Roses, carnations and lilies droop from the chain-link fence outside Thurston High School, and a makeshift plywood cross juts from the ground nearby. Beneath it, a hand-printed sign reads WILL WE EVER LEARN? But as the timber town of Springfield, Ore. (pop. 51,000), grieved last week, the lessons were far from obvious.
Add Springfield to the atlas of American juvenile violence. The map is dotted with names now searingly familiar: Pearl, Miss., where a 16-year-old killed his mother and fatally shot two classmates with a rifle in October 1997; West Paducah, Ky., where a 14-year-old killed three girls with a .22 semiautomatic Ruger in December 1997; Jonesboro, Ark., where an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old ambushed their school, killing five with handguns and rifles in March; and Edinboro, Pa., where a 14-year-old attacked people at his school dance, killing a science instructor with a .25-cal. handgun in April. In Springfield last Friday, at the Lane County courthouse, 15-year-old Kipland Phillip Kinkel, the son of two schoolteachers, slumped in his chair, his face blank and his eyes fixed downward as he faced four charges of aggravated murder.
The day before, in a shooting spree in the high school cafeteria, Kinkel, carrying a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols, had discharged 51 rounds of ammunition, fatally injuring two students and wounding 18 others. Afterward, when deputies drove to his family's gingerbread-trimmed A-frame in a wooded subdivision, they found his parents shot to death. After his arrest, a handcuffed Kinkel managed to get at a knife taped to his leg and lunge at an officer in a police interrogation room. He was subdued with pepper spray.
In the blue-collar bungalows of this lush valley 110 miles south of Portland, all the grownups could talk about was what nurturing, sensible parents Faith and Bill Kinkel had been. All the kids could talk about was how "Kip" Kinkel liked to torture animals, collect guns, build small pipe bombs and joke about killing people.
There are startling similarities with the previous cases: the kid in Pearl tortured animals too and, like Kinkel, went through a "Goth" phase, dressing in black and voicing grim imaginings; Kinkel had a fascination with guns to match that of the Jonesboro boys; like the young man charged in West Paducah, he seemed possessed of a death wish. When he was finally wrestled to the ground and disarmed, Kinkel pleaded with his captors, "Just shoot me." But if these parallels are merely coincidental, others are not easily dismissed. Once again the murderous drama features a troubled youth and a community in which obtaining guns is easy. Once again a high school becomes the stage, with classmates the unwitting cast. And once again there is a chilling disconnect, with adolescents shrugging off his threats of violence as idle chatter and harried school administrators ignoring the warning signs.