Background
Mitchell Scott Johnson was born in Grand Meadow, Minnesota to Gretchen and Scott Johnson. When Mitchell was seven, his parents divorced and he and his brother moved with their mother to Jonesboro, Arkansas. His mother soon remarried to Terry Woodward, an inmate at the prison where she was a guard. Johnson had a good relationship with his stepfather and brother, and adults who remember him described him as being quiet and respectful. He was a former member of the Central Baptist Church youth choir, later joining the youth group at the Revival Tabernacle Church in Jonesboro.
Following the shooting, Johnson's attorney claimed that he had been sexually abused when he was 6 and 7 years old by a "family member of the day care where he was placed." One year prior to the shooting, 12-year-old Mitchell was charged with molesting a 3-year-old girl while visiting southern Minnesota with his family. However, the record of the case was expunged because of Mitchell's age.
Andrew Douglas Golden was born and raised in Jonesboro, Arkansas to Jacqueline and Dennis Golden. By all accounts, he came from a stable household, having a good relationship with both his parents, and regularly visiting his grandparents and great-grandmother. Both of his parents worked as postal workers, while his paternal grandfather, Douglas Golden, was a wildlife conservation officer in Jonesboro. He was raised to be familiar with firearms and their use at an early age; he was given his first firearm by his father when he was six years old.
Read more about this topic: Mitchell Johnson And Andrew Golden
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“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)