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Hayles remembers the expression on Kinkel's face. "It was calm but mad," she says. "It was, like, 'I don't care.'" Mikael Nickolauson, a taciturn 17-year-old, was sitting at a table doing his homework when he was shot and killed. Only the day before, he and his fiance had enlisted in the Oregon National Guard. Kinkel continued moving through the crowd, taking aim. As students were hit in their chest, arms, legs and head, their classmates scrambled under the tables or ran screaming for the exits. At one point, Kinkel raised his rifle to Ryan Crowley's face, but he had run out of bullets and the gun would not fire. Crowley, 14, jumped up and punched him. As Kinkel reached for one of two pistols he was carrying, Jacob Ryker, a wrestler who had been shot in the chest, tackled him. The two boys struggled. Kinkel pointed the gun at Ryker's face, but the wrestler knocked it out of Kinkel's hand and was shot again, in the finger. Other boys piled on the youth and held him until the police arrived.
The mourning in Springfield has not prevented second-guessing. Should the school have helped more? Should police have detained Kinkel when he was first caught with a gun? Officials insist they were following the law in releasing a juvenile with no criminal record to his parents. But Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco, asks, "If detention was not called for, where is the counseling? A child bringing a gun to school needs help." Now Kinkel will be tried as an adult, although under Oregon law he is too young to be subject to the death penalty.
Another question, perhaps unanswerable, is whether this and other recent incidents are part of a cycle in which each shooting spawns the next. Last week three sixth-grade boys were apprehended in St. Charles, Mo., for planning an attack on their school, apparently inspired by the Jonesboro incident. "In the past 10 years, we've seen a lot more real violence on television," says Aletha Huston, a professor of child development at the University of Texas at Austin. "It can feed the fantasies of disturbed adolescents."
"This is not Springfield's problem; it is a societal problem," Mayor Bill Morrisette told a gathering last week, addressing his town's new fear. "We've spent lots to build new lockups, and we've taken the money out of school systems. We can deal with troubled youth. We must seize the moment."
--With reporting by Charlotte Faltermayer/New York, Julie Grace/Chicago, Sylvester Monroe/Atlanta and Richard Woodbury/Springfield