by Gordon Kerr
After firing some rounds at the arriving police cars, Harris turned and entered the school. Meanwhile, realizing that the noise was more than just a prank, students began to flee from the school’s entrances or head upstairs from the cafeteria to the second floor. Others in classrooms were ordered to hide under their desks by teachers.
The killers were now just inside the school’s north-west doors, firing along the corridor. They then set off down the north hallway, firing their weapons and laughing. A 16- year-old named Stephanie Munson was shot in the ankle as she fled, and 47-year-old teacher Dave Sanders, trying desperately to evacuate students, was shot when he ran into them. He crawled into a science lab but bled to death. He had saved 100 students with his bravery.
Nowhere to Hide
Harris and Klebold arrived at the library, spending three minutes firing randomly into it and tossing pipe bombs in as students scrambled under tables. They entered and began firing as they walked towards the west windows. ‘Get up!’ screamed Harris, but no one moved. Then they ordered everyone wearing white hats to stand up; at Columbine, sports team members, particularly detested by Klebold and Harris, wore white hats. Again no one moved and Harris shouted ‘Fine. I’ll start shooting anyway!’ Sixteen-year-old Kyle Velasquez, who had curled up under a computer desk, was shot dead. They then turned their attention and their rifles to the police officers outside, firing at them through the windows. Turning inside again, Klebold wounded several more students before removing his trench coat. Harris fatally wounded 14-year-old Stephen Curnow and wounded 17-year-old Kacey Ruegsegger.
The killers were delighted when they discovered three of the school’s most popular athletes, two of whom – 18-year-old Isaiah Shoels and 16-year-old Matthew Kechter – they killed with shots to the chest. More random shots wounded several other students before Klebold walked up to the table under which 18-year-old Lauren Townsend was hiding. He shot her dead.
Sixteen-year-old John Tomlin tried to crawl away but was killed by multiple shots to the head and neck by Klebold. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Kelly Fleming was killed by Harris with a shot to the back.
It was 11:37 a.m. and shots still rang out in the library, dead and wounded students littering the floor. As they re-loaded, Harris and Klebold noticed John Savage, a student they knew. The unbelieving Savage asked Klebold what he was doing and the shooter replied, ‘Oh, just killing people’. He ordered Savage to get out; the terrified student escaping through the library’s main entrance.
At around 11:42 a.m., the gunmen left the library, making for the cafeteria again where they tried and failed to detonate the propane bomb they had placed there earlier. They wandered back upstairs, staring in at terrified students cowering in classrooms.
Back in the library, at 12:02 p.m., they took pot shots at the police officers outside and then at 12:08 p.m., as SWAT teams began to assemble outside, Eric Harris sat down on the library floor, his back against a bookcase. He put the barrel of his shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Death was instant. At the same time, Dylan Klebold fired his 9mm into his left temple. Their bodies were discovered in the library next to one another.
Red Lake Massacre
Year: 2005
Perpetrator: Jeff Weise
Murdered: 8
The Red Lake Indian Reservation in the remote town of Red Lake, Minnesota, close to the Canadian border, is home to around 10,000 members of the Red Lake Chippewa Tribe. It was there, in 1988, that Jeffrey James Weise was born into a family already blighted by problems and parental separations. His parents, 21-year-old Daryl Lussier, Jr. and 17-year-old Joanne Weise, residents of the reservation, never married and had split up even before Jeff was born. His mother was an abusive alcoholic who was forced by her parents to let her former partner look after the three month-old Jeff in Red Lake while she moved to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.
Out of Control
The family’s problems multiplied. In 1997 Jeff’s father killed himself with a bullet in the head after being involved in a stand-off with police in Red Lake and in 1999, his mother was brain-damaged as a result of a car crash in Minneapolis that killed her cousin. Both had been drinking heavily before the accident. She was admitted to a nursing home while Jeff was taken in by his paternal grandmother, Shelda Lussier, back in Red Lake.
