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Outside the white clapboard house, dented hubcaps and other discarded auto parts lay strewn among candy wrappers, soda bottles and wires. Broken windows were covered with a blue tarp. A light so dim it might have been a continuation of the dark showed from inside. Of the boy, Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickerell said, "He was basically living in hell."
Who killed Kayla Rolland? The hell in which the boy lived has to be partly responsible, because it helped produce a child full of rage and confusion. The boy was said to have played normal street games. He was also known to have started fights. Boaz said the boy once punched him because he wouldn't give him a pickle. He said the boy was made to stay after school nearly every day for saying "the F word," flipping people off, pinching and hitting. Some weeks before, he had stabbed a girl with a pencil. He had attacked Kayla before and, on the day prior to the killing, tried to kiss her and was rebuffed.
Early on the morning of the shooting, he and his brother got into a fight with Boaz's 10-year-old uncle. Boaz's uncle punched the boy, who said, according to Boaz's grandmother, "Do you want me to take my gap [sic] out and shoot you?" The boy's father once asked his son, "Why do you fight?" The boy replied, "I hate them."
With a record of behavior like this, one might ask why no one was paying more helpful attention to him. The teacher to whom the knife was reported did not take him to the principal's office, where he could have been searched. There is no sign that any social-service organization was watching, or even that one was in the vicinity. His parents were worse than useless to him. Tamarla, a drug addict, admitted that she exposed her children to marijuana regularly. Boaz's mother tried to comfort her son, who is growing increasingly agitated about the killing he saw and does not want to return to school. She explained that the boy who did the shooting "cried out for help, and nobody helped him."
Not family. Not school officials. Not any social-service agency. Not the police. The people who lived next door to the crack house reported conditions there many times, but the police did not respond. One neighbor said, "It took a killing to get these people out of here."
The last thing that the opponents of gun control wish to hear is that guns too are partly responsible for killing Kayla, but of course they are. In response to the child's death, President Clinton challenged Congress to break the logjam on gun legislation. Senator Orrin Hatch and Representative Henry Hyde, chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees, which have failed since last summer to get through a compromise bill with modest strictures on the sale and possession of weapons and a requirement that guns be sold with trigger locks, agreed last week to meet with the President at the White House. On the Today show, Clinton said that while the bill has stalled, "every single day there are 13 children who die from guns."