Young Voices From The Cell

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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."