin school system's self-fulfilling motto is "Expect Excellence." And last year, Eisenhower's varsity girls' softball and boys' basketball teams won state championships, the Academic Decathlon team placed third in the state, and the valedictorian went to Harvard. Most of the town's 39,000 residents are middle-class professionals, remnants of Milwaukee's white flight in the 1960s and '70s or descendants of local farming families. Kids call New Berlin Eisenhower middle and high school "Ike," and they call the town of New Berlin "the Bubble," because, they say, as teenagers in suburbs everywhere say: "Nothing ever happens here." On the map, New Berlin forms a neat six-by-six-mile square in the southeast corner of Waukesha County, which prides itself on being one of the most politically conservative of Wisconsin's seventy-two counties. He wanted to see her face and body together, too. He picked the best one, cropped it, and sent it. He turned, fled again, and snapped a few more. He pointed the camera, snapped, then checked the shot. ![]()
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