Friends say father, son often in conflict
One day last spring, Joseph Nee walked into his girlfriend's kitchen, sat down, and began bawling.
This was a boy unafraid of a fight, a boy who once smirked as he wore a swastika-adorned shirt through the halls of Marshfield High School. But that day, said Danielle Conant, he could talk, though tears, about only one thing: his father.
"Joe was constantly crying about his dad, about how he wished he loved him," she said. "He had lots and lots of issues with his dad."
As the younger Nee was charged yesterday with conspiring with another student in a murderous plot at the high school, a complicated and layered portrait of the young man emerged. Students at Marshfield High described the 18-year-old senior as belligerent and defiantly antisocial, frequently threatening violence, as a means, they said, of attracting attention.
Close friends said he did occasionally get into fights, though they said the most serious altercations occurred when he came to the defense of a gay student being harassed by other students, and when he stepped in to prevent school bullies from cramming another student into a locker.
But interviews with Nee's friends suggest that his relationship with his father, Thomas J. Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association and one of Boston's power brokers, appears to be at the center of his troubles.
Of his son, the elder Nee said: "There are challenges in parenting between a teenage son and his father. There is in every household in America. There's a code of conduct and we expect him to live up to it."
Joseph Nee's troubles at home last spring and summer emerged as his father was locked in intense negotiations with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino over a police contract, talks that threatened to mar the Democratic National Convention.
Conant, who dated Joseph Nee for two months beginning in May, said he often spoke of his father's anger toward him and poured his anguish into a journal. Nee also scrutinized news accounts of the Columbine High School massacre, fascinated more by the school politics and cliques it exposed than by the weaponry used by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, friends said.
Nee appears to have had a complicated relationship with the other student charged by police in the school massacre plot, Tobin Kerns. Conant, 16, a junior at South Shore Vocational Technical High School, said the two youths were "like brothers," with Nee wielding considerable influence over the introverted Kerns.
Citing the close relationship between the two, Marshfield students yesterday expressed little surprise that police took Nee into custody -- many said they had immediately assumed he was behind the alleged plot when Kerns was arrested.
Student Halley Dunham, 16, said she assumed Nee had avoided arrest because of his father's position as head of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, saying most of her classmates laughed when Marshfield police described Kerns as the plot's mastermind. She said: "I believe Joe would do it, a hell of a lot more than I think Toby would. . . . [Joe] would just always do stupid things."
Marshfield students recalled when Nee wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the date Klebold and Harris struck at Columbine, with the phrase "Remember the
"He walked around here like he's [angry] all the time. Joe's the type of guy that if he had a choice to be loved or hated, he would choose hate. It was just like he enjoyed the attention," said Brian Bartlett, 17.
Nee often wore black, said friends, and loved skateboarding and playing video games. "Tony Hawk's Underground," a skating game, and "The Matrix," based on the hit films, were favorites, according to Marshfield High students. He had attended the Outward Bound school on Thompson's Island in Boston before enrolling as a freshman at Marshfield High, where he played freshman football. Nee listened to a wide range of aggressive music, ranging from the punk of Green Day to obscure German heavy-metal bands to industrial dance bands -- one of them, KMFDM, a favorite.
When Conant asked him about his thoughts on the war in Iraq, Nee appeared uninterested, she said. But Nee talked incessantly about his father. "He could be very angry when his father's name came up," she said.
Nee lived with the Kerns family after his father kicked him out for drinking, according to Thomas Nee. He then moved in with Conant 3 weeks later, in June, living there a month and a half, Conant said.
But Conant, based on numerous conversations with Joseph Nee, said the father-son relationship was tumultuous, with anger and resentment on both sides. Nee, the third of nine children, often expressed feelings of neglect, she said.
Thomas Nee said yesterday: "I love him. I'm going to stand by him." He said his son had "aced his MCAS" exams, and was considering military service in Iraq, applying to Emerson College to study journalism or communications, or spending a year skateboarding at a beach.
Conant said Nee lied often and was an attention seeker, recalling the swastika shirt in particular. But she also said Nee sympathized with other marginalized students at school, forming the NBK club with Kerns and two others -- it stands for Natural Born Killers, an allusion to the movie and the Columbine killers, who also used the acronym -- to protect bullied kids. She said he would fight only to defend others.
"I think he related, in some ways, to being picked on and stuff. That's why he was always trying to act tough," said Conant. "He wasn't, but he liked to think he was."
Toby Kerns, however, described a more sinister transformation in Nee, beginning in December 2003, when, according to a written statement given to the Globe from Kerns, Nee first mentioned the plot to him.
"Over the next few months, it became very clear that Joe had a morbid fascination with the Columbine high school shooting," Kerns wrote.
Although Ben Kerns has said his son was treated at a psychiatric hospital for problems stemming from psychological abuse suffered when he was younger, Toby Kerns gave a different version in his statement.
After Nee was kicked out of his house, he lived with Kerns, who wrote that "his hatred caused me to have a mental breakdown."
Kerns was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in June, and Nee went to live with Conant for another several weeks, before patching things up with his father, and moving back home.
Globe staff writers Kathleen Burge, Shelley Murphy, Suzanne Smalley, Emily Sweeney, and Patricia Wen contributed to this story.
