Impulse: What drove Elgin teen Angel Facio to stab his teacher
It was an impulse that, three years later, he still can't completely explain. Angel Facio stabbed one of his favorite teachers, nearly taking her life. Even now, sitting shackled in a downstate maximum security prison, his dark eyes searching through a bulletproof pane of glass, Facio can remember each one of his actions that crisp January day in 2008.
He doesn't have to be reminded of the isolation he felt back home in Elgin. That remains.
He sits with that feeling alone in a cell now for 23 hours a day.
It's the first time he's spoken publicly about that violent day and about Carolyn Gilbert, the woman he attacked with a knife.
It was Friday morning, the last day of first-semester finals, a three-day weekend in sight.
At his family's home on Jefferson Street in Elgin, 16-year-old Facio was standing at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of Cheerios, he thinks.
He looked down at the drawer, the one that held all the utensils.
“I opened the drawer. I made sure my parents weren't looking, and I went in and grabbed the knife,” he said.
A steak knife, with a serrated edge.
Months of family problems and feelings of rage had built up inside him.
He couldn't talk to his parents about it. While he'd been taught school counselors were there to talk to, he couldn't do that either, he says. It wasn't cool.
So, Facio slipped the knife in his backpack to take with him to Elgin High School.
Facio says it felt like something had snapped inside him. He had an urge to kill someone. Fast.
But he didn't know who, or when.
Facio got through the shortened school day, taking his exams without acting on his urge. After his tests, he was going to walk to his bus to head home.
But then he changed course.
He decided instead to walk down the first-floor hallway to Carolyn Gilbert's classroom.
Gilbert, a family and consumer science teacher, had taught Facio the year before when he was a freshman in child development class.
The 50-year-old woman had a quiet friendliness about her, sparkling blue eyes and a gentle southern drawl.
“Ms. Gilbert,” as he called her, “didn't do nothin' to me, wasn't mean,” Facio said. He'd earned a B in her class, and earlier, she said she'd thought of him as a “sweet, chubby kid.”
In fact, Facio had visited just the day before to ask about Gilbert's winter vacation.
“I hadn't seen her for that semester yet,” he said. “I was like, ‘So, how you been?'”
The day of the attack, two other students were there talking to Gilbert at 11 a.m. when Facio arrived.
So he waited.
“As soon as they left, I was talking to her, asking how she was doing. Talking about how the next semester might be.”
Then, two teachers came asking for a key.
Still, Facio stuck around.
As they spoke with Gilbert, Facio looked out the classroom windows and saw his bus leave.
It was then that he saw his opening.
As Gilbert was talking to her colleagues, he says, he went into his backpack and grabbed the knife, sliding it up the right sleeve of his sweater, waiting for their exit.
“That's when she went back to doing her paperwork,” Facio said. “Her back was toward me. I ran up behind her and I was going to try to slit her throat.”
Facio tells this story from a private interview room at Lawrence Correctional Center in downstate Sumner, 5½ hours away from Elgin. Metal cuffs clang against one another as he gestures.
His wrists punch the air as he describes the attack.
His shoulders are slumped and his head hangs downward, but his coal black eyes look straight ahead, intently, through a mop of dark curls.
It's the first time the 19-year-old has had a visitor at the high-security prison in six months. He was transferred last October after problems with another inmate at Logan, a medium-security facility in Lincoln. Because of another incident, he's since been transferred yet again, to Pinckneyville.
In the more than three years since he's been jailed, he's only been able to communicate with people on the outside through handwritten letters.
He's lost track of what his parents, brothers and friends are up to since the attack.
“They've left me clueless in here,” he said.
Among the other inmates, he says, he's often asked if he's the “kid that stabbed the teacher.”
“I say, ‘Yeah, I stabbed my teacher that day.'”
Why did he do it?
“I'm still tryin' to figure that out,” Facio said.
He just knows for certain that it was a chaotic, dismal time in his life.
“I've told people, and they say that's just normal, everybody goes through that,” Facio said. “But it didn't feel usual to me.”
Coming Tuesday: Angel Facio was feeling increasingly strange, bottling everything up inside. He talks of the isolation and frustration that led him to snap.