5 Shot Dead at School in Arkansas; 2 Boys Held

The manicured grounds of a northeast Arkansas middle school became a lethal shooting gallery Tuesday as two armed suspects, firing handguns and rifles from a wooded area, fatally wounded four young girls and one teacher who had filed outside after a false fire alarm sounded. Two adolescent boys, clad in hunters’ camouflage, were taken into custody.

The staccato of gunfire at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro lasted only a few moments, but when it was done, 13 students and two teachers lay bleeding on a parking lot near the bullet-pocked wall of the school’s gymnasium.

As the first paramedics and terrified parents descended on the school to aid the victims, police cornered two boys dressed in camouflage pants, shirts and hats in woods north of the school. Wrestling the two to the ground, police recovered two handguns and two hunting rifles with clips still stocked with ammunition. The boys, 12- and 13-year-old cousins identified as students at the school, were handcuffed and taken to the Craighead County Jail for questioning.

Hundreds of sixth- and seventh-graders swarmed out of the school just after 12:30 p.m. CST after a fire alarm was reportedly pulled by one of the armed youths. Once outside, the children were trapped there, unable to flee back into the school because its fire doors automatically lock when an alarm goes off.

“The kids were sitting ducks,” said Twyla Clevinger, who drove frantically to the school where she found her daughter, Jamie, unharmed. “They were screaming to people inside to open up the doors and the guns kept going off. Finally, they got into the gymnasium.”

Law enforcement authorities identified the dead girls as Natalie Brooks, Paige Ann Herring and Stephanie Johnson, all 12, and Brittany R. Varner, who was 11. Teacher Shannon Wright, 32, died after surgery for wounds to her chest and abdomen, Craighead County coroner Toby Emerson said. Another teacher, Sara Thetford, was in critical condition after surgery.

Five wounded girls were admitted to St. Bernard’s Hospital in stable condition. Three girls and one boy were treated and released.

“This is a small enough community that at least half the people around here are either related to these kids and knew them,” said Patrick Campbell, a Craighead County emergency official. “These things just don’t happen in a place like this.”

It was a familiar sentiment, repeated throughout the town like a futile wish or mantra as word of the shooting spread. Not here, they said, watching the latest TV bulletins. Not here, they said, seeing hordes of reporters and satellite trucks take up their familiar posts at the hospital, the school, the police station.

Not here, they said, as names of the victims were released.

At nearby Arkansas State University, a candlelight vigil attracted hundreds of people, most of them red-eyed and drawn. Many of those hugging and praying and weeping beneath the college clock tower said they didn’t actually know any of the victims, but still felt personally grieved by the wounds inflicted on this Bible Belt community.

“Even though it’s not my family that was directly affected, it was my family,” said 21-year-old Jason Henry, a communications student at the college who helped organize the vigil.

“You’d think a tragedy like this would rock your faith in humanity,” said Adam Harris, a senior. “But people of all shapes and sizes, all colors, have come together to pray for the victims. So it renews your faith in humanity.”

As prayer groups gave way to impromptu debating circles--in which the topic was most often the fate of the two underage suspects--a choir of children sang hymns, spirituals, then “America the Beautiful.” Hundreds of people listened to the song, or hummed along, their red candles dripping splotches of wax on the ground, a grim reminder of the blood-stained middle school just down the road.

“America, America, God shed His grace on thee . . . “

David Howell, a freshman, said he went straight to the hospital to donate blood when he heard that local citizens had been injured. But he was assigned No. 263 on a waiting list--proof positive, he said, that this community was swift and uncommonly united in its response to tragedy.

In fact, a small army of volunteer counselors were receiving people at the middle school throughout the night, and most local radio stations were donating air time to the tragedy, broadcasting one of the many news conferences or advising people where to go for help and comfort.

“A very somber day in northeast Arkansas,” said a disc jockey at the local country western station. “Maybe the saddest day that’s ever been, including when the tornadoes came through.”

Melissa Pirtle, whose son attends the elementary school next door to Westside, was still breathing heavy sighs of relief eight hours after the tragedy. She recalled sprinting with “a herd of parents” for the doors of the school, all praying as they ran that their child would be spared.

“It was horrible,” she said of the scene as she arrived. “Everybody asking questions, nobody answering.”

As she described the day, her son stood by, listening intently. Asked if he was scared, 8-year-old Justin shook his head bravely.

“Everybody in my class started crying,” he said. “But me, I thought, my lord, why’re they all crying?!”

He was one of the few people in Jonesboro who didn’t shed a single tear Tuesday.

The lightning-swift ambush, the arrests of familiar young suspects and the prevailing sense of dread that coursed through this town unreeled as grim parallels to similar shooting rampages that have convulsed rural American high school campuses in recent months.

Earlier spree shootings that left two dead last October in Pearl, Miss., and killed three two months later in West Paducah, Ky., mystified parents, teachers and public officials who had long considered deadly school violence a threat only in urban areas. The ambush in Jonesboro, a farming center of 46,000 people about 80 miles northwest of Memphis, only added to the questions.

“These are rash acts and there’s no reasonable explanation for why they keep popping up,” said a baffled Lisa Snell, a policy analyst who conducted a recent study of school violence for the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. “These kinds of episodes, in rural schools where there’s no history of violence, are the hardest to understand.”

