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Friday, March 16, 2001

"It's Only Me"

BY NANCY GIBBS

"It's only me," said the boy with the gun, as he surrendered to sheriffs in the boys' bathroom. If only that were true. In the 48 hours after Charles Andrew Williams shot up his high school in Santee, Calif., 16 more kids in California were arrested or detained for making threats or taking guns to school. An 11-year-old in Higley, Ariz., threatened to kill the girl he liked and the boy who had kissed her. He told police that he got the idea from news reports and was only kidding. Another 11-year-old, in Phoenix was arrested after threatening to shoot a teacher's tape player and then the teacher. He apparently did not like the teacher's "obnoxious music." Elizabeth Bush, the eighth-grader in Williamsport, Pa., who dreamed of becoming either a human-rights activist or a nun, shot the head cheerleader in the cafeteria. "No one thought I would go through with this," she yelled as she fired her .22.

It's not only Andy Williams.

A reasonable person who read the papers or watched the news last week might conclude that murderous violence could happen anywhere, at any time, in any school in America. The one thing that nearly every school shooting has in common is the chorus of parents declaring that "I never thought it could happen here." That's not because they know the statistics--that youth violence is dropping, that schools are getting safer, that fewer than 1% of teen gun-related deaths occur in schools--it's because many of us float our children off to school in a bubble, grateful to live in a wholesome town--"We are America," Santee Mayor Randy Voepel declared--and unwilling to admit that the danger could follow us no matter where we go.

Don't look for a pattern; by the time you find it, you will find a counterargument wrapped around it. Is it the absence of parents, the presence of guns, the cruelty of the culture, the culture of cruelty? School shootings are like plane crashes, rare but riveting for the primitive fears they evoke. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the executioners of Columbine, gave that fear a face: cold-blooded, calculating, seeking immortality, dancing with the devil. They gave our kids the awful shorthand: You're not going to do a Columbine? Williams' friends asked. They even frisked him that morning before school.

In a spasm of fear and frustration, the adults fire back at a moving target. Last week politicians went after the tormentors: in Washington State the senate passed a law requiring school officials to investigate--and notify parents about--incidents of bullying on their campuses. Police went after negligent parents: in Indianapolis, Calvin and Shawnee Sistrunk were charged with felony neglect after their six-year-old daughter arrived at kindergarten with a loaded handgun. She wanted to show it to her friends. The culture cracked down on itself: on Friday night KGTV, an ABC affiliate in San Diego, televised the memorial service for Williams' victims; then, for roughly 35 minutes, it dropped its regular programming and showed only a text message urging parents to turn off the TV and spend time talking to their kids.

Those are the conversations that matter most. Given the agony that Williams inflicted on his victims, it is awkward even to discuss the agony he was in. Some friends came to his defense, talked about how badly he had been treated, how the bullies stole his skateboard, stole even the shoes off his feet. Was there, this time, a measure of pity for a lost boy, who seemed to have had nowhere to go, who wore a silver necklace with the word MOUSE on it, who called at least three of his friends' mothers Mom, who in the end seemed to want nothing more than to be taken seriously and to be taken, at last, into somebody's custody?

One night recently police came upon Williams in the park with several huge bottles of beer. "They just told me to go home," he told friends later. His buddies heard him Saturday night, when he got drunk at a bonfire, talk about taking a gun to school and shooting the place up. "I'll show you one day," he said. When it was over, when the police came to take him away, wrapping him in that oversize white jumpsuit, no one heard him say anything about being sorry. And no one heard him ask for anyone, not even his mom or dad.

-- Peg (pegmcleod@mediaone.net), March 16, 2001

Answers

A 13 year old boy, from my city, threatened to bomb the middle school he attends.

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Bomb scare forces evacuation in Lowell

By KATHLEEN DEELY and JACK MINCH Sun Staff

LOWELL -- A 13-year-old boy who allegedly threatened to leave school and retrieve a bomb triggered a massive police investigation that closed down a Centralville block for several hours yesterday afternoon.

Police did not find a bomb, but did discover flammable materials inside the boy's apartment at 290 W. Sixth St., said Deputy Police Superintendent Kenneth E. Lavallee.

"I would say the item was deliberately mixed," Lavallee said. "I wouldn't say it was a weapon. ... I would say the person who mixed this knew it could burn."

State police took the material back to the fire marshal's office in Stow, said Trooper Elkin Arredondo.

Nobody was injured by the potentially explosive materials, Lavallee said.

The investigation, which began around 2 p.m., displaced scores of Centralville residents from their homes for several hours. Police went door-to-door to evacuate residents and nearby businesses.

A 16-year-old girl at the apartment that police searched identified the boy as her younger brother. She said he learned how to make explosive devices on the Internet.

The boy tried to take what he called a bomb to school on Monday, but was stopped by their mother, said the girl.

"It looked like a bomb and that's what he said it was and tried to take it to school, but my mom stopped him," she said. "There were no signs he was going to do anything until Monday."

The girl did not know if her mother got rid of the device, but said her brother had been working secretively in his room for the past couple of nights.

Yesterday he got angry with a teacher at Robinson Middle School and threatened to leave and come back with weapons, she said.

"He told them he was going to go home and get the bombs and a gun and kill a teacher," the girl said. She did not know which teacher may have upset her brother.

Standing outside the front door to her family's apartment after police left, she said her brother's room had been thoroughly searched and his computer confiscated.

She did not know why her brother would have materials for bomb making.

He is on medication an "has a bad temper if he can't get stuff he wants," the girl said.

Police did not arrest the boy and would not release his name. The Sun is not identifying the boy because he is a juvenile and has not been named a suspect in a crime.

"We are looking at all angles," said Lavallee.

The investigation began when a school resource officer working at a city middle school learned that a pupil "had made threats about hurting others with an explosive device," according to the police statement.

Officials did not identify the chemicals or say what kind of container was used to store them.

"It was more a flammable liquid than an explosive device," said Deputy Fire Chief Robert Flynn.

For four hours yesterday afternoon, police cordoned off West Sixth Street from the Beaulieu Street block to Lakeview Avenue as residents took shelter from the late-winter chill at the Centralville Social Club.

"They didn't tell us nothing," said Matthew Sigman, 19, who lives across the hall from the boy's second-floor apartment. "They came, pounded on the door, and said we're evacuating."

A state police bomb squad entered the building and took an X-ray of the suspicious devices in the boy's apartment. Moments later they re- entered in protective gear and determined the devices as two mixtures of flammable material, Lavallee said. state police removed the material around 5:30 p.m.

The atmosphere was frenzied as the Police Department's mobile operations unit, police and fire crews, a Trinity ambulance and Keyspan gas workers waited at the scene.

Police would not say who tipped them off to the devices. The building, owned by Gail Booth, has six apartment units and two stores, Mill City Auto and a sports card shop.

Eleven-year-old Brian Sullivan was home alone watching television in the building when police knocked on the door and told him to get out.

"I wasn't scared. I just want to get back in my house," Sullivan said as he shivered outside.

Another neighbor, 11-year-old Crystal Sullivan, who also lives in the building, repeated the story that the boy had threatened to bring a bomb into the Robinson Middle School yesterday.

Sigman's stepmother, Suzanne Sigman, was scared by the allegations of bomb making and appreciated the police response.

"They seem like sweet little kids," she said. "(The allegations) could be a very dangerous thing. Someone could have gotten hurt bad if it had gone off."

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The boy was obviously a bomb himself. The mother and sister knew what he was up to...I'm just shaking my head in disbelief.

-- Peg (pegmcleod@mediaone.net), March 16, 2001.