Give a Boy a Gun (14 page)

After Michael Carneal killed three and wounded five in a Paducah, Kentucky, high school, several magazines and newspapers reported that he had imitated a computer-game pattern by quickly shifting from one target to the next.

We came around the side of the house. You had to go through this gate because Dustin has a pool in his backyard. Brendan and I were going in. Sam and Deirdre were coming out. The thing is it was just, like, bad timing. Sam got to the gate first. He pushed it open and just kept going. Like he wasn't even going to bother holding it for Deirdre. So Brendan caught the gate and held it for her. Some people say he bowed or touched her on the shoulder or something. I didn't see it. All I saw was Sam come out of nowhere and get Brendan from behind.

— Ryan Clancy

I was in the kitchen and I heard the shouting.
I came out, and Sam had Brendan on the ground and was smashing him like a wild animal. There had to be six guys standing around watching. Any one of them could have pulled Sam off, but they didn't. I had to get Sam in a choke hold and practically suffocate him to get him to stop.

— Dustin Williams

Have you ever heard the sound of a fist on bone? It would make you sick. One thing I know for certain, Sam was definitely going for Brendan's face. I swear if I'd had a gun that night, I would have shot Sam myself.

— Ryan Clancy

I went home that night and told my mom there was something really wrong with these kids.

—Chelsea Baker

It wasn't like that in elementary school. I mean, even when two kids got into a fight, they didn't try to hurt each other so badly. Kids in elementary school are way more open to teachers' influence than when they get to middle school and high school. Why can't they teach something in elementary school that could help kids learn how to deal with one another without it always becoming violent?

— Emily Kirsch

It was reported that Carneal wounded or killed eight people with eight bullets, despite the fact that he'd never fired a gun before. This was not the case. It was later discovered that Carneal had learned to shoot at a summer camp run by a well-known national youth organization.

I heard about it in the teachers' room first thing Monday morning. A little later I saw Brendan in the hall. His nose was swollen, and his lip was fat and split, and his eye was black and blue. A few minutes later I saw Sam. Not a scratch. You never would've known he'd been in a fight.

—Beth Bender

Boys fight. They've always fought and they always will fight. Was Sam provoked? Who
knows. We weren't there. We didn't see. Forgive me if I sound callous, but this was an incident that took place off school property.

—Allen Curry

Michael Carneal was frequently picked on and teased. The intimation that he was gay was even printed in his school's newspaper.

Gary was really down. I didn't know why. It could have been something at home, I'll never know. We were talking on the phone about what happened to Brendan at the party and how the jocks just stood around and didn't stop Sam. Gary said he wished they'd all die. I said, “Not really, right?” He said he really, really did want them to die slow, painful, miserable deaths. I said, “While you live to be a hundred?” He said he really didn't care. He was past the point of caring. He just wanted them to die.

—Allison Findley

According to several news organizations, Michael Carneal carried a backpack containing more than five hundred rounds of ammunition on the day he killed.

Brendan called me around dinnertime. It was definitely weird. I don't think we'd spoken on the phone since the end of ninth grade. There was a time when I was pretty sure he was interested in me in a romantic way. But I thought that had passed. Anyway, we talked for a while, and I wasn't sure what he was getting at. Then he told me that about a week before the fight with Sam he'd been rejected by a private military school he'd applied to.

I know that must sound totally out of character. I wonder if Gary even knew. I mean, why in the world would a kid like Brendan want to go to military school? But I think somewhere inside he knew he was headed for big trouble, and he must have believed that military school might be the way to save himself. And if I'm right, then when he was
rejected, it was like he lost his last lifeline. Being rejected meant two more years of living hell at Middletown High. I think he knew he'd never survive it. I think maybe that was the last straw. He lost hope.

We talked for about twenty minutes, and then he asked me if I was going to the dance that night, and I was like, “No way.” He asked if I was sure, because he'd noticed that I was getting friendly with some of the quote, unquote “popular” girls. I assured him there was absolutely, positively no way I was going.

And then he said he was glad, and that he'd always liked me. And then he said good-bye.

— Emily Kirsch

I can see how Gary might have been thinking about killing himself. Brendan never struck
me that way. It was like he was too angry to do that. He wanted to get too many people. But if you put them together, you can almost see the idea coming to them. Deciding to do themselves in, but going to school and taking as many of those guys with them as they could.

— Ryan Clancy

“Five days before the shooting, Eric [Harris]'s hopes of becoming a marine were undone after his parents told a recruiter about [the antidepressant medicine Eric was taking]. . . . Friends said that Eric was crushed by the news, and had been growing increasingly depressed as graduation neared.”

—New York Times
, 6/29/99