New details add to bombing puzzle

Investigators probing the bomb explosion and death Saturday night on the OU campus within a football field's distance from, well, the Sooners' jam-packed football field, are coming up with new details about Joel Hinrichs III that add more questions than answers.

One huge new question: with the large amount of "solid explosive material" found within Hinrich's campus apartment, what did his roommate think? And, by the way, where is his roommate?

Previous posts on "OU Bombing" are HERE and HERE.

What few new information has emerged comes mostly from sources outside of the FBI investigation. Reports the Daily Oklahoman:

FBI officials continued to investigate but refused to answer questions Monday about Hinrichs' death. Those close to the 21-year-old engineering student and National Merit Scholar describe a troubled young man, but not necessarily one who would end his life in such a grisly manner.

"Joe was widely admired by people, but because he was never able to validate personally, he wasn't able to bond and have relationships," said his father, Joel Hinrichs Jr., from his Colorado Springs, Colo., home. "He was very bright and very alone."

Monday, investigators were seen questioning Hinrichs' neighbors who lived in Parkview Apartments on Sooner Drive, southeast of Lindsey Street and Stinson Avenue.

Hinrichs' building and three others were evacuated early Sunday because explosives were found inside the student's apartment.

Norman police Sgt. George Mauldin, head of the department's bomb squad, said his team removed a "significant quantity of highly explosive material" from Apt. 506B.

The material, which he described only as "a solid," was detonated safely at the police firing range on Jenkins Avenue, south of State Highway 9.

Mauldin said the explosives would not have destroyed the apartment building had they detonated early.

Hinrichs' image is coming across as a brilliant but intensely lonely young man who did not bond well with others his age.

If everything we know is on the level, it increasingly seems as if there was a deep spiritual crisis in Joel Hinrichs' life (not that there is a shortage of such crises among Americans these days). Did the lad attend a church? What kind of faith background did he have? How emotionally close, or distant, was his immediate family? It would be instructive to know.

Within the responses of the father there are what appear to us as hints that he lived in a family of scholarship and high expectations, but not necessarily emotional closeness. Consider the previoius statement: "Joe was widely admired by people, but because he was never able to validate personally, he wasn't able to bond and have relationships," said his father, Joel Hinrichs Jr., from his Colorado Springs, Colo., home. "He was very bright and very alone."

Never able to "validate personally"? What exactly does this New Age sounding description really mean? Does it mean that he took no value in having other people in his life, or does it mean that he saw no value in his own to other people? The father continues, "he wasn't able to bond and have relationships. He was very bright and very alone."

In one of his first published comments to the press, the elder Hinrichs said of his son, “I don’t want him defined by whatever limitations led him to this. He was quite introverted. He was a very quiet, introverted, intelligent young man. I can’t approximate what led him to make such a final decision.”

The words are uncommon, precise, erudite, and distant. What pain Mr. Hinrichs is feeling, and there is no doubt that it is considerable, it is under a very tight control, at least in public.

It is said that an acorn does not fall far from the tree, and often the personality characteristics of fathers and sons are quite similar. This is not to cast judgments on anyone, especially Mr. Hinrichs. It's an attempt to begin to understand why a 21-year-old National Merit Scholar, with a bright future a high likelihood, might find himself in a spiritual pit deep enough and dark enough to take his own life in such a macabre, dangerous fashion.

Sometimes children leave home and encounter others who are able to use personality quirks as handles to manipulate them into dangerous directions. Thus, we, the public, should not ease our concern until we know for certain that there were not one or more other people advising or assisting him with his explosives collections.