By the time investigators stepped back and looked at the case as a whole, a clear pattern emerged — not of rage in the moment, but of obsession slowly collapsing under its own weight.

Erik Wong had existed on the fringes of David Ede’s life for months: a quiet classmate, a fellow nerdy friend, someone close enough to observe but never close enough to belong. During that same period, he developed an intense fixation on Brittany — a girl who represented everything he felt excluded from: admiration, confidence, visibility. She never knew him. That invisibility, more than rejection, became the wound he couldn’t reconcile.

Erik framed himself as Brittany’s silent defender. He resented Bruce openly, criticised anyone who showed interest in her, and cast David as the ultimate betrayal — not just because David was involved with her, but because he had access to a world Erik believed people like he and David could never enter. That sense of injustice seeped into everything Erik created. His film reviews grew darker, obsessed with punishment and revenge narratives. His artwork began to include fragmented symbols of devotion and loss. His podcast, once abstract, became unmistakably personal — a poetic monologue centred on a woman who never answered back. Even Brittany’s Shreddit alias, EvaDarling18, echoed through his language, mirrored in his fixation on the word “darling” as both worship and possession.

Knife Night offered Erik what he believed was his only chance to act. The anonymity of identical masks, the noise of the film, the predictable chaos of students leaving their seats — all of it created an environment where he could disappear into the crowd while doing something irreversible. He knew where David would sit. He knew the blind spots. More importantly, he knew that this was the moment where fantasy and reality could finally merge. His obsession didn’t make him detached or cold; it made him volatile. The ketchup residue later found on the knife — transferred from his glove after eating — became an unintentional signature of that instability: a messy, human mistake from someone who wasn’t empty, but overwhelmed.

In the end, Erik Wong didn’t kill out of calculated gain or psychopathic detachment. He killed because his internal narrative collapsed. The digital trails, the poetry, the reviews, the hidden usernames — they all told the same story long before the knife ever did. Erik wasn’t invisible anymore. He was seen at last, not as a protector or a misunderstood artist, but as the person who cracked when his imagined world could no longer survive contact with reality.

Congratulations, Detective Lights. You solved the case.