The Best American Crime Writing (25 page)

He was the first at Etowah—first at a school where there would be a second—and he was also the first nationally. After Brian came the deluge. After Brian Head brought his gun to school at Etowah, boys brought their guns to school in Paducah, Kentucky; in Jonesboro, Arkansas; in Springfield, Oregon; in Pearl, Mississippi; in Littleton, Colorado; and in Conyers, Georgia. They all succeeded where Brian failed—their guns all had chambered rounds—and they are all remembered as the very essence of terrible boys. What Bill Head discerned in what most citizens saw as random slaughter, however, was a pattern that started with a constant. “There is no doubt in my mind that bullying and peer abuse are at the heart of most schoolyard tragedies,” he says. “Schools have failed to protect the children in their care. A kid comes home bloodied, they say he got into a fight. It doesn’t matter if he started it or not. It doesn’t matter if he was getting picked on. The victim is just as guilty as the perpetrator. No wonder kids take guns to school.”

After Brian’s death, Bill started a foundation called Kids Hope and poured his savings into a video aimed, essentially, at teaching schoolchildren the mechanics of mercy. He also urged schools to begin making sure “seven-year-olds receive the same basic protections as seventy-year-olds,” and to winnow the merciful from the cruel by treating “fights” as instances of
battery
, as instances of
assault
… as outright attacks. Although he would never have as much effect as Brian himself—for it was Brian who spoke most eloquently and whose effect was indelible—he was, like Brian, at the head of what would become a groundswell, of what would become, indeed, a movement. As schoolyards became venues of slaughter, the role of the bully became the one issue that generated anything approaching consensus. The issues of handgun availability and the influence of violence on television and in the movies polarized liberals and conservatives along predictable lines. Bullies, though—well, bullies were bad. An antibullying movement flourished because there could be no probullying movement, and by its terms, we can no longer afford to consider bullying an inevitable if unfortunate fact of childhood. What do bullies do? They hurt children. They cause lasting and in some cases fatal damage. They must be stopped, and it is quite simply our moral obligation to stop them, even though they are of course children themselves.

“I used to be able to light up a cigarette in a department store or at the end of a dinner party,” says Cindi Seddon of Bully B’ware, an organization at the forefront of antibullying education. “Now the first is against the law, and the second is stigmatized. That’s what I would like to see happen with bullying.” Based outside Vancouver, Canada, and started by Seddon and her partners in response to the spate of schoolyard shootings and suicides, Bully B’ware has distributed its videotapes and teaching tools to schools across North America and has helped implement antibullying programs. Central to the Bully B’ware mission are two observations that Bully B’ware has itself helped turn into gospel: one, that the bullies who roam the halls of schools like Etowah and Columbine are not the same as the bullies you remember—that the bullies who used to stop at intimidation now don’t stop at all; and, two, that bullying is linked to criminality, as both a precursor and an actual manifestation. The Bully B’ware website cites a statistic holding that by age 24, “60 percent
of all people identified as childhood bullies have at least one criminal conviction,” and in conversation Cindi Seddon notes that jails are filled with criminals who got started as bullies.

Are such statistics reliable? Well, Jonathan Miller was identified as a childhood bully and at age 18 does, in fact, have at least one criminal conviction. The question, though, is whether he was convicted as a murderer because he was identified as a childhood bully. The question is whether he was convicted as an adult because he went to Etowah High School, which was haunted by the death of Brian Head. The question is whether he was convicted as a criminal because the death of Brian Head—along with the deaths of far too many others—had forced our culture to change its mind about bullying and to view it as an act that was in and of itself criminal. The question is whether he was sentenced to life in prison because he stood as indisputable proof of the newly advanced thesis that bullying kills.

It is March 29, 2002, when Bill Head tells me, in a restaurant in Cherokee County, Georgia, not so far from where his son, Brian, and then Josh Belluardo fell dead, what he thinks he knows about Jonathan Miller. “The boy was already a career criminal by the time he murdered Josh,” he says. “It was no accidental thing. He used to take an extra lap in the school bus just so he could terrorize kids.” He is a big man, thick and dense—so big, in fact, that he never had to deal with bullies when he went to school, because bullies never wanted to deal with him. He wears a broad-brimmed brown hat and sports a thick red beard, and squeezed between the beard and the hat are small and steady blue eyes that are clearly the eyes of a man who has never hurt another soul by intention in his entire life. There is an inkling in him of the man Brian Head might have become if he had survived the trials of his adolescence, and toward the end of the interview, I ask him the date of Brian’s death.