Craighead County Sheriff Dale Haas refused to speculate on possible motives, but parents and other public officials said Tuesday that at least one of the two adolescent suspects had talked openly, days before the shootings, of taking vengeance on unnamed students.

John Speed, minister of Bono United Methodist Church, said a Westside guidance counselor told him minutes after the shooting that one of the suspects had made threats to other students last week. “I don’t think [school officials] took it as seriously as they should have,” Speed said.

Clevinger and other Westside parents said that the threats may have been made only to other children--and perhaps not reported to authorities. The older suspect, Clevinger and others said, was reportedly angered by an earlier breakup with a girlfriend at the school. The girl was among those wounded Tuesday, Clevinger said.

Unable to control his anger, one of the suspects reportedly told other students that “he had some killing to do,” Clevinger said. “Obviously, no one paid any attention. That’s not the kind of thing that happens in our schools.”

Gov. Mike Huckabee said he was angry, as a parent, that such a tragedy could happen at a public school.

“We have to be angry at the kind of culture that breeds this in a 12-year-old child,” Huckabee said.

Arkansas law does not prohibit minors from possessing shotguns or rifles, but it does bar people younger than 21 from possessing handguns.

Under Arkansas law, the two suspects were considered juveniles and were scheduled to face a detention hearing this morning.

But Dist. Atty. Brent Davis said he might look at ways to try them as adults. “We are searching the law to see if there is another option,” he said.

The massacre at the school--a remote 10-acre campus of 250 students set along a winding state highway amid rolling rice fields--proceeded with lethal simplicity, according to police. Just after the lunch hour had ended, Westside’s halls echoed with the drone of a fire alarm. No drill had been planned, authorities said, but taking no chances, teachers and students began filing out.

A volley of shots crackled from a tree line 200 yards north of the wing where the school’s sixth-graders study. Within a few minutes, more than two dozen shots were fired. “We thought it was just firecrackers,” said pupil Brandy George. “I saw one of my teachers get shot. I started running toward the gym.”

A separate building from the rest of the school, the gym’s doors remained open. Screaming and wailing, students raced for the doorway. Teachers lifted several wounded children and, cradling them in their arms, lurched away from the fallen.

Karen Pate, a parent volunteer who was inside the gym, rushed outside to see “girls falling to the ground.” Pate aided a felled teacher who “had been shot in the abdomen,” helping her out of the line of fire. “Another student had got shot in the leg. As soon as she got hit, she . . . fell into the doorway.”

A frantic report was called into Craighead County sheriff’s headquarters at 12:41 p.m., Campbell said. Within four minutes, Sheriff Haas and a contingent of deputies, Jonesboro police and Arkansas State Police troopers flooded over the scene.

A crew of workers on a rooftop near the school reported to police that they saw two youths in camouflaged shirts, pants and hats firing at the school. Police dashed into the woods and cut off the boys, who were headed toward a white van parked nearby.

Terry McMatt, a sheriff’s deputy who helped arrest the youths, said they offered “not much conversation” as they were read their rights and led into a squad car. McMatt said he recognized one of the youths from his experience as a DARE anti-drug counselor. McMatt did not elaborate on his dealings with the boy, but intimated the youth had disciplinary problems.

As paramedics dealt with the injured, frightened parents raced across the school’s playing fields, trying to find out if their children were among the lucky survivors.

After hearing a news report about the shooting, Clevinger phoned the school repeatedly, getting only busy signals. Desperate, she drove to Westside, but she had to make the last half-mile on foot because of a long line of cars left by parents along a winding stretch of Highway 91. As she ran to the school, she prayed that Jamie was unhurt, but imagined the worst.

She found her daughter in the gym. “She was fine, but terribly shaken,” Clevinger said. “One of her best friends was shot.”

Clevinger and other parents said they could not understand how two young boys had amassed a small arsenal of guns--and how they had managed to fire them so quickly.

“I know this is hunting country,” one parent said. “But these were little kids, children. How do two kids get away with running around on their own on a school day with a bunch of guns?”

Even as an agent from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was dispatched late Tuesday from Little Rock, Ark., to Jonesboro to answer that question, public officials and policy experts in Arkansas and elsewhere agonized about what could be the common thread among recent school ambush cases in West Paducah, Pearl and now Jonesboro.

Perceived revenge, the same towering rage that has motivated adult-inspired massacres over the past three decades, may now be inflicted on a much younger generation, some authorities say.

“Typically, the perpetrators have had a history of problems,” said Dr. Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center.

Yet deaths associated with school violence have actually dwindled over the past five years in America, from a high of 55 in 1992 to 19 in the last school year. And most of those incidents involved fatalities in city schools, said Stephens, whose center made those tallies.

Kevin P. Dwyer, assistant executive director of the National Assn. of School Psychologists, laid the blame squarely on the “availability of guns and the misdiagnosis of depression.”

“It makes me cry,” Dwyer said. “People don’t take these kids seriously. . . . They tell friends they’re going to do something. They tell adults wait until you see what’s going to happen. They send a lot of signals.”

There was second-guessing, too, in Jonesboro as the town’s hellish day came to a close. But the first order of business was prayer, said Baptist pastor Rodney Reeves.

“We sure hope,” he said, “that God can somehow redeem such an evil situation as this.”

Braun reported from Chicago and Moehringer from Jonesboro. Times staff writers Judy Pasternak in Chicago, Steve Berry in Los Angeles and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.