LOL I think we're saying the same thing about the self-talk. :rocker:
As far as the social awkwardness goes, maybe his peers didn't get along with him because he's strange, not because he has a social impairment due to Asperger syndrome. I'm hesitant to toss around the "autism spectrum disorder" phrase in this situation because there is just so little information, and as I mentioned in my first post on the topic, I think it does a disservice to people with diagnosed ASDs to slap an "autism" label on anyone who presents as socially atypical or doesn't have many friends. I think doing so leads people to think that "autistic" means "weird and friendless" and "weird and friendless" means "autistic," you know? Since you work with children who have autism spectrum disorders, you probably understand how much social difficulty they have even without being automatically lumped in with everyone who has ever done anything beyond the boundaries of what is socially acceptable, as this suspect has.
I wouldn't be surprised if the suspect in this case were just antisocial (in the clinical sense, not the idiomatic sense) or strange rather than autistic.
(Anyway, obviously I like talking about this kind of thing so please forgive my wordiness!)