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Williams came to California less than two years ago from a town in rural Maryland. After a spell in the town of Twentynine Palms, his dad got a job as a lab technician for the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and the two moved to Santee (pop. 58,000). Williams was instantly picked on by the bigger, more streetwise kids there. Laura Kennamer, a friend of Andy's, saw kids burning their lighters and then pressing the hot metal against his neck. "They'd walk up to him and sock him in the face for no reason," she says. "He wouldn't do anything about it." Jennifer Chandler, a freshman, saw the same pattern of torment: "Kids were mean to him. He'd slack it off. Like he kept it all inside."
Things weren't great at home either. Williams' parents had divorced when he was 5, and he rarely saw his mother after that. Several friends said he would automatically call their mothers Mom. Williams lived with his father Charles Jeffrey in a dank stucco apartment house about one mile from the high school. Adrianna Aceven, a fellow freshman and one of the few friends whom Williams invited back to his apartment, said the father was distant, disappearing to work on his computer when the kids walked in. On weekends the senior Williams is said to have stretched out on the floor, sipping beer and watching the sports channels. "I never saw Andy go anywhere with his dad," says Shaun Turk, 15. "Andy would call him and say it's raining and beg him to give him a ride home. But you could hear his dad yelling into the phone, 'Get your ass home!'"
So Williams sought out another place to belong. He ended up with a band of dope-smoking skateboarders who hang around Woodglen Vista Park, a short walk from the school. "When I first met Andy he was, like, a good Christian boy from Maryland," says Aceven. "But he started hanging with a different crowd, getting into trouble, ditching school, acting different." Aceven called Andy's new friends the Grommits, a term that eludes meaning even for her. The kids would sit at the tables behind the park toilets, smoking marijuana and drinking tequila they would shoplift from the Albertson's supermarket opposite the school. One of the tables has a graffito of a marijuana leaf.
Williams fell into a troubled teenage world, where Columbine has become a legend, where getting stoned on superstrong weed like "bubblegum chronic" is for some a daily deed and where ditching school to rub shoulders with the Aryan Brothers gang in the skate park is an unexceptional life choice. The scene at the public housing complex next to the park, another hangout, is dissolute. Single parents fill ashtrays the size of dinner plates with cigarette butts, indifferent or oblivious to a preteen daughter sharing with a reporter her tales of hallucinogen abuse or a 15-year-old son boasting of his near-death experience from alcohol poisoning. At night drug-crazed kids run rampant around the buildings, screaming and banging on windows like demented Valkyries. The city ran out of money before Christmas to pay for security guards for the apartment blocks, and the cops are so weary of the complex that residents claim that sometimes they don't even respond to emergency calls.