I was like a child in front of a stage, Hating the curtain as if it were in the way... --Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Childhood should be a game of waiting in the wings, of playing at hearts, broken then mended, of rehearsing life, falling but protected. But the news out of Jonesboro, Ark., last week was a monstrous anomaly: a boundary had been crossed that should not have been. It was a violation terrible enough to warrant waking the President of the U.S. at midnight on his visit to Africa, robbing him of sleep till daylight. It was news horrifying enough to cause parents all over America to wonder if they were doing enough to wall away their children from the bad angels that can steal into young souls to stifle the knowledge of good and evil. The shooters in custody in Jonesboro for the murder of four very young girls and their teacher were two very young boys--one just 13, the other only 11. And now they will be tormented by more memories than if they had lived a thousand years.
What do kids know about living? And how do they then turn to killing?
Mitchell Johnson, 13, found God at a youth revival meeting last September. "He made a profession of faith and decided to accept Jesus Christ as his savior," says Christopher Perry, the youth minister at Central Baptist Church in Jonesboro. Mitchell was new to the area, barely two years in town, and looking to fit in. A classmate brought him to Central Baptist, and the church, for a while at least, seemed to provide a haven.
He became an upstanding member of the congregation, delighting many of the adults with his choirboy gentility. "Yes, sir" was the way he addressed the men, and he was wont to say "Ma'am" when he held out a chair for a lady. He'd been raised right, most folks thought. Only two weeks ago, says Perry, Mitchell Johnson joined up with another youth group to sing and minister at a nursing home.
Jonesboro was supposed to be a refuge of sorts. Mitch was originally from Spring Valley, Minn. (pop. 2,460), and he was floundering by the time he and his mother and brother left, first for Kentucky and then for Arkansas. The amiably goofy kid was upset by the 1994 divorce of his parents, Scott and Gretchen. Close friends and young relatives had watched his behavior deteriorate. "Since they split, he's gone downhill," says his cousin Mike Niemeyer, 17. "He'd get into fights, some physical, some verbal. He was easily p___ed off." The fine manners that he shared with his brother Monte, 11, were still on display, but he would exhibit troubling, attention-getting antics. Last summer, when he returned to Spring Valley to visit with relatives during vacation, he began obsessing over twin passions: girls and gangs. "He said he'd give anything to be in a gang," says Niemeyer. "He'd kill anyone to be in a gang." Schoolmates in Jonesboro say Mitch began wearing red to signal his membership in the Bloods, a ruse that they saw straight through. A wannabe, most of them concluded. The slightly paunchy boy also fancied himself a Romeo and, with an intuitive sense of drama, vowed suicide when a Minnesota Juliet wanted nothing to do with him. "He was crying a lot," recalls his buddy Andrew O'Rourke, 13. "He showed me the gun and the rope he could use. I said there are other girls as good as her, but he said, 'No. She's one of a kind.'" After 45 minutes, though, O'Rourke convinced his friend to lay down his gun.