Voices From The Cell

By Timothy Roche With Reporting By Anne Berryman/Conyers, Edward Barnes/Edinboro, Stephen Barnes/Jonesboro, Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque and Springfield, Broward Liston/West Palm Beach, Michelle McCalope/Clifton, Natalie Phillips/Seward, David Schwartz/Phoenix

"Not too bad," that's what the boy killer murmured to his lawyer when the verdict came in. He was right that it could have been worse. The Florida jury might have gone for murder one but instead convicted Nathaniel Brazill, 14, of murder in the second degree for pointing a gun between the eyes of his favorite teacher and pulling the trigger a year ago. "I'm O.K.," he mouthed to his mother Polly, seated in the courtroom's second row. Then he gave a little wave to a young cousin, sitting nearby.

If Brazill didn't at that instant grasp the grim future that awaits him, it probably won't take him long. Next month the judge will mete out a sentence that could mean a lifetime in prison. And if Brazill needs a clearer picture of what's in store for him, the prison life of other school shooters will give him an idea. These young gunmen, at the moment of their wrathful outbursts, were often filled with a sense of potency and triumph or at least relief that whatever or whoever was troubling them had been exorcised. But those sensations generally prove fleeting. As they settle into the monotony and isolation of prison life, these boys tend to experience feelings of profound regret, remorse and loss as they come to terms with what they have done to their victims and what they have done to themselves.

For eight weeks, TIME delved into the lives of 12 convicted school shooters--who had terrified their classmates and periodically traumatized the nation since 1997. Among them, they fired 135 shots, killing 21 people and wounding 62. If they were not suffering overtly from mental illness before their crimes, many clearly are now, with varying degrees of treatment available. Psychologists say they are likely to be suicidal for much of their lives and suffer repeated flashbacks to the single day when everything changed, when they killed beloved teachers or gunned down schoolmates they did not know, when they went from good sons to the young terrorists among us.

Within the system and in their own personal circles, these boys engender a wide range of reactions. Prosecutors label many of them unredeemable sociopaths; defenders say that with education and counseling, they can be restored. Even loved ones take varying positions. Some offer support, while others abandon their own.

To this day, a few of the boys refuse to explain themselves. And it is fair to ask why we would want to hear from any of them anyway or have sympathy for what they have to say. But many have developed, sometimes with the help of psychologists, a better understanding of what led them to murderous fury--an understanding that could help others avoid such atrocities in the future. Almost all the shooters were expressing rage, either against a particular person for a particular affront or, more often, against a whole cohort of bullying classmates. Some of their stories confirm the notion that school shootings are a contagion, that the perpetrators are imitating the gross acts of carnage they've seen reported in other places. On the day that he brought to school a .25-cal. semiautomatic handgun that he had stolen from his grandfather's desk drawer, Brazill boasted to a classmate that he would be "all over the news."

If these kids felt empowered by the notorious shooters who came before them, however, at least some--the most self-aware of the group--now want to set a new example for students tempted to perpetuate the cycle. Don't look to Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the most notorious of the school avengers, this group is saying. Those boys killed themselves and never had to face the aftermath of their rampage. Instead, this group says, look to us, who are living the postscript, and don't let it happen to you. Even Brazill, in an interview with Time six weeks before his conviction, had come that far. Asked what he would like to tell the student groups who sometimes tour his jail, he replied, "Don't pick up a gun. You don't know what's going to happen."

THE PRICE

Evan Ramsey knows. Four years ago, he brought a pump-action shotgun to his Alaska high school and opened up, killing the principal and one student. Now he is serving a 210-year term in a maximum-security prison in the Alaskan mountains. Every night, before crashing in the tiny cell he shares with a fellow murderer, he mops the prison floors, a job that earns him $21 a month, just enough to buy soap, shampoo and stationery, which the Spring Creek Correctional Center does not supply for free. His face pasty white from lack of sun, Ramsey told TIME his biggest complaint is the total absence of privacy. The light is always on in his cell, and the toilet sits in the open at the end of his bunk.

A school shooter with one of the longest sentences, Ramsey has encountered some of the harder edges of prison life. He spent six months in solitary confinement after beating a fellow inmate with a sock packed with batteries when the prisoner reneged on a gambling debt of four candy bars. Ramsey has heard that an uncle of the student he killed is in the same prison and that the man "wants to do a bunch of different things to me."

Ramsey says he committed his rampage because he was sick of being picked on in school, where he was nicknamed "Screech," after the geeky character in the TV show Saved by the Bell. "Nobody liked me, and I could never understand why," he says. "It was pretty bad then, but it's a lot worse now." Sometimes Ramsey will be starkly reminded of the shooting, for instance, when he recently received papers on a civil suit his victims' families have filed against the school district. "I sit there, and I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish I didn't do what I did," he says. "I wish I would have known the things that I know now."

Among Ramsey's wishes is that one of the two friends to whom he confided his lethal plan would have turned him in. Last week a blue-ribbon panel that studied the Columbine massacre criticized police, school officials and the killers' parents for not intervening to stop Klebold and Harris, after being given signs of their murderous intent. "That would have been one of the best things a person could have done," says Ramsey of his own case. Instead, Ramsey's buddies egged him on.

