Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  Billy would call Nicholas a nigger. Nicholas would call Billy a honky or white cracker. Half the time Billy would be the first to start calling names, according to Billy; half the time Nicholas would start. “The whole thing was a joke,” Billy testified later. He said Nicholas laughed about it. Billy added, “It was nothing I thought serious.”

  But the relationship had a profoundly dark edge to it. At six foot one, 170 pounds, Billy was far taller and heavier than Nicholas. From time to time, at odd moments, Billy would shove and strike Nicholas. “There was some slapping,” Dr. Wallace testified at Nicholas’s sentencing hearing. “There was some sticking him with a probe in biology.… There was hitting in the stomach or in the belly area … repeated acts of this type.”

  Dr. Wallace found that Nicholas had suppressed his anger and fear to the point where, that Friday morning, he experienced a “disassociative” episode. “He kept so much within him, like a pressure cooker,” Dr. Wallace said. “It built and built and then exploded, and that was the accumulation of all of the repressed and suppressed emotions.”

  One week before Nicholas decided to go hunting for Billy, he and the other boy got into another war of words, this time during gym class. This time, however, Billy’s taunting seemed to wrench something loose inside Nicholas. The taunting and teasing may indeed have been a perverse game indulged in equally by both boys, but suddenly it became something far more sinister. As Nicholas left the class, he shouted to Billy, “I’m going to kill you.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “I can’t take him picking on me,” Nicholas told Adams. He had been afraid, he said, that Billy Cutter “would end up killing me. He always threatened me.… Like he would hit me in the back of my neck.”

  His mother interrupted, “You could have gone to the phone and called me at work.”

  “If he would have broke my neck,” Nicholas said, “my life would have been over. He kicked me. He hit me in the back of the neck.”

  “Not all people, bullies, can threaten you,” his mother said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “But, Mom, he actually hit me and I don’t want my neck—if he would have broke my neck—”

  “I’m trying to reason with you. You could have gone to the office and asked the people to call your mom. The other kids do. You could have called me.”

  “You only use that for when you are sick, Mom,” Nicholas protested. “You can’t use it for being threatened. The teachers are supposed to handle it, but they don’t do anything.”

  Nicholas seemed able to find solace consistently only in his pet birds, and in guns. Everyone at school knew of Nicholas’s passion for firearms. It served only to widen the gulf between him and his peers. At lunch while all the other boys were reading skateboard magazines, he’d thumb through Guns & Ammo. His locker was papered with glossy ads depicting powerful handguns. In conversation, according to a fellow student, Nicholas loved to discuss “which bullets had more firepower.” His classmates worried about Nicholas. One told a Norfolk newspaper, “All the kids said he was going to shoot someone.”

  Even the guns became fodder for taunts from Billy Cutter, and from other students. “They were always making fun of me,” Nicholas told Adams. “They always said stuff: ‘You know so much about guns. You never even shot a gun in your life.’ ”

  His mother worried most about her son on Fridays, the day, she believed, when passions kept in check all week were most prone to be released. “Nicholas,” she said. “Why would you take a gun today? You said that Billy hadn’t hit you since Wednesday, so why would you take a gun on Friday? I told you how Fridays are. You lay low on Friday, because everybody is upset.”

  When she arrived at headquarters to meet Adams and her son, she was consumed with grief and guilt over Nicholas’s attack on the school.

  “I will be up praying all night, all day tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to pray.”

  Nicholas, trying to rein in the day and get things normal again, abruptly shifted the conversation to matters of daily routine.

  “Are you going to work?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t want to go to work.”

  Genuinely perplexed, Nicholas asked, “Why not?”

  “Because that’s what got me, trying to work and earn, to try to keep my head above water and losing you.”

  “You can take my money out of the bank,” Nicholas offered.

  “Gaining the world,” his mother cried, “and losing my soul—”

  “It’s not losing me,” Nicholas pleaded. “It’s just people picking on me. That’s all it is. If God would have just stopped them—if I was nice enough and He would have made it so they were nice to me and didn’t hit me, everything would be fine. That’s as simple as it is, or He could have just made them keep their hands to theirselves. That’s very simple.”

