The Cyber World Shut Out O.C. Loner Too

This is the story of a young man who couldn’t make friends.

He was mocked and bullied. He had trouble looking people in the eyes. He struggled to carry on a conversation and thought his parents and his doctor misunderstood him.

He was filled with hurt, and maybe anger too.

For companionship, he turned to the Internet, an anonymous world where he hoped his awkwardness wouldn’t show. He searched friendfinder.com and other sites for someone to talk to. But even there, he was belittled and rejected.

Last weekend -- his brain awash with depression and despair -- he took a shotgun, went to a house in his Orange County neighborhood and killed a man and his daughter. Then he went home and killed himself.

Some who had crossed paths with 19-year-old William Freund wondered what they could have done differently. Former classmate Tiffany Key spoke up on the Internet:

“Think about your interactions with him. Were they positive? Or were you one of those kids that made his life hell? If you did, then please change your life. This is your wake-up call.”

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For as long as Key can remember -- at least back in middle school -- Freund was a social outcast.

When he walked through the halls, people harassed him. Sometimes, mockingly, students would put an arm around him and loudly announce things like, “Hey, everybody, this is William. He’s my friend,” said Key, who graduated from Aliso Niguel High School with Freund in 2004 and now attends UC Irvine.

If he sneezed or blew his nose in class, people laughed.

He wore a big, bulky jacket and people laughed.

When he walked down the hall, he ignored the students punching and kicking his backpack. Some, Key said, ruthlessly used Freund as the butt of jokes.

“He wouldn’t get aggressive. He would never retaliate,” she said. “He would just take it, day after day.”

Key said she and her friends tried to reach out to Freund, inviting him to participate in group projects. But because so many people were insincere with Freund, “when somebody would try to be genuine, he was so very defensive,” she said.

Tolerating such bullying is a common characteristic of someone with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that authorities said was diagnosed in Freund when he was 16. The disorder, a variant of autism, makes it difficult for people to interact socially. For some, the sickness can be emotionally crippling.

“People with Asperger’s syndrome want friends desperately,” said Stephen M. Edelson, director of the Oregon-based Center for the Study of Autism. “But they just don’t have the social behavior skills.”

In Freund’s case, it was “almost as if he was afraid to open up,” said Tio Lavranos, 19, another former classmate. “Every time I tried to talk to him, he really wouldn’t respond too much,” he said.

After graduation, Freund worked part time at a computer repair shop in Corona del Mar. He also helped his father at the family-owned print shop.

“He seemed to be out there doing stuff, but he didn’t have much of a personal life with friends,” said Forrest Fuster, his former employer. “He did a lot of work and no play. All he did personally was play on the computer.”

His social skills were so stunted that he sometimes seemed rude. Once when he finished repairing a computer, he didn’t say a word but simply attached a note to the keyboard saying, “You’re welcome.” When he answered the business phone, he greeted callers with a curt, “What do you want?”

Like Lavranos and Key, Fuster tried to befriend him. He invited him to watch movies, play video games or paintball. Freund turned him down, every time. “I reached out,” Fuster said, “but he didn’t receive anybody.”

*

Instead, Freund passed countless hours alone in his computer-filled bedroom. One high-speed computer he proudly pieced together with parts his parents gave him for graduation.

In a cyber world where anyone can assume any identity, he took on various characters, role-playing in Doom 3 and other online games, Fuster said.

He also pleaded for help. And for a friend.

He looked on websites such as friendfinder.com and agelesslove.com, crafting pitiable pleas for camaraderie.

“I’ve never really had a friend,” Freund wrote in one of his online profiles. “I’ve never had someone I can share more intimate conversation with, or just have a good time with. I want to experience doing things together with a ‘buddy,’ even having fun which I never had.”

He never had a girlfriend. “I do not have a place of my own but do not consider it a problem as Nobody has ever been over in all my life.”

For a while, it seemed his online posts were harmless enough.

He chatted in February about the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” and television shows, mostly reruns of “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits,” and other sci-fi programs.

He posted reviews of online businesses. He bought and sold video games and paintball supplies on EBay. He asked questions about guns, such as where in California he could shoot buckshot at a range.

It should have been easier for Freund to fit in on the Internet.

“You don’t need as much social skills when you type messages,” Edelson said.

But even there -- in the last place Freund sought advice and friendship -- the security of his online world unraveled in his final two weeks.

He rambled about wanting to commit suicide and the ways he had tried: asphyxia, lethal and inert gases, and hanging. He needed, he said, to “get away from the stress of the world for a bit.”

And he hinted at his imminent death, suggesting that he might not make it to Halloween. He wanted to give away his pug on craigslist.org. On Oct. 19, he posted on the Asperger’s syndrome website wrongplanet.net: “I think the only thing to do is go admit myself to a hospital.... I feel like I need to kill myself.”

In those last two weeks, his messages became frantic; some were almost incomprehensible, filled with typos and run-ons. He sounded crazy -- so much so that some people thought he was playing an Internet joke.

In one posting, Freund said his plans were to “Start a Terror Campaign To hurt those that have hurt me, My future ended some time ago.”

During a discourse on a firearms forum on somethingawful.com, described by the founder as a Mad magazine for the Internet, he detailed plans to get even with pranksters he said had terrorized his neighborhood and shot up his pumpkin last Halloween. He boasted that he spent about $5,000 preparing for “this Halloween shootout.”

The responses were harsh and occasionally cruel. One reply on Oct. 26 asked: “Wait wait, people are shooting pumpkins with BB guns, and you’re going to respond with ‘a bunch off 9mm rounds heading your way!’? Are you ... retarded?”

Another said: “I can imagine this mongoloid, sitting on his creaky porch, one strap on his overalls, leaping up and running to the defense of his precious 24-ounce pumpkin.”

Some told him he was no longer welcome. They asked him to leave and never come back.

“I think the craziest part is it was actually real,” said Rich Kyanka, 29, the webmaster of somethingawful.com.

“Obviously if you could go back in time and know this guy is serious and was mentally disturbed, you could do something about it.”

But if anybody tried, it came too late for Freund and Vernon Smith, 45, and his daughter Christina Smith, 22, the two neighbors he gunned down.

On Oct. 26, three days before his shooting rampage, Freund’s obnoxious comments got him banned from Kyanka’s website. The world that Freund had escaped to began slamming the door.

Even online, he was a social failure.

He died knowing it and feared no one would grieve for him. “No friends,” Freund wrote, “all enemies.”

Former classmate Lavranos wouldn’t describe himself as Freund’s friend either. He wishes now that he could.

“We’re all human beings trying to find our happiness,” Lavranos said.

“Here’s a guy ... who had it really hard and nobody made it any easier for him.”

News aide Sheena Tahilramani researched this story. Staff writers Mai Tran and Christine Hanley contributed.