“March 28, 1994,” he says, and seems startled when he says it—no,
rattled
. In the deep sigh that follows his answer, tears storm his eyes. “So, eight years ago yesterday,” he says. “You picked a good day for your interview.” Suddenly, the interview is over, for when we stand up to leave, the tears are still shining in the shadow of his hat, and I don’t have the heart to ask him the one question I had left to ask. His son was dead. The only solace left to him was that he was able to list Brian among the merciful, among the legions of those beset by the cruel, but from what I knew of adolescence, I knew that sometimes all that separates the cruel from the merciful is one irrevocable moment. In class that day, there were two such moments for Brian Head. In the first, the gun didn’t go off. In the second, it did, and what I wanted to ask Bill Head was if he ever allowed himself to wonder what fate would have befallen his family had a bullet been chambered in Brian’s gun when he pointed it at the boy who slapped him … if he ever allowed himself to think that his son was just one irrevocable moment from being remembered not as one of the victims of the terrible boys but as a terrible boy himself.

On November 2,1998, Jonathan Miller and Joshua Belluardo each had their irrevocable moment. That’s all it was, really; think how long it takes to throw a punch. Because the moment was irrevocable, however, people asked how long Jonathan had had that punch in him and started focusing not on the irrevocable moment but rather on the irrevocable life.

Here is the irrevocable moment. Two boys, Josh and Jonathan, neighbors but not friends, two grades apart in school and fifteen months apart in age, get on Cherokee County school bus number 155, which serves both E. T. Booth Middle School and Etowah High School. Josh sits in what may be roughly defined as the middle of the bus. Jonathan sits in the back with his friend James
Nachtsheim. They are supposed to go camping that night near a local lake, and they start discussing their plans. Or, rather, they start discussing their plans until their general urge to make trouble—to mess around on the school bus—distracts them. They begin throwing packets of ketchup and mustard at some of the other boys, and the other boys start throwing packets of ketchup and mustard at them. Out of the fracas, one of the packets hits Josh in the back of his head. Later, some of the kids will say that Jonathan threw it; James Nachtsheim will say he didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. This is their moment, the moment they’ve been heading for ever since the Miller family moved to Shallow Cove, one house away from the Belluardos. Josh turns around and glares at Jonathan, Jonathan responds by asking him to fight, right there on the school bus. Josh accepts his challenge but specifies that the fight will take place not on the bus but on his front lawn, after they get off. “All right,
bitch,”
Jonathan says. “All right,
faggot.”
“Are you gonna kick his ass, Jon?” one of the kids asks. “Yeah, I’m gonna kick his ass,” Jonathan answers. “How you gonna kick his ass, Jon?” the kid asks. “I don’t know,” Jonathan says, and later, at the trial, one kid will say that Jonathan articulated the idea: “Maybe I’ll hit him from behind.”