  His mother, during a later hearing, described Nicholas as a “very obedient, quiet child.” She and Nicholas had moved to Norfolk from California in 1983, so that she could care for her ailing mother. Nicholas’s father, Clarence, stayed behind.

  Nicholas had always done poorly in school. In California, he failed the first grade. “At that time,” Dr. Wallace testified, “he was tested in the California school system and started in learning disability classes, which continued until the time the family left California.” By the time Dr. Wallace saw him, in April and May of 1989, Nicholas was sixteen and in the tenth grade. Dr. Wallace’s examination, however, found Nicholas lagging far behind his fellow sophomores. “On the wide-range achievement testing, he was reading at about a seventh-grade level,” Dr. Wallace testified. “But his spelling I believe was at a second- or third-grade level, and his math about a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”

  On arriving in Norfolk, Mrs. Elliot enrolled Nicholas in Kempsville Elementary School, a public school, but in September 1987 transferred him from the public system to Atlantic Shores. Even though Atlantic Shores would cost an additional $240 a month—hard to afford on her salary as a public-school nurse in the city of Chesapeake—she felt the school would be well worth the cost. She told the court, “The public schools seem to have a lot of problems, and he was a child who needed special help, and I felt in a Christian environment he would get that help, and I was advised he would.”

  Atlantic Shores brought no miracles, however. School remained a chore for Nicholas. Once, he overheard a female teacher and a secretary discussing his poor progress. “She said something about getting help in English that I am not good in,” he told Detective Adams. “She said, ‘I can’t believe this. He started off with a third-grade book … and he can’t even do that.’ ”

  “Did it make you mad?” Adams asked.

  “I can’t believe she was talking about me. She didn’t have to tell the whole world.”

  Adams asked Nicholas if he had overheard anything else, from other teachers.

  “I’ve heard the secretary say that ‘he’s just the worst kid in school.’ I heard her say that.”

  Adams then asked Nicholas which teachers in particular seemed to dislike him. He named a few, but the list omitted Karen Farley, a popular teacher who taught typing and other business skills, and whose own two children, Lora and Will, were also enrolled in the school.

  When Adams asked Nicholas whether he got along with Mrs. Farley, Nicholas nodded yes.

  This was clearly evident in a videotape Mrs. Farley made of her typing class earlier in the school year. The camera captured her voice as she simultaneously filmed the class and reminded her students to type without looking at the keys. At one point, as the typewriters clatter away, she asks the few students present if any other students are likely to show up that morning. She learns that two students, Nicholas and a girl named Shirley, have simply stepped out of the room for a moment, Nicholas for a drink of water. “Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Farley says. “I’ll have to get Nicholas. He’ll just die if I don’t get a picture of him.”

  And soon she does. Nicholas sits facing the camera, a big,
endearing smile on his face. He is wearing a white polo shirt, a black jacket, and light pants. He is small boned, lean, well groomed, his hair trimmed close. In this image, in the bright sun that floods the classroom, he is just a boy. Nothing in the smile suggests the stress and anger he is supposed to have felt—although by the time this videotape was made, he had already acquired his gun. The smile is one of brilliant delight.

  Nicholas did not hate Karen Farley. It is doubtful anyone could have. She spoke in a soft, measured way, with a Tidewater pace and cadence. She was devoted to the school. The morning of December 16, 1988, she returned a check the school had given her as payment for the extra time she had put into helping produce the school yearbook. She told Rev. Mr. Sweet the school needed the money more than she.

  She had begun her teaching career in 1970 at Booker T. Washington High School, an all-black school then on the verge of being integrated. The school had decided to integrate the faculty first, then the student body. She stayed for three years until the strains and dangers of teaching there and of trying to motivate a group of disinterested city kids wore her down. She resigned to become a first-grade teacher at the Faith Christian School, operated by Faith Baptist Church in Chesapeake. She left after one semester to have her first baby, Lora. A boy, Will, followed.

