Thomas Solomon Jr. is no monster. If he was trying to mimic the other school terrorists who came before him, he did a poor job. He had access to high-caliber weapons in his stepfather's gun cabinet, yet he chose a low-powered .22 rifle to shoot up his high school. He was a practiced shot, yet he aimed low. He was literally a Boy Scout, a pleasant 15-year-old kid who went to church and didn't care for Goth life or Marilyn Manson or Duke Nukem or any of the other cultural markers we have come to expect from our kid killers.
Thanks to the halfheartedness of Solomon's melee, Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga., was not "another Littleton." No one died in Conyers, and thankfully only six students were injured. All are expected to recover fully. But if it was less bloody, the latest shooting was equally frightening in another way: coming a month to the day after the massacre at Columbine High, it hinted that school violence might now become...routine.
Just as drive-by shootings and other youth violence became a quotidian feature of inner-city life in the 1980s, the episode in Conyers suggested that we may have crossed a threshold at the close of the 1990s. We have suspected for some time that our young people suffer more depression and other mental illness than any previous generation. Perhaps we are now seeing the proof--and the long-term results.
Classmates say Solomon, whom most people call T.J., came to school on Thursday morning bearing the weight of a break-up with his girlfriend and wearing a determined stare. Stacey Singleton, a junior at Heritage, calls it a "hate look," scary enough that when she spotted Solomon and his rifle as he entered the school, she tried to melt into a phone stall she was using. "I just gripped the phone and knew that something really, really bad was going to start," she says.
Heritage students thought the first shots from Solomon's rifle were firecrackers, just like the ones used in last year's senior prank. Solomon maintained a dazed expression as he began randomly firing into the school's indoor commons. "He wasn't aiming," says junior Ryan Rosa, one of his victims. "He was holding it down low... He was not chasing people." In other words, Solomon went about his work almost reluctantly, shooting literally from the hip with a pump-action sport gun.
Since the Littleton shootings, Rosa had thought about what he would do if something similar happened at his school. "I thought I'd be a hero--tackle the gunman and wrestle him down," he said. In the event, though, "what I did was run." Rosa was still wondering whether T.J. was using a cap gun when he felt a sting in his leg. He joined the fleeing crowd, ending up in a science lab with other students for several very long minutes.
Solomon's shooting ended quickly. Typically, the rifle model he used can fire about a dozen rounds without reloading, and students say he fired about that many shots. They discovered evidence in the boy's bedroom showing he had contemplated the devastation: printouts of bomb recipes, notes on where to plant explosives at the school and rantings about his despair. Solomon wounded six students in all, only one seriously: sophomore Stephanie Laster, who had just stood up from a cafeteria table where she was chatting with a teacher and a girlfriend about a missionary trip she was planning for next month.