12 迷：真假采访（3）

What did you know about Adnan and his relationship with Hae Min Lee?

I think that was his first real girlfriend, and I think that’s why his reaction was so strong. I don’t think it meant that much to her. I don’t think that’s wrong, it’s high school, you know. She’s a high school girl, ‘Oh, he’s cute, Oh, whatever’—things fizzle out. I think there was another dude or something, or whatever. I really didn’t know much about their relationship, if they hung out, where they hung out, when they hung out.

How do you remember Hae?

For our age group, she was really independent. I believe she had a job also. But she seemed to be more mature, like she was two, three, four years older than us. Like she was a junior in college. The way she moved and went about her day. She just seemed like an older chick who happened to be in high school. She also wasn’t on the magnet side of the demographic.

When did he first talk to you about hurting her?

It was at least a week before she died, when he found out she was either cheating on him or leaving him. We were in the car, we were riding, smoking. He just started opening up. It’s in the evening after school, we never hung out in the morning. Just normal conversation like, ‘I think she’s fucking around. I’m gonna kill that bitch, man.’ Nothing real pointed or anything, not like, ‘I know his name,’ or ‘I caught her.’ But I just thought he was just shooting off like everyone else shoots off when they’re mad at their girlfriend. He never said anything like, ‘Hey, what gauge gun should I use?’ or ‘How many minutes am I supposed to hold somebody under the water for?’ or, ‘Is there a statute of limitation on murder?’ I thought he was just blowing off steam and bullshitting. I thought at worst he’d throw a rock through her window or something. Normal high school ‘I’m mad at her and I’ll scratch her car’ sort of stuff.

I had never known anybody who had killed anybody else, so there’s no way I could have known.

But look, if we start speculating what he was thinking that far ahead – I don’t know. He might really have just been bullshitting at the time. I don’t know what happened, what occurred between them that day. I don’t know if she said something he couldn’t handle, and he went off the edge or if he had been seriously speculating about it. I don’t feel comfortable drawing conclusions like that. You can’t start drawing conclusions like that.

A big part of the ‘Serial’ podcast is to speculate on Adnan’s motive. What do you think?

I don’t necessarily know if he meant to kill Hae before he did it or if it was a sudden moment thing, but looking at his life, from what I saw, he seemed to be far out of his realm when it came to Hae leaving him.

From the way he carried himself, at least, it looked like he had never lost anything before. And it was really hard for him to deal with being on the losing end. In that situation, he was the loser. And people were starting to find out he was a loser, ‘Oh, you and Hae aren’t together anymore. She got a new boyfriend?’ And he didn’t know how to deal with that.

And the other thing about it, I mean, there looked like there was real hurt and pain. What else could motivate you to choke the life out of someone you cared about? He just couldn’t come to grips with those feelings. However he ended up doing it—whether it was premeditated, an involuntary reaction at that point in time—he just couldn’t come to grips with being a loser and failing. He failed; he lost the girl.

I know that he came from a very strict religious background and that he was uneasy with some of the things he was doing. He was having a hard enough time with that itself. There were some big forces going on that didn’t have anything to do with Hae.

But, like I said, I don’t know how to come up with this story about how Adnan did it, why he did it, what he was thinking, how he was thinking, and why he was thinking that. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a cop. It’s not my job to figure that out.