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Teen Admits To Planning Deadly Attack Against Entire Family And Students; New Speaker Of The House Has Message For The White House And Democrats. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired November 03, 2015 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:30:00] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: There we go. Kelly and Robert, thank you both so much. I appreciate it.

Coming up next, CNN, looking back on a shocking case here. This it teen admitted to planning a deadly attack against his entire family and so many students at his school, even going so far as to make practice bombs, but a judge dropped most of the charges against him. We would end up look at this case and we will hear about all of this from his family, who they say never saw this coming.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:34:50] BALDWIN: I love my job. But there are days when the worst thing happens. Breaking news, and I have to sit here and tell you about another school shooting. We have been reporting on them far too much, but today this is a different tale. I want to tell you about a school massacre that didn't happen.

Let me tell you the story of this family in Minnesota. This is reporting by a phenomenal team in CNN.com which has just launched this in-depth story today. This family, all American, loving, two parents, but according to recordings and police interviews, which you are about to see here, if the youngest son in this family had his way, he would have had his -- he would have quote "disposed," this is his words, dispose of them. Killed them. Every one of them. Along with at least 40 others in a rampage that he'd hoped would have outdone columbine.

That did not happen. And you will learn why. And perhaps even more revealing here, an angle of the tory rarely explored. You will hear what happened after the plot was stopped. The prosecution some say fell apart sentencing others wonder may not punished enough. And a mother and a father and a sister who cope with the knowledge that this young man wanted to kill them and continue to question what they could have done differently.

CNN's Wayne Drash and (INAUDIBLE) produced this story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

[15:36:00] STEPHANIE LADUE, MOTHER OF JOHN LADUE: I will tell you it started out like a dream that I couldn't wake up from. Got a knock on the door. We were told you need to leave your home right away. Your son has been involved in a plot to kill you, kill your husband and his sister and blow up the school basically. I was told there are bombs in our house and we need to leave immediately for our own safety.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today's date is April 29th, 2014. I'm officer Schroeder with the Waseca police department. And I'm here with John Ladue.

S. LADUE: I was scared. Mostly scared for my son.

JOHN LADUE, SUSPECT: Sometime before the end of the school year my plan was to steel a recycling bin from the school and take one of the pressure cookers I made and put in the hallway and blow it up during passing period time.

CHELSIE SHELLHAS, ALERTED AUTHORITIES: This is where I was doing dishes and this is the window that I seen the boy walking. He was here fiddling with the lock trying to get in.

J. LADUE: I am the one who is responsible for the CO2 bomb. Even though my intentions were to never hurt anyone, I just wanted to test out the devices. I have created similar to those and set them off over various period of time in town.

DAVID LADUE, FATHER OF JOHN LADUE: They want to talk about this as though this was columbine that was stopped.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You have brothers and sisters?

J. LADUE: Yes, I have a sister. She is one year older than me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So you would have done this stuff while she was at school as well.

J. LADUE: I forgot to mention a detail. Before that day I was planning to dispose of my family too.

S. LADUE: I always thought my son loved me. I always believed he did. That's a real hard pill to swallow.

VALERIE LADUE, SISTER OF JOHN LADUE: I just couldn't see that happening, honestly. As close as my brother and I were, that my brother would come to me one day face to face and end my life, I personally don't believe it would ever happen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why would you dispose of your family? What have they done?

J. LADUE: They did nothing wrong. I just wanted as many victims as possible.

D. LADUE: John had a journal, a plot. I have been, you know, going over this plan and actually writing it out. But I'm glad he didn't do them and I don't think he was going to do them or wanted to do them. I assume that's why John was very eager to talk to police when they showed up.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you have at your house?

J. LADUE: I have three unexploded ones in my room. They were ready to go off with the just a lit of the match.

S. LADUE: John went through a lot of changes as he was growing up. When he was young, he had a great sense of humor. My son had a set of toy knives or something he got as I think it was a Christmas present from his dad or his grandma. We have a tree in the front yard that's an old useless tree and my son made up a little target. He was just going to, you know, throw these things at the target at the tree. Didn't see it a as a problem. All we saw it was as target practice.

J. LADUE: I did a good job of keeping myself under the radar too it seems.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So yet, you were still going to do it in the next month probably?

J. LADUE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Put this plan together?

J. LADUE: Yes, no question.

[15:40:06] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just trying to figure out why.

