Girlhoods Interrupted

By Jodie Morse

Elizabeth Catherine Bush was no Charles Andrew Williams. She didn't shoplift booze or boast of pulling a Columbine. Bush was a quiet eighth-grader who attended Bishop Neumann High School in Williamsport, Pa., a cozy Roman Catholic school that holds spaghetti suppers and sock hops. A stickler for safety, Bush lectured the school bus driver for speeding through railroad crossings. She tacked posters of Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. to her bedroom walls and affixed pictures of the Columbine victims to the bulletin board over her desk. Her parents say she wanted to be a human-rights activist--or a nun.

Yet just minutes after emerging from a Lenten Mass Wednesday morning honoring the San Diego school-shooting victims, Bush walked into the cafeteria armed with a .22-cal. pistol, one of the 12 guns her father owned, and shot classmate Kimberly Marchese in the shoulder. Bush then placed the gun barrel against her own temple and announced that she wanted to kill herself. School staff and another student talked Bush out of pulling the trigger, and Marchese spent just one evening in the hospital. But if the outcome was far less bloody than what had taken place two days earlier at Santana High School, the case is equally distressing for another reason: Bush, the first female school shooter in nearly three decades, belies much of the profile we have come to associate with--and use to help intercept--the potential kid killers among us.

Those who know Bush paint a complex portrait of her. She idolized pacifists like King but studied martial arts and had once practiced her shot at the firing range with her father. She made fast friends with the outcasts at school yet wanted nothing more than to be accepted by Marchese, the cheerleading captain who ran with the cool crowd. "She has a kind heart," says her mother Catherine. "In school she made friends with a girl in a wheelchair and helped her out. She would always put herself between those who were being picked on" and their tormentors. But Bush just as readily recoiled when those taunts were turned on her and students started making fun of her appearance. Bush's parents claim the ridicule was so severe at the public junior high Bush attended before Bishop Neumann that students, on occasion, actually pelted her with stones. Bush became depressed, started skipping classes and even resorted to self-mutilation by cutting her arms.

Her parents hoped to give Bush a new start when they transferred her to the much smaller Bishop Neumann, where the student-to-teacher ratio is just 13 to 1. But the teasing there was just as bad. According to Bush's lawyer George Lepley, the trouble peaked in recent weeks when Bush attempted to make peace with Marchese, who, Lepley says, was tormenting her. Bush sent Marchese e-mails and confided her troubles to her. Lepley claims that Marchese then passed those secrets along to other students. "She was betrayed," says Lepley, "and her intimate feelings were revealed for others to mock." While Marchese has acknowledged that the two girls have spoken--about matters as personal as God--her father denies his daughter harassed Bush or broke a confidence.

What made Bush snap remains even more of a mystery to her parents and friends. One, Jenn Oglesby, 14, spent almost every weekend shopping and watching videos with Bush. "She seemed really happy," says Oglesby, who spoke to Bush on the phone the night before the shooting. "We talked about school, but she didn't mention any problems." Before Bush excused herself for dinner, the two made plans to hang out over the weekend. Instead, as her friend sat in a juvenile-detention center charged with attempted homicide, Oglesby stopped by Bush's home last Friday night to console her parents and to drop off a gift she knew her friend would appreciate: earrings in the shape of two gold crosses.

--By Jodie Morse. Reported by Ed Barnes and Elaine Rivera/Williamsport

With reporting by Ed Barnes and Elaine Rivera/Williamsport