Jeff Weise grew into a deeply troubled young man. At school, he was forced to repeat the eighth grade and he was enrolled on a special educational programme. Although often described as quiet at school, he got into fights, one of which was with another student, who he had called a ‘Communist’.
In May 2004, as his life seemed to be spiralling out of control and he was becoming increasingly introverted, he attempted suicide, slitting his wrist with a box opener. He decided not to go through with it, however, and sought medical help.
He was also the victim of bullying by his schoolmates, mainly due to his size and appearance. The black trench coat he wore all year round and the white make-up he plastered on his face did not help and he was nicknamed ‘Goth kid’.
The problems worsened when he began attending Red Lake Senior High and by 2004, he was being prescribed antidepressants. On one occasion that year, while students were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school, Weise extended his arm in a Nazi salute. He was sent for counselling where he talked about his admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Then, rumours began to circulate that someone was going to ‘shoot up’ the school on Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, which was also the date that the Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had chosen to enact their massacre. Jeff Weise was the number one suspect, although he always claimed to have been accused unfairly and nothing was ever proven. Nonetheless, he was finally expelled from the school in October 2004, being enrolled on a home-schooling programme for children on the reservation.
A Nazi Obsession
Meanwhile, Weise was very active on the Internet, posting regularly on the Neo-Nazi Libertarian National Socialist Green Party website under the aliases, ‘NativeNazi’ and ‘Todesangel’ (‘Angel of Death’). On forums, he posted statements such as ‘As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there is [sic] barely any full-blooded Natives left. Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run rampant...Under a National Socialist government, things for us would improve vastly…and that is why I am pro-Nazi.’ He also created violent and aggressive computer animations and was obsessed with drawing swastikas. An acquaintance described the drawings he made in his sketchbook as ‘disturbing’.
At around noon on Monday 21 March 2005, Weise took a .22-calibre pistol from his room and walked into the bedroom where his 58-year-old grandfather, Daryl Lussier Sr., was sleeping. Weise fired two bullets into his grandfather’s head and a further ten into his chest. Lussier was the owner of several guns through his work as a sergeant with the Red Lake Police Department. Weise grabbed his police-issue weapons – a .40 caliber Glock 23 pistol and a Remington 870 12 gauge pump-action shotgun. When Lussier’s girlfriend, 31-year-old Michelle Sigana, appeared on the stairs of the house carrying laundry, Weise killed her with two bullets to the head.
He jumped into his grandfather’s squad car which was parked outside the house, and drove it the few miles to his old school, arriving there at 2:45 p.m. At the main entrance to the school there was a metal detector, manned by two security guards. As Weise approached them, one of them, Derrick Brun, confronted him but Weise shot the unarmed man twice, killing him. The other guard fled.
Weise spotted a teacher, 62-year-old Neva Rogers, down the corridor and fired at her, but he was wide of the mark. She ran into a classroom and exclaimed, ‘Somebody’s shooting out there!’
Panic Ensues
It was the last lesson of the day and the students in Missy Dodds’ class had been restlessly eyeing their watches and the clock on the classroom’s front wall, eager to go home. Now, they were thrown into panic. D
odds quickly locked the door and switched off the lights, shouting at the students to hide at the back of the room. They frantically upended tables and threw themselves behind them. The room went silent as they waited.
They heard shots outside getting closer until suddenly the glass panel in the door was shattered by a blast from a shotgun. Weise climbed in through the two-foot-wide opening. He turned towards Neva Rogers and fired at her, hitting her in the head. She fell to the ground, already dead. Then, in homage to his heroes from Columbine who had reportedly asked the same question, he said, ‘Do you guys believe in God?’ One student answered ‘No’ but it made no difference. Weise let loose a volley of shots, killing Alicia White, Thurlene Stillday and Chanelle Rosebear who were all 15.