  Mrs. Farley stayed home with her children until 1978, when she returned to Faith. She continued teaching there until the school closed in 1987, at which point she joined the teaching staff at Atlantic Shores. A colleague from the Faith Christian School, Bonnie Lovelace, recalled a night when she and Mrs. Farley found themselves still at work long after everyone else had gone home.

  “Do you think anyone knows we’re here?” Mrs. Farley asked.

  Probably not, her friend answered.

  “Oh, well,” Mrs. Farley said. “Someday we’ll make headlines.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE LETHAL LANDSCAPE

  BEFORE ADVANCING ANY FURTHER, I SHOULD first make my bias clear, for bias more than any other force shapes debate about guns in this country. I am not opposed to guns, not even handguns, provided the owners acknowledge the monumental responsibility conferred by ownership; provided too that they invest the time necessary to become safe, proficient users and to store those guns in a cabinet strong enough to hold burglars and toddlers at bay. When I see rural road signs perforated with large-diameter bullet holes, I realize responsibility is not something universally practiced by America’s gun owners. I now ask the parents of my daughter’s playmates if they own guns and, if so, how they store them. If they store them loaded, even in a locked cabinet, my children do not play at their homes. Period.

  I can appreciate the lethal appeal of weapons and the fine craftsmanship evident in such premium handguns as the Colt Python and, yes, the Smith & Wesson Model 29 used by Dirty Harry. When I go to gun shows, as I do now in my capacity as a federally licensed firearms dealer, I am drawn, as are most of the rest of the browsers around me, to pick up the guns spread so invitingly across the exhibitors’ tables, especially the notorious weapons, the fully automatic AK-47s and MAC-11s, the Sten guns and pistol-grip Mossbergs. As a creature of the James Bond era, I am particularly fascinated by the silencers, which can be acquired by anyone with a clean record willing to pay the $200 federal transfer tax covering such devices. At gun shows, the urge to touch is strong and has caused many dealers to spread a soft black mesh over the guns on their tables. I confess to at least thinking the words “Make my day” or “Hasta la vista, baby” on my rounds, although I do not own any guns and, as a parent of two resourceful children age five and three, have no plans to buy any. I am content to let hunters hunt and can certainly appreciate the fun of getting out into the wilderness on a crisp autumn day in the company of one’s friends, although I confess the charm of “blooding,” or dumping a pail of deer viscera over the head of a novice hunter on the occasion of his very first kill, still eludes me.

  Where I run afoul of the tenets of the National Rifle Association is in my belief that people should be allowed to acquire guns only after going through a licensing process at least as rigorous as getting a driver’s license. As things stand now, a blind man can buy a gun. I hasten to add here that I mean no offense to the sightless. It just seems to me that anyone who buys a firearm ought first to be asked to prove he or she can see well enough to distinguish between a burglar and the paperboy. When I first mentioned this notion in print, I took it to be an unassailable position. I soon heard from two irate souls who accused me of stereotyping the blind. One of my critics wrote: “I know several blind persons (men and women) who have guns—for all the reasons anyone else might own them. These people represent the same cross section of sensitivity to the issue … and they demonstrate behavior as responsible as that of anyone else.” The author accused me of believing “that blindness should be prima facie disqualification for owning a gun.” Such a belief, he wrote, was “totally unsupportable on any basis other than unreasonable discrimination.”

  Nonetheless, I stand my ground.

  Where I further risk abrading the prickly sensibilities of the gun camp is in my belief that a federal firearms dealer’s license of the kind I now possess should be the hardest, most expensive professional license to acquire in America, instead of one of the easiest and cheapest. I cross the friend-foe line too in my belief that America is currently in the midst of a gun crisis that can no longer be considered just a manifestation of that good old frontier spirit but instead has become a costly global embarrassment.