J. LADUE: I think there are three reasons why. The reasons I said I did in my journal were because there were three. One, just because it's an opportunity to get out of here. Two, for fun. And third, to follow my idol.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Who is that?

J. LADUE: My number one idol is Eric Harris. He's the main perpetrator of columbine high school.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How did he become your main idol?

J. LADUE: I don't know.

S. LADUE: It just seems like a strange lottery, you know. Like the unlucky lottery, the kind you don't want to win. It kind of feels like that's what my life has become.

D. LADUE: My dream for him is the dream I had. I found him alive. I don't know how long it's going to take for him to recover.

S. LADUE: I'm thankful that nothing happened. I'm thankful that, first of all, my son wasn't hurt. I'm sad that it came about the way that it did. And I surely wished that we would have known something was wrong long before this. But we didn't.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: We have to talk about this. Coming up, I'll talk to Wayne Drash who put this piece together, an attorney, a child psychologist. Why were the charges thrown out? Walk us through with the judge would thought about. How can we make sure nothing more could happen? Stay with me. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:46:50] BALDWIN: Welcome back. We are highlighting our in-depth coverage of CNN digital of this school attack that never happened, thank goodness. This was thwarted last year. In the end the teen who ended up -- wanted to blow up his school and kill his family pleaded guilty to one felony count having an explosive device. This was all part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid prison time. If he complies with the terms, the court laid out, the felony could be reduced to a misdemeanor and that could eventually be wiped from his record.

So those details from my colleague CNN enterprise reporter Wayne Drash who joins me from Atlanta. Also with me, CNN legal analyst Joey Jackson and psychologist Jeff Gardere.

So first and foremost, Wayne, you know, kudos to you and your team for this phenomenal reporting. The fact that you were in touch with this family for months and months and they were willing to trust you and share this information and share this man's journal entries. Tell me more about the process with this family and where is this young man now?

WAYNE DRASH, CNN ENTERPRISE WRITER: Thank you, Brooke. John is currently in Waseca County jail while the state of Minnesota tries to figure out how to pay for his treatment. According to the plea deal, he has to come here in Georgia to a treatment facility to get treatment for autism spectrum disorder. The state of Georgia also has to degree to accept that transfer. So that's where he is right now.

But like you were saying, really very thankful to the family, Stephanie and David Ladue for opening their house to me. We have met for hours over the last few months. Obviously, not very easy for them to talk about these things, to talk about, you know, your son's own words, talking about killing yourself as well as causing a massacre at school.

Stephanie, the mother, was so distraught within the first week she actually had a mental collapse to the point that she could no longer walk or eat or talk and she had had to check into a psychiatric facility herself. And she literally had to learn to walk again. So at the same time, they are prayerful people. I don't know if happy is the word, but they are at least pleased that nobody was harmed in John's plot, including himself as well as them. They don't believe he actually would have carried through with it. If anything, they believe his suicide was prevented.

As part of that, they shared with me all of his journal entries since his detention. Hundreds and hundreds of pages so that I could see his change of thought in the nine months before his arrest, his journal entries were all fixated on his plot in the journal entry since his detention. There was no cause, no fixation on violence. It was really quite ordinary stuff on one or two occasions he did reference his arrest where he basically says something to the effect of I just was being solely and acting stupid prior to all this. [15:50:09] BALDWIN: All right. Joey, I'm turning to you first

because, you know, here is someone we saw in police interrogation. He says he was inspired by, you know, one of those columbine, he wanted to kill 40 people, I mean, the line about I omitted one detail, I was going to dispose of my family ahead of time. Here you have this judge, I mean, four attempted murder charges down to this plea deal. Walk me through how the judge arrived at that decision and why.

JOEY JACKSON, HLN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. And you what, Brooke? It wasn't only the judge, of course, the prosecution appealed it. It went even to the state courts. And so, this is the thinking. Whenever involved in criminality, there are two things, and not to get too technical, but there's the act and then there is mental state, right? So you call it mensrea (ph) which is what your mind-set? And then, you can't only possess a mind because the mind just tells the intent you're formed to commit a crime, there has to be some act in furtherance of the crime.

And so, here's the legal issue. The legal issue is that mere preparation is never enough. And so, there was a ton of preparation that we see that he did here.

BALDWIN: Explosion -- devices exploding and a dry run.

