Answers to Killings Elusive, Town Finds

The children of this river town came to pray again Tuesday in the spot where three friends had died the day before, crowding into the high school lobby where blood had been washed away with cleanser and lockers festooned with red roses. But even silent devotion did little to help answer the question that nagged at them all: Why had they been targeted by one of their own?

The day after 14-year-old Michael Carneal was arrested and charged with murder in the attack that left five other Heath High School students injured, people in this western Kentucky border community had difficulty believing that the bloody morning’s volley could have sprung from someone so slight and seemingly nonthreatening.

It would have been reassuring had the evil come from outside, or been inspired by some malign group hidden among them. But there were no outsiders to blame, only an awkward, intelligent, lawyer’s son who never quite seemed to fit in. For a heartland town in search of the root of its anguish, all that they knew was still not enough.

“The kids want to blame it on something more than it is--a group of misfits or some evil inside that boy,” said the Rev. Tommy Tucker, one of more than a dozen ministers who counseled students Tuesday in the school auditorium. “I’ve been trying to tell them it’s not that simple. Believe me, I wish it were.”

Taunts Thrown, Teasing in Return

Students and school officials said that Carneal was among a group of skateboard enthusiasts who both taunted and, in return, were teased by Heath athletes and members of the morning prayer group.

“We’d mess around, but I never imagined it could lead to this,” said Ben Strong, 17, the goateed prayer group leader who was lionized for ending the killing spree by calmly persuading Carneal to drop his pistol.

Many turned to the 356 churches scattered through the area, flocking to services and even telephoning local pastors for consolation. At the Olivet Baptist Church on Highway 60, more than 3,000 worshipers crammed into the mahogany-lined chapel to hear Tucker and a parade of youth ministers ask for divine help in enduring their torment.

Even President Clinton appeared to be shaken by the notion of a teenager invading a school, intent on killing. “Of course, we still don’t know all the facts surrounding the tragedy or why a 14-year-old boy would take a pistol and open fire on his classmates in a prayer group,” Clinton said Tuesday in Washington. “We may never know.”

The yearning for a clean, well-lighted response seemed understandable in a “Bible Belt community where people want answers they can make sense out of,” said Bob Steele, the McCracken County School District’s director of pupil personnel. “There might never be an answer, but people here place a lot of faith in their churches. At least it starts to heal the pain.”

Many of Heath’s students come from Concord--a warren of housing tracts on the west side of Paducah, a town of 27,000 pinioned between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. Once this was a center of river barge traffic. Now it is a factory town where middle-class families have clustered over the past 30 years.

There are older, wealthier families among them--one of those, the Carneals. Michael Carneal’s great-uncle was an elementary school principal in the Heath school district, Steele said. A grandfather was a prominent landowner. And the boy’s father is so well-liked among the town’s leaders that McCracken County Sheriff Frank Augustus agonized aloud that the suspect “comes from an excellent family, one that [we] have known for a long time.

“We don’t know a motive,” the sheriff said. “Only he can tell us that. And right now, he can’t tell us because he doesn’t seem to know.”

Even though the thin, curly-haired Carneal had gained a reputation over his first two months in high school for interrupting classes with jokes and taunting authority figures by wearing T-shirts emblazoned with defiant slogans, no one imagined him as a threat, capable of stealing a small arsenal of automatic weapons and planning a blood bath.

“I knew the young man had some immaturity problems,” said Principal Bill Bond. “But there was nothing to indicate any violence in this boy’s background or that he was dangerous. He was just like any small, immature 14-year-old starting out in high school.”

Witnesses said the bespectacled boy gave himself up to Bond just minutes after he froze into a marksman’s stance and--arms outstretched and ears plugged as if for target practice--began firing wildly into the crowd of praying students. At first the youth seemed to be targeting certain students, Strong said. One of the first victims was Nicole Hadley, 14, who played clarinet in the school band. She reportedly was a close friend of Carneal’s, a band member who played an instrument called the baritone, a brass cousin of the tuba. Shot in the head, Hadley lingered on life support until she was pronounced dead Monday night at Western Baptist Hospital.

The succeeding shots seemed to be fired wildly, witnesses said.

Pinned Suspect Against Wall

When the suspect stopped for a brief moment, Strong grabbed him and pinned him against a wall. “You gotta stop!” he shouted. “Why are you doing this?”

Dropping a stolen .22-caliber gun--which, police said, still contained one bullet--the suspect muttered, “ ‘Kill me now’ or something like that,” Strong said.

Then, the shaken principal led the teen into his office to wait for police. Bond said the boy only told him: “I’m sorry.” Investigators from the sheriff’s office said the youth had stolen two semiautomatic rifles, two shotguns and a handgun. In a tearful interview with detectives, the youth reportedly admitted he had stolen the weapons during a Thanksgiving Day robbery.

Bond said the young suspect had loaded his rifles and shotguns and had armed himself with 600 semiautomatic rounds and 100 shotgun shells “as backup.”

“We would have had a much more devastating tragedy,” the principal said Tuesday, without the quick thinking of Strong, a defensive end on the school football team. Saying Strong had “saved my life, and I don’t know how many more,” Bond embraced the prayer group leader outside the school’s entrance before the two went inside to lead more than 250 students in prayer.

Later, Strong said that while he could not understand what could have driven Carneal to fire on his fellow students, he acknowledged there was a history of tension between the suspect and members of his informal prayer group.

Strong and other students said Carneal and a group of friends--who sometimes described themselves as atheists--would stand on the fringes of the prayer meeting, near a sports trophy display case, and mock them. “They didn’t agree with what we did, but it wasn’t major,” said Strong, whose father is an Assembly of God minister. “We didn’t exclude them or anything like that.”

Friends said Carneal had displayed gifts of intelligence as early as elementary school--a time when he seemed to fit in more easily. “He didn’t really start to change until he got to middle school,” said Sarah Mullen, 15, a classmate. “Then he started dressing differently, more grunge.”

The youth began spending his time with skateboard enthusiasts. He listened to hard-core alternative rock groups; one favorite was Sublime. He kept his wallet on a chain. He wore T-shirts emblazoned with the motto, “Authority Sucks.” He showed up one day with a shirt bearing the satanic number 666.

“I think it was just for the effect,” said Trent Mathis, 17, a trumpet player in the school band. “He liked getting people teed off.”

In class, Carneal was sometimes “real hyper”--often clowning and blurting out comments that annoyed teachers and classmates, said Colt Gatlin, 14, who has known him since the sixth grade. Recently, Gatlin added, Carneal seemed to be calming down. “He’s a good kid, not exactly normal, but not crazy, either.”

Urged to Miss Prayer Meeting

Carneal took ribbing from older students--some of them athletes like Strong, and others who were in the prayer group. “He said Ben picked on him a lot,” Mathis said.

Strong said he and Carneal did taunt each other--but gently. The teasing continued as late as last Wednesday, when the freshman mentioned to Strong that he should avoid showing up for the prayer meeting the following Monday. “Something big’s going to happen,” Strong recalls Carneal telling him.

The football player assumed it was one more prank--at worst, a tossed stink bomb. Strong laughingly threatened to retaliate, telling Carneal: “Well, I’ll beat you up if you do.”

Strong told neither teachers nor his parents about the exchange.

“Even when he fired,” the senior said, “I thought it was a prank.”