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If students had turned their eyes to the hill, they would have seen the source of the evil. With apparent deliberation, the shooters were aiming high at their targets, at points where bodies are most fragile. The victims were apparently "selected because of their sex or who they were. It was not a random shooting, where you just shoot out there," Doug Golden told ABC's PrimeTime Live. "If that had been true, you would have shot as many boys as you did girls." (A music class of all girls did, however, file out first.) Of the 15 wounded, only one was male (Drew's cousin Tristan McGowan). In less than four minutes, the boys had fired 22 rounds of ammunition.
Mitchell and Drew tried to beat a fast retreat, but construction workers who saw gunsmoke rising from the woods tipped off the police. Two officers chased the boys down as they were heading toward their getaway van. They offered only slight resistance, and the police easily disarmed them of nine guns (another gun was found on the ground). Said Officer Terry McNatt, "They didn't say anything." They stayed silent for the entire drive to the Craighead County sheriff's office.
And the next day, Drew remained silent throughout the preliminary hearing, even as he listened to the recitation of his and Mitchell's alleged crimes: five counts of capital murder, 10 counts of first-degree battery. Mitch wept and appeared remorseful. But a single night of jail found the boys outwardly changed. Upon waking, Mitchell requested a Bible, a minister and "some Scripture thought," according to Sheriff Dale Haas. Both boys asked for pizza for lunch. The request was denied, and Drew began to cry in his holding cell, begging for his mother. Said the sheriff: "He wants his Mama, and he wants to go home now."
Drew's mother Pat Golden, postmaster in a nearby town, was at work on the day of the shooting. That afternoon, she had her son on her mind, having just learned that there had been a shooting at the school. Pat withdrew quietly to a back room, where a friend heard her crying softly, worried for Drew's safety. Her husband Dennis called to say authorities didn't know the whereabouts of their son. "Then," recalls Joyce Prater, a friend and former colleague who had stopped by for stamps, "the phone rang again. Pat let out a terrible, terrible scream, as though someone had died. I will never forget it as long as I live. By the time I ran back to see her, another employee said, 'She's already gone.' She just tore out of there." Prater was especially worried about her friend making the 25-mile drive to Jonesboro alone because she was still slowly readjusting to cars: she had suffered a seizure last year and had only recently returned to driving.