Bus number 155 turns into the Port Victoria subdivision and stops at Shallow Cove. Josh gets off the bus and heads for his front lawn. Jonathan follows, with James Nachtsheim following behind him. Jonathan rushes up behind Josh and hits him in the back of his head before he ever reaches his front lawn. Josh slumps to his knees, Jonathan takes another swing and hits his face, Joshua falls to his neighbor’s grass, and Jonathan kicks him in the side. The fight, in Jonathan’s mind, is over, and he may or may not stand over Josh, raising his fists in exultation. Then it really is over: Jonathan and James leave Josh behind and go to Jonathan’s house to prepare their camping gear. They don’t mention the “fight”—or what prosecutors will later call “the assault;” the Belluardos, “the attack;” and the Millers, “the incident” or “the accident”—to Jonathan’s father
when they say hello to him, and then, as is their custom, they head for the woods in back of the Millers’ house. Someone standing on Shallow Cove sees them and calls Jonathan’s name. Jonathan hears the anger in the voice, sees the outlines of the storm gathering where Josh fell, and runs. He hides with James in a culvert in the woods, then sneaks off to a friend’s house. By now, he knows he is in trouble, but he can’t imagine what kind; he can’t imagine that his trouble is irrevocable, because he can’t imagine that his
moment
was irrevocable: “I didn’t think I hit him that hard,” he will say later. Certainly, he can’t imagine that his first punch opened a microscopic tear in Josh’s vertebral artery, and so by the time he threw his second punch, blood was flooding Josh’s brain, and so by the time he kicked Josh in the side, Josh was, for all intents and purposes, already dead. He can’t imagine Josh turning purple on the grass, or Josh’s sister, Katie, crying over him and begging her brother to live, or Josh’s mother, a bus driver for the Cherokee County schools, hearing about what was happening to her son by radio dispatch. And no, he can’t imagine that with one punch he has destroyed not only Josh’s life but also his own, as well as the lives of two families. He’s a kid, after all, so he can’t imagine moments in terms of their irrevocability, or punches in terms of consequences that are as freakish as they are unforeseen. He just knows he is in trouble, and when his friend drives him home, past the ambulances and police cars and fire trucks, he slumps in the car. He wants to tell his father what happened—what he did—but it is too late: A policeman sees him and arrests him. He is charged with aggravated assault and aggravated battery, and when Josh is taken off life support two days later, he is charged, as an adult, with felony murder. He is 15, and Josh was—the most terrible word a parent can hear—13.

Jonathan’s irrevocable life began that night, on television, and the next morning, in the newspapers. The packet of mustard, the challenge, the insults, the attempts at bravado, the first punch, the second punch, the kick in the side, the bus driver’s recitation of
Jonathan’s victory dance: Everything was there in the news stories, but what might have been adolescent ephemera was now judged by the stain of permanence. Jonathan had been in trouble a lot, it was reported, when he went to E. T. Booth. Jonathan’s parents could have curbed his behavior, it was reported, but chose not to. Jonathan terrorized Joshua unmercifully, it was reported, until one day Josh couldn’t take it anymore. Jonathan didn’t like gay people. Jonathan said, like, gay people deserved to die, or something. Joshua didn’t just die at the bus stop; he died at the hands of the “bus-stop bully.” Joshua didn’t die as the consequence of a punch; he died as a consequence of bullying. Bullying was bad. Bullies were bad. Jonathan was bad. The death of Josh Belluardo became the murder of Josh Belluardo, and the murder of Josh Belluardo entered its endless afterlife as an object lesson in what one antibullying website calls “the number one social concern in America today.” Joshua entered heaven as an angelic victim, and Jonathan, although certainly not the first well-known bully in Cherokee County—although not even the first well-known bully involved in a fatality at Etowah High School—entered his earthly career as the first bully in Cherokee County intended to be the last.

Indeed, both Cherokee County and the state of Georgia changed laws and policies as a direct result of Josh’s irrevocable death and Jonathan’s irrevocable life. In early 1999, Cherokee County instituted “three strike” antibullying programs in all of its schools, whereby bullies would be expelled or assigned to alternative schooling after their third offense, whether verbal or physical. At the same time, the county hired a police chief for its entire school system, and the police chief not only installed armed officers in all the middle and high schools under his supervision but also subtly criminalized the daily scrimmage of the schoolyard. A threat was no longer a threat; specific enough, it counted as simple battery. A shove was no longer a shove; forceful enough, it counted as simple assault. The change in the state began in Cherokee,
when a reporter called state representative Chuck Scheid and asked, “What are you going to do about bullying?” In January, Scheid responded by drafting what was known informally as the Josh Belluardo bill and pushing it through Georgia’s state legislative session. The bill basically called upon the rest of the counties in Georgia to adopt antibullying policies, and when Jonathan Miller went on trial at the end of April, Representative Scheid visited the courtroom to meet the Belluardos and extend his condolences. He did not speak to the Millers, for he believed what he had heard from trial judge Michael Roach—that the trial of Jonathan Miller on felony murder charges was the tragic result of the Millers’ refusal to discipline their son.