Suddenly, 16-year-old second-year student, Jeffrey May rushed at Weise, trying to stab him with a pencil he was carrying. Weise, however, was wearing his grandfather’s bulletproof vest and the pencil was deflected. Weise levelled his gun and fired into Jeff May’s face, the bullet entering his right cheek, fracturing his jaw and lodging in his neck, close to his vertebrae. His courageous intervention had given the 12 other students enough time to escape. After the shooting, May was airlifted to MeritCare Hospital, 105 miles (169km) away in Fargo, North Dakota. He suffered a stroke that immobilized his left side and needed surgery to remove the bullet. He remained in hospital for months but recovered from his injuries.
A few minutes after tussling with Jeffrey May, at 2:52 p.m., Weise was back at the main entrance where he shot dead another two students and wounded two others. By this time, however, police officers had arrived at the school. For about four minutes there was a gunfight during which Weise was hit in the arm and the abdomen. He staggered into an empty classroom, slumped against a wall, raised the barrel of his grandfather’s shotgun to his mouth and pulled the trigger. His was the ninth death on that dreadful day.
Amish School Shooting
Year: 2006
Perpetrator: Charles Carl Roberts IV
Murdered: 5
‘Paradise Lost’ was the headline used by one newspaper to sum up the reaction of the world to the news that five little girls had been killed in a gun attack on a US school. The girls had been shot dead, execution style, in the rural Amish hamlet of Nickel Mines, in the Bart Township of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was the third deadly shooting in the United States that week, but surely one of the most shocking examples of this deadly phenomenon.
It had begun on the morning of October 2, 2006, a perfectly normal day, it had seemed, at the tiny one-room Amish schoolhouse. At around 10:25 a.m., a truck pulled up outside the building and a man, Charles Carl Roberts IV, wearing a baseball cap and wire-rimmed spectacles, appeared at the door. He told 20-year-old teacher, Emma Mae Zook, that he had lost a clevis, a metal shackle, on the road outside and asked if any of the children or teachers had seen it. Although she was slightly wary of the man – he seemed edgy and avoided eye contact – Emma Zook offered to interrupt the lesson to allow the children to go outside to help him search.
Roberts, however, simply turned round, walked to his truck and, to the surprise of the watching children and teachers, returned with a 9mm handgun. The horror was about to begin.
A Family Man
Born in Lancaster County in 1973, Roberts was the son of a police officer. Educated at home, he earned a diploma through a home-schooling association and by 2006, he was employed by Northwest Food Products Transportation. He lived in a mobile home in Bart Township with his wife, Marie, to whom he had been married for nine years, and his two sons and a daughter. Another daughter, born to the couple a year after their marriage, had died soon after birth.
Outwardly, Roberts seemed like an ordinary husband and father; caring and considerate. Normally devoted to his wife and children, it was later reported that he had become introverted and tense in the weeks leading up to the incident. He was also reported to have suddenly become very jovial the week before, as if, some surmised, he had made the decision to carry out the act and it had lifted a great weight off his shoulders.
Earlier that morning, Roberts and Marie had walked their children to the bus stop to put them on the bus to school in Bart Township. By 8:45 a.m., he was back home while his wife went into town. He wrote four suicide notes that she found on her return at around 11 a.m. To Marie he wrote, ‘I don’t know how you put up with me all those years. I am not worthy of you, you are the perfect wife you deserve so much better. We had so many good memories together as well as the tragedy with Elise. It changed my life forever I haven’t been the same since it affected me in a way I never felt possible. I am filled with so much hate, hate toward myself, hate towards God and unimaginable emptiness. It seems like every time we do something fun I think about how Elise wasn’t here to share it with us and I go right back to anger.’
The Nightmare Begins
Roberts ordered the boys in the class to help him unload the truck. He had brought with him the 9 mm handgun, a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-06 bolt-action rifle, about 600 rounds of ammunition, cans of black powder, a stun gun, two knives, a change of clothes, sexual lubricant, and a box containing a hammer, hacksaw, pliers, wire, screws, bolts and tape. He started to barricade the doors with planks of wood, but as he did so, Emma Zoo, her mother and some other family members who were visiting the school that day, succeeded in escaping through another schoolhouse door. Furious, Roberts sent a boy, Peterli Fischer after them to tell them to come back. Peterli’s nine-year-old sister, Emma, seeing her brother run off, innocently followed him. She could only speak Pennsylvanian German; and when Roberts screamed at her to stay where she was or she would be shot, she probably did not understand. It was a misunderstanding that would save her life.
