He was a scrawny freshman who played linebacker, loved to hunt, had a desk in Room 51 and looked for trouble. His friends voted him Most Likely to Start World War III.
On a drizzly Thursday morning, a calm Kipland P. Kinkel allegedly walked into crowded Thurston High School cafeteria and opened fire less than 24 hours after being suspended for having a gun at the school.
One student was killed and 19 wounded, 4 critically, in the rampage. The slain student was identified as Mikael Nickolauson, 17, who had just joined the Oregon National Guard. Two more bodies were found later at Kinkel’s home. Katie Kinkel, his grandmother, confirmed that the bodies were his parents.
“He was just walking and shooting the gun, just like when you’re shooting a deer,” said student Sarah Myrick. “He was holding it right by his eye so he could aim.” By other accounts, the shooter–clad in a tan trench coat and a baseball cap–ran through the cafeteria, shooting from the hip.
The bursts of gunfire shattered windows as students screamed, scrambled for cover and whispered prayers. Four more were hurt in the panic to flee.
The scene of carnage and grief was no less shocking for being the fifth multiple school shooting in the country since last fall. “It’s everywhere,” said Joyce Miller, whose daughter, Elizabeth, is a junior at the school. “There are time bombs all over the place.”
Friends and classmates said Kinkel was angry at his father because he had been grounded for hanging toilet paper in trees.
As part of the punishment, William Kinkel, a retired schoolteacher, had removed his son’s firearms from his gun chest, said 15-year-old freshman William Michael Ford, a friend of Kinkel. But not all of them.
“He let him keep one,” Ford said. “I think it was for him to shoot bats. The bats were getting into their attic and messing stuff up in there.”
Police say the younger Kinkel parked a few blocks away from the school Thursday morning and walked inside the cafeteria carrying a .22-caliber rifle and two handguns. The cafeteria was humming with a breakfast gathering of 400 students, awaiting candidates to deliver stump speeches prior to an election for student council.
At 8 a.m., when the gunman burst through the doors of the cafeteria and a sound like firecrackers filled the air, Myrick thought it was an election-day gag. As she stood talking with friends, she suddenly realized the firecrackers were gunshots.
Elizabeth Millern, waiting for the bell to sound for her junior literature class, dropped her backpack on the floor, scrambled halfway under a table and began to pray.
She saw a girl hobble by, holding her leg. “She looked like she was in pain,” Miller said. “I was just praying I would be safe and the shooting would stop.”
It continued for 20 seconds–an eternity to Miller, lying with her hands over her head.
“It was like firecrackers, just `puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh.’ “
When the shooting stopped, Miller bolted from under the table and out through a school hallway, leaving her backpack in the cafeteria.
“I’m still scared,” she said hours later, her voice shaky. “I don’t want to go back to school. I don’t think I’ll go back for a while.”
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As the percussion of gunfire faded, the shooter tried to reload. But star wrestler Jake Ryker, ignoring an abdominal gunshot wound, tackled the boy and grabbed the gun.
The terror at Thurston High was over. But the questions about school violence began anew.
“Why are we seeing a spate of them right now? I think it’s due to the copycat scenario,” said Kim Dell’Angela, a clinical and pediatric psychologist at Loyola University Chicago.
“I suspect what’s going on now with these murders in the schools is that you have already distressed adolescents who are very vulnerable and who experience a precipitating stress that puts them over the edge. And they see that this way of becoming important is popular right now,” Dell’Angela said.
Thursday’s shooting, along with some of the recent killings in other schools, mark a shift in the nature of school violence, some experts said, with incidents escalating beyond one-on-one disputes into movie-style scenes of mass mayhem.
“We’ve transitioned from single-victim shootings to multiple shootings, indiscriminate shootings of large numbers of people who had little or nothing to do with the events that led to the problem,” said Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center in Westlake Village, Calif.
“There’s more firepower, more victims, and a greater sense of callousness. It’s a real change, a disturbing one.”
In the last year, there have been four multiple shootings, including the tragedies in West Paducah, Ky., in which a troubled teen allegedly sprayed gunfire into a high school prayer circle, killing three students and wounding five others, and the incident in Pearl, Miss., in which a student allegedly killed two schoolmates, his mother and injured nine others.
Perhaps the most horrifying incident took place in Jonesboro, Ark., where an 11-year old boy and his 13-year-old friend are charged with fatally shooting four students and a teacher and wounding 10 others March 24.
Some of the real-life scenes of semiautomatic weapons blasting into a crowd of schoolchildren so strongly resemble cinematic images that many experts are convinced that the young killers are not making up the scenarios but acting out a repertoire learned on screen.
“Kids aren’t born violent, it’s learned behavior,” Stephens said. “This is some idea that kids have absorbed about how it’s done.”
Friends say Kinkel bragged about building bombs and torturing animals and routinely cursed his coaches on the football team.
But, Ford said, Kinkel–a skinny, seldom-used linebacker who stood 5 feet 4 inches–had a lot of friends and served as an inspiration of sorts for his teammates.
“He was a pretty crazy guy. The way he played, he got people fired up–yelling, bumping helmets and shoulder pads.
“He talked about stuff, he bragged that he was going to kill people,” Ford said. “But no one ever took him seriously.”
Ford said he talked to Kinkel on Wednesday morning about a test they had scheduled in Spanish class in Room 51. “He didn’t sound like he was going to kill anybody or anything,” Ford said. “He just sounded normal.”
But Kinkel was suspended before he could take the test.
“In my lit’ class and in science, he was always constantly getting in trouble and getting sent out into the hallway,” said Rachel Miller, Elizabeth’s younger sister. “He’d say cuss words. He’d cuss at the students or say rude things to them.”
Called upon to read from his journal in literature class, Kinkel would describe “sick things” such as wanting to shoot and kill people, Rachel Miller said. But nobody believed he was capable of such a thing, she said.
“He was really a nice kid,” she said. “He was always nice to me or talked to me and said `Hi’ in the halls and stuff.”
Later, students lingered in the drizzle outside the olive-green school building, talking and consoling one another. Some carried flowers.
More than 300 people, including many students, attended a memorial service Thursday night at Springfield Lutheran Church. Those assembled sang “Amazing Grace” and other hymns and read from scripture.
“Today is not the kind of plan I would have had for Ascension Day,” said the church’s pastor, Rev. Zane Wilson.
“In this day, we are reminded how we need each other to console each other, to hold each other. Our children have been shot in our schools. We ask how could it happen in Springfield. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that question.”