Maintaining relationships from within prison walls is a trial. Some of these kids have devoted parents and friends. A number have attracted admirers. Ramsey has a pen-pal fiance. Kip Kinkel, who is serving a 112-year term for killing his parents and then two students in his Oregon high school in 1998, has received money in the mail from strangers. Charles (Andy) Williams, who is in prison on charges of killing two students in his Santee, Calif., school in March, gets more letters than he can answer--as many as 40 a week, according to his lawyer. There are five different clubs on Yahoo dedicated to him, as well as a dozen homemade websites. But the real, deepest ties these kids have to their communities are often shredded. Ramsey's family visits only once a year. At one point, they went nine months without even calling.

The father of Mitchell Johnson, who with buddy Andrew Golden killed four kids and a teacher when they attacked their Jonesboro, Ark., school with an arsenal of weapons in 1998, has severed contact with him. Mitchell told his mother that his father said to him on the phone, "You're the reason I quit praying" and hung up. After T.J. Solomon of Conyers, Ga., shot and wounded six classmates with a sawed-off shotgun in 1999, his mother demanded to know why he hadn't blasted himself. "You were going to kill yourself, I understand. How did that not happen?" she asked him just after his arrest. "I don't understand how you took innocent children, but you were too afraid to do anything to you. That really has me puzzled. You didn't think twice about doing it to them."

Luke Woodham, who killed two classmates in Pearl, Miss., in 1997 after beating and stabbing his mother to death, gets very few visitors. The school friends of Michael Carneal, who killed three classmates in West Paducah, Ky., in 1997, largely shun him. From jail, Brazill continued to write love letters to Dinora Rosales, one of the girls he wanted to see when the teacher he killed, Barry Grunow, refused to allow Brazill inside the classroom because he had been suspended for throwing water balloons. But the 14-year-old Rosales, feeling threatened, turned the mash notes over to the police.

THE REMORSE

After Jacob Davis used a magnum bolt-action rifle to mow down his girlfriend's ex-lover at his Tennessee high school in 1998, he dropped down beside the bleeding body. A friend came over and said to Davis, "Man, you just flushed your life down the toilet." Davis replied, "Yes, but it's been fun." The fun didn't last. Today Davis is serving a 52-year term at a medium-security correctional facility in Clifton, Tenn. Before the shooting, he had received an academic scholarship to study computer science at Mississippi State University. Instead, he takes a prison course to learn the low-tech skill of computer refurbishment. Dressed in prison blues, Davis spoke to TIME while seated at a small wooden table in a visitor's room, with a security guard standing watch in the corner.

"When you got someone else's blood on your hands, it's not an easy thing to deal with," Davis says, looking downward. "I will suffer my own personal hell the rest of my life. There's nothing you can do to make it go away. I'm truly remorseful for what happened. He's gone," Davis says of Nick Creson, the 18-year-old boy he killed, "and I can't do anything to change it and bring him back."

Davis is plagued by nightmares and insomnia, as are many of the other gunmen. And when he awakens each day, he often confronts anew the calamitous effects of his act on Creson's family and his own. "It's kind of hard not to when you wake up every morning in a prison cell," he says. If Johnson didn't understand at the time the consequences of his murders, he does now, says his mother Gretchen Woodard. "He's older. He knows now the permanence of it," she says. "If words from him would not hurt those families, he'd write them."

For many of the young shooters, news of another school rampage sets off bouts of emotional turmoil. Carneal became "seriously depressed" after the Columbine attack, according to Kentucky juvenile-justice commissioner Ralph Kelly. "He really took a setback from that. He felt a lot of responsibility for that happening." Kinkel also blamed himself for Columbine. On hearing the news, Kinkel told a psychologist, "I flipped out, started blaming myself." According to a friend, the March school shooting in Santee also disturbed Kinkel. Victor Cordova, incarcerated in a juvenile-treatment facility in New Mexico for shooting a schoolmate in the head, was so upset by a TV report on the Santee case that he asked to be released from the requirement that residents watch the evening news each day. Brazill, the night of his conviction, couldn't stomach even an episode of Law & Order that featured a school shooting; he retreated from the common room to his cell.

Woodham, whom many investigators believe started the chain of recent school shootings with his killing spree in 1997, is haunted by that burden. "If there's any way that I can, I would like to help stop these shootings," he wrote in a letter to Time. Davis has the same idea and a plan. He's writing a book about his experiences. "I want somebody to learn from the mistakes I've gone through," he says. "I want to be a part of changing all this crap that's going on."

One way to do that is to try to understand the triggers for these crimes. Davis says for him the proximate cause was jealous rage. After his girlfriend, Tonya Bishop, confided that she had had sex with Creson, Davis became increasingly obsessed over a period of three months with hatred for Creson. Davis' stepmother Phyllis thought this was "just like any other" teen-romance drama and assumed that "just like everybody else, he'd get over it." He didn't. He was besotted with Bishop but didn't trust her. He started sleeping just a few hours a night. His grades fell from A's to D's and F's. One day, after a glaring match with Creson in a hallway, Davis recalls, "it was just like something clicked in my head. I had been going downhill for so long. I got stuck thinking about all the pain I'd suffered. And I couldn't put all that out of my head." He went home, got his hunting rifle and ambushed Creson in the school parking lot.

