Did you speak with members of the Columbus police department in your research for the book?

Yes. I spoke with the homicide detectives, ambulance crews; I spoke with the families of the victims and the mother of Nathan Gale as well as speaking to tons of fans. I probably corresponded with close to 200 people while researching the book.

After doing all this research do you think that there was anything that could have been done to prevent this from happening?

Well hindsight is always twenty-twenty, but as far as culpability goes I would put the culpability squarely on the shoulders of Gale. I’m not aware of any precedent to his actions, I never found any instance of somebody actually getting onstage and killing a performer. I think the biggest misconception is that there was something that the venue missed. I think the security at Alrosa Villa that night, and this is my opinion, was no better or no worse than the security at other clubs that I’d seen. We’re not talking about somebody getting drunk and starting a fight or smoking weed. We’re talking about an armed intruder coming into a club with a mission to kill people, and I don’t know of a single venue anywhere in the United States that has a protocol to deal with that.

Do you think that the level of aggression present in the type of music that Damageplan and other bands of the same ilk are playing had anything to do with the tragedy?

It’s very easy to take a negative, narrow view of heavy metal based on what happened. What the book is going to very clearly explain is that the killer was not a fan, and he was not enamored with Pantera or Dimebag for the reasons people think he was. Looking beyond that it is absolutely inspiring and amazing that so many people stayed around and tried to help. When the police showed up there were 250 people milling around the parking lot waiting to give statements. One of the detectives, Bill Gillette, said that in his nine and a half years of working homicides he had never seen that kind of cooperation.