JACKSON: He had guns in his home. Right, exploding devices. But if you don't take a substantial step towards the actual commission of the offense, it's not a crime. And so the judge said, that based upon mere preparation, there was no act in furtherance, there may have been plotting and planning, but no attempt to specifically carry it out. The judge said that it does not constitute a crime.

That then went to the appellate court and the appellate court agreed that it wasn't enough to constitute a crime. And so, the prosecutor was in the position of, where do we go now? And what they did was they opted to enter into that plea deal. Now, they entered into the plea deal because, you know, the logic is, whenever you're treated for example, as a juvenile, he's 17, as opposed to adult, the focus is on rehabilitation. When you are an adult, the focus is on punishment. So if they would have went forward in terms of an adult perspective, he may not have gotten treatment for ailments in prison whereas a juvenile you get such treatment and that's the analysis.

BALDWIN: So, if the payment is made and he's sent to this facility, as Wayne pointed out in Georgia for this ten years of therapy for autism spectrum order, I mean, I am left wondering, how do we know after ten years if you have an intent, finish my sentence, Jeff Gardere.

JEFF GARDERE, CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST: Well, exactly. We are talking about autism spectrum disorder. We are not talking about something that we know of right now that is not curable. So I think they were using autism spectrum disorder, one of issues that he had, in addition to delusional personality issue, he, himself, even said, I know I've got psychiatric problems. I think I may be a sociopath. So this is a person who doesn't have a conscious but is smart enough to understand there's something that's wrong. And I think what the prosecutors perhaps saw here was there was a chance of saving this individual because of his psychological state of mind. It wasn't that he was just a bad egg. It wasn't that it was bad wiring in his brain. They knew that his parents were very committed to his upbringing, that he came from a good home and that this was a person, like we have many young people who have these psychological issues and don't get the help and some of them act out. But if you could get to this guy, you know, while he's young, and you can help him and what we've seen is that he didn't act out. He had the rehabilitation. And so, they'll keep him in treatment. Not for the autism spectrum disorder. Maybe that was for a legal situation.

BALDWIN: Sure.

GARDERE: But for more of the personality disorder, to make sure that he won't act out. And by the way, people with autism spectrum disorders, there's no link towards criminality or violence and we should say that.

BALDWIN: No, I don't want to go there. Jeff Gardere and Joey Jackson, thank you very much.

JACKSON: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: And finally to you, Wayne Drash, the story is up on the CNN home page right now. Just go to CNN.com to read this entire thing and watch the video again.

Thank you so much to all of you. And we will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:58:00] BALDWIN: He's only been on the job a couple of days, a newly seated republican speaker of the house Paul Ryan has a message for the White House and for Democrats. That the Republican Party will not back down from a fight over government spending. It is a fight that could lead to a December shut down there.

Our senior political reporter Manu Raju has more on what the speaker told reporters, including the smell of his office -- Manu.

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: Brooke, now, this -- the battle lines have already been drawn over government spending before Paul Ryan has fully moved in to the speaker's office. What Mr. Ryan said to us this morning is that, look, we're going to fight the White House on some of these -- we're going to exercise our power of the purse and push what we believe needs to be done when it comes to government spending.

Now, the White House and Congress have agree on top-line spending levels but did not agree on program by program decisions. And that includes what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. And that's going to be the big fight heading into December, December 11th is the next big deadline. And that's what the two sides will have to negotiate particularly when it comes to thorn issues like funding for Planned Parenthood, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, et cetera, those are the big fights that Paul Ryan has to worry about in his first coming weeks.

BALDWIN: My other question, on a lighter note, here is what he also said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. PAUL RYAN (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: They have ozone machines apparently that you can detoxify the environment but I'm going to have to work on the carpeting in here. You know, if you go to a hotel room or get a rental car that's been smoked, that's what this smells like.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Is it really that bad, Manu, 20 seconds?

RAJU: Yes, it really is. I mean, John Boehner was an avid smoker, chain smoker, you know, during meeting, during negotiations and everything. And Paul Ryan is a workout freak. So I think they are going -- the first order of business to fumigate the space.

BALDWIN: Fumigating. Cleaning the carpet and Dennis Hastert (ph) portrait gone.

Manu Raju, thank you so much for us there on Capitol Hill on this Tuesday.

And thank you so much for being with me. I'm Brooke Baldwin here in New York. We will send it to Washington. "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper right starts now.