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Drew was the child of Pat's change of heart. "Pat was married before," explains Prater, "and after two children she had a tubal ligation." But her second husband Dennis Golden had never had children. Says Prater: "She had the operation reversed so that they could have Drew. That child is the center of their world." Pat and her husband worked long hours to provide for the boy. His grandfather Doug Golden insists that "Drew understood law and order." He believes his grandson wasn't close to Mitchell Johnson. "Did this kid threaten him or intimidate him," he wonders out loud, "like maybe he was victimized?" After all, he notes, "this kid had made threats at school and pulled a knife," referring to reports about Mitch. "The sad part is that no one listened." In a statement from the family, read by Val Price, the public defender who appointed himself Drew's lawyer, Pat and Dennis Golden said they "would like to explain the situation and make it clear for everyone and to take away the pain for everyone, but they simply cannot. They, too, cannot understand, and they, too, are asking why Andrew, their 11-year-old baby, is allegedly involved."
Mitch Johnson's parents, meanwhile, seemed to be collapsing under the weight of guilt. Mitchell's father Scott, a long-haul trucker, told CBS News, "As hard as it is for me to say that, my son is guilty." His ex-wife Gretchen spoke on ABC's 20/20 of the anguish in Jonesboro, saying, "There's just no words from any of us or anything anyone can do that will ever make that right again." She met with Perry, her son's spiritual adviser, for succor, telling him that she couldn't erase the images "of the children hurting, of the parents trying to find their babies, the fact that these mothers will never get to hold their children again." Scott Johnson, who was in Fort Worth, Texas, when he heard the news, also came to Perry's church, with his younger son Monte. On Wednesday night, recalls Perry, "they had come late. Toward the end of the evening, I asked everyone to pray, to turn their chairs around and kneel to pray for those who were wounded and who died. Kids told me the dad had fallen out of his chair and collapsed, breaking down and crying." As for Monte, "he said he was not going to live in a hole, not going to be denied the right to live his life." But, says Perry, Monte was afraid to go to school last Thursday, worried that he would be punished for the sins of his brother.