Film Influence, Plan Suspected in Kentucky Deaths

The bespectacled 14-year-old accused of murdering three students and wounding five others during a shooting rampage inside a Kentucky high school may have divulged his plans to other students and been influenced by a classroom massacre scene in a 1995 movie, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Timothy Kaltenbach, McCracken County’s commonwealth attorney, said law enforcement authorities are considering a second arrest, citing information that suggests Michael Carneal had planned his armed assault at Heath High School as far back as a year. Carneal had been a freshman at Heath, a school in the river town of West Paducah, for just two months.

County sheriff’s detectives, aided by Kentucky State Police troopers, began interviewing Carneal’s classmates Thursday. One student reportedly has retained a lawyer.

While not furnishing details, the prosecutor said: “Apparently there had been an ongoing discussion” for nearly a year between Carneal and at least one other youth “about perhaps carrying out a crime like this.” Carneal had mentioned either “shooting at the school or taking over the school and shooting.”

“If someone engaged in the planning process, they will be punished,” Kaltenbach said.

During a half-hour confession soon after Monday’s slayings, Kaltenbach said, Carneal told homicide investigators that the shooting spree had been influenced by a movie, “The Basketball Diaries.”

The film, adapted from poet-songwriter Jim Carroll’s autobiographical look at his teenage descent into drugs and violence, contains a harrowing dream sequence in which the narrator imagines killing classmates with a pump-action shotgun.

Carroll’s original memoir describes the narrator’s reverie of firing a machine gun into the air at school. “It’s just that I get this complete urge to suddenly take a machine gun and start firing like mad toward my right side,” the book’s narrator writes. “Not at anyone or anything unless they got in the way, but that wouldn’t matter much because I would aim fairly high.”

Through an agent, Carroll said Thursday that he was “extremely saddened by the recent events in Kentucky.” He denied any connection between his book, “written 30 years ago, and the killings. What happened in Kentucky was a product of the pernicious violence of our time and the act of an unbalanced individual.”

But the film contains a bloody fantasy sequence showing actor Leonardo DiCaprio, clad in a black leather trench coat, striding into a prep school classroom and vengefully gunning down six students and his teacher, a Catholic priest.

During Carneal’s confession, videotaped by sheriff’s deputies, the youth said “that he had seen” the sequence. “It was a factor in his mind,” Kaltenbach said. “I believe that it’s fair to take him at his word, if he says it’s a factor in his mind.”

Kaltenbach insisted that “these movies” are “one factor where people come up with some of these ideas. I think that especially these kids--I think that movies do affect adolescents of this age.”

In Los Angeles, Steve Elzer of New Line Cinema, the distributor of “The Basketball Diaries,” declined to comment on the movie’s possible influence on Carneal.

For four days since the shooting, West Paducah residents have been gripped by rumors that a student cult was behind the shootings or that Carneal had been pressured into the act. Many cite the murderous school shooting Oct. 1 in Pearl, Miss., where one youth was allegedly egged on by others to kill.

“When it happens in Mississippi or Chicago, it seems so crazy, but it’s somewhere else,” Gil Arterburn, a local youth minister, said during a church service. “But when it hits home, it’s so hard to believe.”

“Are there more people involved in this who maybe chickened out or used [Carneal]?” asked County Sheriff Frank Augustus.

Witnesses said that the gawky, slight youth was alone when he approached a circle of students who were praying before class Monday morning. He inserted plugs into his ears and began firing with a .22-caliber handgun, they said. A spray of eight shots killed three students and left one paralyzed.

The gunman surrendered the weapon at the urging of Ben Strong, a senior and leader of the prayer circle, then accompanied the school’s principal, Bill Bond, into his office to wait for police. Sheriff’s deputies recovered two loaded semiautomatic rifles and two shotguns hidden in a blanket wrapped with duct tape at the school. More than 700 rounds of ammunition were found in the boy’s backpack.

Fellow students said Carneal had complained at times of being harassed by older students. One of them was Strong, who claimed the two were friends and that the teasing was mostly in jest. Bond said that he had reviewed papers written by Carneal in which the youth had lamented being “weak” and “teased all his life.” And in the boy’s confession, Kaltenbach said, Carneal also mentioned “that he had felt like he had problems at school, been picked on.”

Other students said that Carneal and a circle of skateboarding enthusiasts sometimes turned the taunts the other way, mocking Strong and his prayer group as they stood in silent devotion.

Strong said that Carneal had approached him last Wednesday and warned him not to show up for Monday’s prayers because “something big was going to happen.”

Carneal will be tried as an adult, Kaltenbach said, but prosecutors would not seek the death penalty because it cannot be applied in Kentucky when a defendant is younger than 16.

“At 14 years of age, I think you know or you should know what you’re doing,” the prosecutor said.

Carneal is charged with three counts of murder and up to six counts of attempted murder. Kaltenbach said he will press for a sentence of life without parole. A hearing is set for Wednesday.

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.