The fugitives from the school ran to a nearby farm and telephoned the police. Meanwhile, Roberts ordered the remaining adults and the 15 boys out of the schoolhouse, leaving him with ten girl hostages whom he ordered to line up in front of the blackboard.
By 10:42 a.m., the first police cars began to arrive and secure a perimeter around the building. Meanwhile, Roberts was binding the arms and legs of his hostages with plastic ties. Seeing some troopers beginning to edge closer to the schoolhouse, he screamed at them to move back or he would start shooting the girls. The officers retreated and tried to communicate with him using their PA systems. He paid them no heed and was, in fact, engaged in a conversation with two of the girls, the sisters of Peterli and Emma Fischer, the children who had just left the schoolhouse. Astonishingly, the girls asked him to shoot them first and to spare the lives of their friends.
Suddenly, the crowd that was gathering outside heard a scream from inside the building. A group of officers who had succeeded in getting round to the back of the schoolhouse requested permission to approach the windows, but it was not granted, the authorities worried that if the gunman caught sight of them a bloodbath would ensue. But at 11:07 a.m., when gunshots rang out from inside the schoolhouse, the officers rushed to the doors and windows. The volley of shots ended abruptly. As they later realized, Roberts had shot himself.
A Sickening Scene
He had shot several of the girls in the back of the head at point-blank range. Naomi Rose Ebersol, aged seven, Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, aged 13, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, aged 12, died at the scene while two other girls – seven-year-old Lena Zook Miller and eight-year-old Mary Liz Miller – would die in hospital the following day. The other five girls were wounded but survived their injuries.
Why did Charles Carl Roberts suddenly become a killer of little girls? We will probably never know the complete truth, but, while he was holding the girls hostage, he phoned his wife and recounted a story from 20 years previously. He told her that when he was 12, he had sexually molested two young female cousins and that recently he had been dreaming of doing it again. Oddly, however, when police questioned the girls he had mentioned, they could remember nothing of the incident to which he was referring.
A new school was built in a differe
nt location and the West Nickel Mines schoolhouse was demolished. The scene of such unimaginable horror was returned to quiet grazing land.
The Virginia Tech Massacre
Year: 2007
Perpetrator: Seung-Hui Cho
Murdered: 32
He sought to emulate his heroes, the Columbine High School murderers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. He succeeded. By the end of his rampage through the corridors of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, 23-year-old South Korean immigrant, Seung-Hui Cho, had amassed a death toll more than twice the size of theirs’.
An Erratic Loner
Cho’s family had long been concerned about the erratic behaviour of their only son. He had always found it impossible to make friends and rarely spoke, leading them to suspect that he might be suffering from autism. His behaviour brought bullying from classmates that only forced him to retreat even deeper inside himself. He was diagnosed with depression and a social anxiety disorder known as selective mutism that explained his lack of speech. He went into therapy but gave up on it very quickly.
At Virginia Tech, where he went to study English in 2003, his behaviour got worse. He would sign into class as ‘Question Mark’ and even used that name when introduced to people. His classmates began to call him the ‘Question Mark Kid’. He was thrown out of one class for photographing female students’ legs under their desks and his creative work became increasingly violent and obscene. Department Head, Lucinda Roy, thought that working on a one-to-one basis with him might help, but did not feel secure when she was with him, devising a secret signal that would let a colleague know if Cho started behaving inappropriately.
His attendance of classes fell away and he stopped doing any work. When he was not seated on a rocking chair staring emptily out the window, he could be seen typing relentlessly at the keys of his laptop. Once he rode his bike in endless circles around a dormitory car park, lost in thought. The song Shine by post-grunge band ‘Collective Soul’, played on a loop in his room, some of its lyrics – ‘Teach me how to speak/Teach me how to share/Teach me where to go’ – scrawled on his wall.
