The Boy Who Loved Bombs

By Margot Hornblower/Springfield

Roses, carnations and lilies droop from the chain-link fence outside Thurston High School, and a makeshift plywood cross juts from the ground nearby. Beneath it, a hand-printed sign reads WILL WE EVER LEARN? But as the timber town of Springfield, Ore. (pop. 51,000), grieved last week, the lessons were far from obvious.

Add Springfield to the atlas of American juvenile violence. The map is dotted with names now searingly familiar: Pearl, Miss., where a 16-year-old killed his mother and fatally shot two classmates with a rifle in October 1997; West Paducah, Ky., where a 14-year-old killed three girls with a .22 semiautomatic Ruger in December 1997; Jonesboro, Ark., where an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old ambushed their school, killing five with handguns and rifles in March; and Edinboro, Pa., where a 14-year-old attacked people at his school dance, killing a science instructor with a .25-cal. handgun in April. In Springfield last Friday, at the Lane County courthouse, 15-year-old Kipland Phillip Kinkel, the son of two schoolteachers, slumped in his chair, his face blank and his eyes fixed downward as he faced four charges of aggravated murder.

The day before, in a shooting spree in the high school cafeteria, Kinkel, carrying a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols, had discharged 51 rounds of ammunition, fatally injuring two students and wounding 18 others. Afterward, when deputies drove to his family's gingerbread-trimmed A-frame in a wooded subdivision, they found his parents shot to death. After his arrest, a handcuffed Kinkel managed to get at a knife taped to his leg and lunge at an officer in a police interrogation room. He was subdued with pepper spray.

In the blue-collar bungalows of this lush valley 110 miles south of Portland, all the grownups could talk about was what nurturing, sensible parents Faith and Bill Kinkel had been. All the kids could talk about was how "Kip" Kinkel liked to torture animals, collect guns, build small pipe bombs and joke about killing people.

There are startling similarities with the previous cases: the kid in Pearl tortured animals too and, like Kinkel, went through a "Goth" phase, dressing in black and voicing grim imaginings; Kinkel had a fascination with guns to match that of the Jonesboro boys; like the young man charged in West Paducah, he seemed possessed of a death wish. When he was finally wrestled to the ground and disarmed, Kinkel pleaded with his captors, "Just shoot me." But if these parallels are merely coincidental, others are not easily dismissed. Once again the murderous drama features a troubled youth and a community in which obtaining guns is easy. Once again a high school becomes the stage, with classmates the unwitting cast. And once again there is a chilling disconnect, with adolescents shrugging off his threats of violence as idle chatter and harried school administrators ignoring the warning signs.

As Springfield students, clustering around the squat, gray-green high school building, look back, the signs seem all too clear. For his middle school yearbook, Kinkel was jokingly voted "most likely to start World War III." "He was really open about making bombs," confides T.J. Harty, 13. "Once he showed me a pipe bomb with a white fuse and said, 'I'm going to blow something up.'" Kip would brag about cutting up cats and squirrels and even claimed to have blown up a cow. Like many local teenagers, he hunted deer, with a rifle his father gave him last year. He seemed to take pleasure in killing. "Other kids say, 'I got a deer,'" recalls Lindsay Parr, 14. "But he was, 'Oh, yeah, I sliced it open.'"

On an Internet service account unearthed by the Portland Oregonian, Kinkel logs on as "Kipper" and, in what seems almost a parody of adolescent rebellion, lists his hobbies as "role-playing games, heavy-metal music, violent cartoons/TV, sugared cereal, throwing rocks at cars." His occupation: "Student, surfing the Web for info on how to build bombs." The result is nothing to laugh at; when police searched the family house, they found five homemade bombs (two with electronic timing devices) in a crawl space under the house, along with at least 15 other explosive devices, including a hand grenade, two 155-mm howitzer shell casings and literature about bombmaking, some of it from the Internet.

In school, few took Kinkel's menace seriously. He was known as a class clown, a little weird but with plenty of friends. Although small for his age, he played football as a backup linebacker and took karate lessons. And if classmates failed to report his darker side, teachers seemed equally nonchalant. He reportedly gave a presentation in speech class on how to build a pipe bomb, complete with illustrations. In a literature course, he was said to have read from a diary in which he mentioned plans to "kill everybody." Asked at a news conference whether officials should have reacted, Springfield school superintendent Jamon Kent noted that funding cuts have reduced the counselor-to-student ratio to roughly 1 to 700. '"What do kids see every day in the movies?" he asked. "If we detained every student who said, 'I'm going to kill someone,' we would have a large number of students detained."

To neighbors in the Shangri-la subdivision, Kip came across as polite, even friendly. "This was an all-American kid," says urologist Dennis Ellison. "He had a caring mother and father. This was not a redneck family." By all accounts, Bill Kinkel, 60, who retired from Thurston High after 30 years of teaching Spanish, and Faith, 57, who was head of the language department at Springfield High School, were beloved by their students and cherished by a broad swath of friends. They took Kip and his older sister Kristin, 21, a university student in Honolulu, on skiing and hiking trips and vacations in Europe. Bill Kinkel took his son to basketball games and, when Kip insisted on getting a rifle, to a safety range for instruction.

