Attacker in campus knife rampage known as quiet student

Rick Jervis | USATODAY

Dylan Quick is a quiet, 20-year-old student with a hearing impairment who worked at the campus library and loves books. Colleagues and faculty, however, didn't know Quick also harbored a grisly fantasy since grade school: stabbing people to death.

On Tuesday, Quick acted out his fantasy, running through the halls of Lone Star College's CyFair campus with a utility knife and lashing at strangers' faces, chests and throats before being tackled to the ground by students. None of his 15 victims were killed.

Police on Wednesday said they were still trying to determine what triggered the stabbing spree and what other motivations drove Quick's bloody rampage through campus. This much is known: Quick had two blades with him at school on Tuesday – the utility knife he used in the attacks and a precision knife he kept in his backpack during the ordeal.

"Yesterday's incident was planned for quite some time," Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia told reporters on Wednesday. He added, "We still don't know what the impetus for this incident was."

The first calls came to campus police at 11:13 a.m., and Quick was subdued four minutes later, campus President Audre Levy said. In that short span, students reported the suspect dashing from building to building, slashing and stabbing at passersby, seemingly at random.

Quick had worked at the campus' library for about a year, where he was well-regarded by co-workers, Levy said. Faculty who knew him said he was a good student who never gave trouble, she said.

"There were no signs he was a problem student," Levy said. "The library had fond things to say about him. Many are surprised he was the individual."

But trouble lurked beneath the pleasant façade of the library worker. After his arrest Tuesday, Quick confessed to investigators he had fantasized about stabbing people since age 8, Garcia said. His office also received an e-mail tip that Quick had revealed his stabbing fantasy in online chat rooms prior to the attacks. Late Tuesday, deputies searched the home Quick shared with his parents and confiscated information relevant to the attack, Garcia said.

Surveillance video at the college clearly shows Quick on his rampage, he said. Prosecutors at a probable cause court Tuesday night noted that a "bloody knife tip" had been removed from the chest of one of the victims.

"The defendant gave a videotaped confession, admitting he stabbed complainants multiple times with a … knife because of his fantasy to kill people," a prosecutor told the court, KHOU-TV reported.

But the person with a fantasy to stab and kill was far different from the shy bookworm known around campus. An online profile of Quick on the college's website posted earlier this month said he was active in the book club and listed his favorite book as The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux, according to Click2Houston.com, which reviewed the story before it was removed from the college's website Tuesday evening.

According to the profile, Quick was born completely deaf and received a cochlear implant when he was 7. He was home schooled and his mom began involving him in the college's library teen activities when he was 12, the profile said. According to the story, Quick said "book clubs were a great foundation for college, a starting point from which to evolve."

The profile said Quick planned to pursue a career in accounting and wanted to transfer to the University of Houston after getting an associate's degree from Lone Star College.

Instead, authorities on Wednesday charged him with three counts of aggravated assault for Tuesday's attack at the college.

Stabbing rampages of strangers in a public place are a rare occurrence and one typically reserved for family homicides inside a home. Since 2006, 11 of the 13 mass stabbings where four or more people were killed involved slain family members or acquaintances, according to a USA TODAY database of mass killings. The other two were robberies.

Acting out violent fantasies, such as those Quick allegedly confessed to investigators, is also rare in mass attacks – and more troubling, said Louis Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Most mass attacks are "reactionary," where assailants react to something that occurred to them, such as being fired from a job or bullied at school, he said.

Crimes based on violent fantasies are often sexually motivated, such as sexual assaults or murders involving sexual activity, not knife attacks on strangers, Schlesinger said.

"If it's something that's been in him for many years, it's a really bad sign," he said. "It's a much deeper problem."

Contributing: Doug Stanglin