Elise Thompson, 52, found her son James, 16, dead inside their home after he was shot by his 15-year-old brother Austin Thompson.
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“Detectives have so far not found any social media footprint for the younger Thompson boy, but are sifting through ‘written material’ taken from the family home in an attempt to make some sense of what happened.
One neighbor, who asked not to be named, recalled Austin and James kids who ‘played ball in the street with the rest of the neighborhood kids.’
He told DailyMail.com: ‘They were sporty and so the other kids liked playing with them. Austin was livelier than James, he was younger, I suppose.
‘If there was any issue of mental health problems then they kept it in house. I never saw or heard anything untoward.’
He described the family as ‘just a regular family.’
‘They went to work and school, and you’d see them coming home or to say good morning to,' he said. ‘They got all smart and went to church every morning. I don’t know if we’ll ever know what happened here.’
But another, who went to school with the brothers described them as ‘often distant’ to the point that he once asked James if the boys were related.
The former schoolmate at Knightdale High School where James was a junior said: ‘I was in the same year as James, but we didn’t have any classes together.
‘We’d get the bus together, sometimes they would sit together, sometimes they wouldn’t. They were kind of distant from each other to be brothers.
I even asked James once if they were related because they looked alike, and he said they weren’t.’
Another recalled the ‘baby-faced’ killer as
a strange kid who walked around at 4.30am with a book bag and helped his father, who was a handyman, with odd jobs.”
