The Brandon James Murders were a series of killings committed on Halloween night 1994, targeting students at George Washington High School in Lakewood.

The murders were attributed to Brandon James, a student at the school, who had been ostracized for various reasons, primarily his facial deformities caused by Proteus Syndrome. Brandon allegedly snapped and attacked a group of his tormentors at the school’s Halloween party. Ultimately, five people were killed and a sixth, Kevin Duval, badly injured, before Brandon was gunned down by police at the Wren Lake jetty, having gone there under the impression he was meeting Daisy, a girl he had a crush on.

The incident became the stuff of urban legend in Lakewood, bolstered by the fact that Brandon’s body was never found.¹ In the mid-2010s, Brandon’s identity was usurped by a series of masked killers who perpetrated consecutive killing sprees, the motivations of which were connected, some more tenuously than others, to the events of 1994.

Victims

Trivia

The murders were the subject of Careless People: A Tale of Two Daisies- Violence and Retribution in the The Great Gatsby and the Brandon James slayings, a Retrospective, a 2015 English paper by GW High sophomore Noah Foster, wherein Noah attempted to find thematic resonance between the murders and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby .³

On hearing the story of the murders from Noah, Kieran compares Brandon’s rampage to the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre.⁴ The real-world tragedy was the deadliest school shooting in United States history until the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. The Columbine massacre ended up delaying the production of Scream 3, as part of a media panic over the killers’ allegedly being influenced by violent themes in pop culture. Scholarship on Columbine has never been able to definitively pinpoint a motive for the two shooters’ rampage, though it is broadly agreed that they were not actively targeting their bullies.

1. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎
2. Survived his injuries. ↩︎
3. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎
4. The Story so Far, Vol. I: Chapter 1, Scene 17 ↩︎