  That a handgun crisis does exist should be well beyond dispute by now, given the bleak slag heap of statistics on gunshot death and injury now casting its shadow over our society. These statistics could kindle outrage in a stone but have failed, somehow, to shake any tears from America’s gun industry and the gun culture that supports it.

  Over the last two years firearms killed almost 70,000 Americans, more than the total of U.S. soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War. Every year handguns alone account for 22,000 deaths. In Los Angeles County, 8,050 people were killed or wounded in 1991, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times—thirteen times the number of U.S. forces killed in the Persian Gulf war. Every day, the handguns of America kill sixty-four people: twenty-five of the dead are victims of homicide; most of the rest shoot themselves. Handguns are used to terrorize countless others: over the next twenty-four hours, handgun-wielding assailants will rape 33 women, rob 575 people, and assault another 1,116.

  A relatively new phenomenon, originating in the mid-1980s, is the inclusion of young children on the list of urban gunshot homicides. In 1987 a team of researchers from the UCLA Medical Center and King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles found that until 1980, King/Drew hadn’t admitted a single child for gunshot wounds. From 1980 to 1987 the center admitted thirty-four. The study, published in the American Journal of Diseases of Children, included a macabre one-page table that listed the children’s injuries, the relationship of the shooter to the victim, and other data that sketched the true horror of gunshot wounds, a horror ordinarily spared us by reporters pressed for time and news space who concentrate on the dead and dismiss any other victims as simply being wounded. The children, ranging in age from one to nine, were shot in the head, neck, chest, leg, and rectum. A five-year-old lost a hand. A three-year-old, shot in the rectum, endured a colostomy. Other children on the list lost fingers, eyes, and brain tissue, with at least one—an eight-year-old girl—consigned to an institution most likely for the rest of her life. They were shot by grandfathers, robbers, cousins, snipers, friends, and in a particularly cruel twist, by gang members seeking to exact revenge on an elder sibling by killing a younger brother or sister.

  No one knows how many people in all incur nonfatal gunshot wounds each year. The most common estimate is that there are five nonfatal wounds for every fatality, or more than 150,000 injuries a year. No one knows for sure, however, because no federal entity keeps track. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible fo
r monitoring injuries from virtually every other consumer product, does not tally gunshot injuries because its founding legislation explicitly excluded firearms from its jurisdiction. One might assume this circumstance came to exist after a pitched battle between the Commission’s backers and the National Rifle Association. The story is less dramatic, but far more disappointing. The sponsors excluded guns because they feared such a battle, and the damage it might do to the rest of the proposed legislation. There was ample reason for this fear, however. The firearms industry and gun lobby have a vested interest in suppressing detailed information on gunshot injuries and accidents, especially when such numbers are linked to specific models of firearms. Accurate statistics would be invaluable to bereaved families seeking to win negligence suits against gun dealers, distributors, and manufacturers. A true tally of nonfatal injuries, moreover, would by itself change the contours of the national debate over guns by providing a more realistic picture of the widespread prevalence of gunshot injury. That Congress should carve an exception for firearms is all the more remarkable given that guns comprise the one class of mass-market product designed from the start to kill.

  The nation began arming itself in earnest in the roaring sixties amid student protests, Cold War terror, race riots, and assassinations. Over the most tumultuous years, from 1967 to 1968, the number of handguns annually made available for sale to civilians in the U.S. rose by 50 percent—by some 802,000 pistols and revolvers—to 2.4 million, the greatest single annual leap in American history. In 1960, there were 16 million handguns in America; ten years later, the total had risen to more than 27 million. As of 1989, according to a study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), there were 66.7 million handguns and 200 million firearms of all kinds in circulation in the United States.

  If these guns were controlled by a legion of sober adults, we might have far less to worry about. One study of eleven thousand teenagers in ten states found that 41 percent of the boys and 21 percent of the girls said they could obtain a handgun whenever they wished. A July 1993 poll of students in grades six through twelve conducted by Louis Harris for the Harvard School of Public Health found that 59 percent said they could get a handgun if they wanted one; 21 percent said they could get one within the hour.