With the benefit of antidepressant medication, Davis now believes that mental illness was at the root of his behavior. The psychiatrists who examined him agree, having determined that at the time of the shooting, Davis was suffering from serious depression with psychotic features. Eight of the other 11 convicted kids that TIME reviewed have had some sort of mental disorder diagnosed since their crimes, mostly depression but also personality disorders and schizophrenia or its precursors. Six of the kids have had behavior-altering psychotropic drugs prescribed.

The presence of mental illness may help explain why some kids snap when faced with the usual torments of adolescence and others don't. Of course, some kids consider their vexations extraordinary. Carneal, who at the time of his crime was a freshman who got picked on for his small stature and quiet manner, told a psychiatrist that he felt going to prison would be better than continuing to endure the bullying in school.

Psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow, director of the Erik H. Erikson Institute for Education and Research in Stockbridge, Mass., notes that a significant subgroup of the school shooters consists of kids who come from relatively affluent families, who are academically above average, if not gifted, and who rarely have the qualities expected of violent offenders--such as a history of substance abuse or mental disorder. In Twemlow's view, this is no coincidence. "Bullying is more common in affluent schools probably than in the low-income schools," he says. It is spurred, he believes, by "the dynamics that come out of our typical hard-nosed, competitive" middle class.

Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist who has interviewed numerous school shooters, says they tend to have in common "some degree of depression, considerable anger, access to weapons that they aren't ready to have, and a role model salient in their memory. So far," he told a TIME reporter, "it's always been a mass murderer who has been given ample coverage in your magazine." Describing his pre-rampage mind-set, Solomon once wrote, "I felt the next thing left to release my anger would be through violence. I had just gotten the idea from the shooting at Columbine High School on April 20." Solomon opened fire precisely one month after that date. Seth Trickey, who in 1999 shot and wounded five classmates in Fort Gibson, Okla., told a psychiatrist he had become preoccupied with previous school shooters and wondered how he would hold up in their shoes. Woodham told the cops who took his confession, "I guess everyone is going to remember me now."

THE REHABILITATION

Though Woodham has since expressed remorse, prison authorities aren't especially interested in his redemption. Woodham receives no schooling or counseling. "We don't make any pretense about trying to rehabilitate someone who is going to spend their natural life in prison," says Robert Johnson, commissioner of Mississippi's Department of Corrections. "What's the use?"

Most of the rest of the boys are working toward high school diplomas. A couple hope to move on to college correspondence courses. Seven of the shooters are offered regular psychological counseling, ranging from daily to weekly sessions. However, some lawyers and relatives have begun to question the treatment and challenge the qualifications of prison psychologists, who increasingly are overburdened and underfunded as overall inmate populations grow.

In Pennsylvania, the mother of Andrew Wurst, who opened fire on his middle-school dance in 1998, killing a teacher, has battled prison officials to upgrade her son's therapy. She has been rebuffed. So Wurst remains totally delusional, according to psychiatrist Robert Sadoff, who examined him. Sadoff wrote that Wurst believes "he is real but everyone else is unreal." That includes the teacher he killed, John Gilette, who in Wurst's mind "was already dead or unreal." Wurst told Sadoff that, excepting himself, everyone has been programmed by the government by means of "time tablets" that control people's thoughts.

There are other kids lost in their own worlds. Trickey, according to a report of the Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs, "does not show any remorse for his crime and has little insight into his problems." Father John Kiernan, who used to visit Solomon regularly, says he seemed unaware of the consequences of his rampage. But in 1999, Solomon carved an X across his chest, apparently with a fingernail, and last January he attempted suicide by swallowing 22 pills of the antidepressant Elavil that he had bought from another inmate.

Many years will pass before most of the shooters come up for possible release. Three of them expect never to be paroled. Others will be men of 50 or even 70 before they have that option. But a handful of these boys, sentenced in more lenient states, will be released during the next five to seven years. Trickey's continued detention is reviewed every six months, and he will certainly go free by the time he turns 19. Cordova gets out at age 21. So do Johnson and Golden.

For his part, Solomon is in for 40 years. He's likely to be haunted by nightmares for much of that duration. "I've been having dreams and many flashbacks, and most recently, I have been hearing screams," he wrote after his arrest. "I know that it's just in my mind, [but] it's like I'm really hearing them, as if someone were screaming in my face. Usually when it's time to go to sleep and everything is quiet is when my thoughts get worst, because it's all I can hear." Of a dream, he said, "I see myself standing there, shooting me." In his sleep, he is his own victim. And when he wakes up, he is too.

--With reporting by Anne Berryman/Conyers, Edward Barnes/Edinboro, Stephen Barnes/Jonesboro, Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque and Springfield, Broward Liston/West Palm Beach, Michelle McCalope/Clifton, Natalie Phillips/Seward, David Schwartz/Phoenix, David Thigpen/Paducah and Rod Walton/Fort Gibson