But to a few close friends, the father confided his "tremendous discipline problems" with Kip. "They tried to be nurturing," says retired lumber broker Tom Jacobson, a close friend. "But Kip seemed to inherit something that left him angry inside. He was out of control." The parents tried on-and-off therapy and even homeschooling for a period. Denny Sperry, another old friend, says Bill Kinkel seemed baffled by his son. "He felt he had to be strict or Kip would cross over the line," Sperry says. When the youth had a first brush with the law, after throwing rocks off a freeway bridge in Bend, Ore., the parents were exasperated. Recently, after Kip and some friends "t.p.-ed" a local house, wrapping it in toilet paper, he was reportedly grounded for the summer.

According to some reports, the parents had discovered Kip's secret gun collection, including a sawed-off shotgun that Kip kept in a box. Last Wednesday, Mickell Young, 15, walked out of second-period study hall with Kip. "How's it going?" Young asked. "Not that great," Young recalls Kip replying. "My mom took my guns away." When Young said, "Oh, that sucks," Kip said, "It's not a problem. Something will happen." A short while later, Kip and a friend were arrested. The friend had stolen a gun in a burglary and sold it to Kip, who had stashed it in his locker. The boys were suspended and hauled down to the police station. Kip was charged with possession of a firearm on school property and possession of stolen property, and released to his parents' custody.

Out of shame or in revenge, Kip shot his parents that night or the next morning, police say. Then, at about 7:30 a.m., he drove to school in the family's Ford Explorer. Some 400 of Thurston High School's 1,500 students were gathered in the cafeteria in the usual rituals of last-minute homework, coffee, doughnuts and socializing before classes began. Amid the cheery chaos, no one stopped Kinkel, dressed in cargo pants and a long khaki trench coat. As he walked calmly toward the door of the cafeteria, he began firing his .22 semiautomatic rifle, hitting two boys. Senior Mike Peebles, a lifeguard with first-aid training, rushed toward a boy who had been shot in the head. Rolling him over with the help of others, he held the boy's head so as to open the airway. "We said, 'Hey, you, don't leave us,'" Peebles recalls. "But his eyes were swollen shut, and his face was purple." The student, 16-year-old Ben Walker, later died in the hospital.

Without a word, Kinkel entered the cafeteria, spraying bullets. It was election day for student government, and candidates were moving from table to table, handing out candy and canvassing votes. Sadie Hayles, 16, had been chatting with Tony Case, a baseball player, when "Kip came galloping sideways across the room. Tony was saying, 'You guys should vote for A.J.' Then Kip pointed the gun toward me and Tony. Tony kinda dropped and let out this breath. He stumbled next to me. I was, like, 'This isn't funny.'"

Hayles remembers the expression on Kinkel's face. "It was calm but mad," she says. "It was, like, 'I don't care.'" Mikael Nickolauson, a taciturn 17-year-old, was sitting at a table doing his homework when he was shot and killed. Only the day before, he and his fiance had enlisted in the Oregon National Guard. Kinkel continued moving through the crowd, taking aim. As students were hit in their chest, arms, legs and head, their classmates scrambled under the tables or ran screaming for the exits. At one point, Kinkel raised his rifle to Ryan Crowley's face, but he had run out of bullets and the gun would not fire. Crowley, 14, jumped up and punched him. As Kinkel reached for one of two pistols he was carrying, Jacob Ryker, a wrestler who had been shot in the chest, tackled him. The two boys struggled. Kinkel pointed the gun at Ryker's face, but the wrestler knocked it out of Kinkel's hand and was shot again, in the finger. Other boys piled on the youth and held him until the police arrived.

The mourning in Springfield has not prevented second-guessing. Should the school have helped more? Should police have detained Kinkel when he was first caught with a gun? Officials insist they were following the law in releasing a juvenile with no criminal record to his parents. But Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco, asks, "If detention was not called for, where is the counseling? A child bringing a gun to school needs help." Now Kinkel will be tried as an adult, although under Oregon law he is too young to be subject to the death penalty.

Another question, perhaps unanswerable, is whether this and other recent incidents are part of a cycle in which each shooting spawns the next. Last week three sixth-grade boys were apprehended in St. Charles, Mo., for planning an attack on their school, apparently inspired by the Jonesboro incident. "In the past 10 years, we've seen a lot more real violence on television," says Aletha Huston, a professor of child development at the University of Texas at Austin. "It can feed the fantasies of disturbed adolescents."

"This is not Springfield's problem; it is a societal problem," Mayor Bill Morrisette told a gathering last week, addressing his town's new fear. "We've spent lots to build new lockups, and we've taken the money out of school systems. We can deal with troubled youth. We must seize the moment."

--With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/New York, Julie Grace/Chicago, Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta and Richard Woodbury/Springfield

With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/New York, Julie Grace/Chicago, Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta and Richard Woodbury/Springfield