Young Voices From The Cell

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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."