Little Monsters, Gigantic Fears

Now it’s getting scary. Being a parent must be a nightmare these school days. Being someone’s son or daughter might be even scarier. Little monsters are loose. They don’t merely carry out a terrorist threat, a shooting, a bombing, an act of violence, they fake it now, pretend, make jokes, play on and prey on people’s fears. Which is cruel beyond belief.

It is happening coast to coast. It’s spreading to countries other than ours. In Canada, a 14-year-old boy has been charged with murder and attempted murder for an assault on campus that left one student dead and another seriously wounded. Another little monster’s victims.

It is happening in our own neighborhoods. A boy’s home in Oxnard is searched by police after he supposedly made threats to classmates, mentioning bombs. The officers look around, find a number of pipe bombs in the house. They take the boy into custody. He is 18.

It is happening everywhere we look. A high school sophomore, 15, from Newbury Park has his computer seized and is placed under arrest after threats were allegedly made on the Internet, possibly as a prank. Yeah. Some prank.

Our high schools are in the Jeopardy round, speeding toward Double Jeopardy. At Quartz Hill, boys 14 and 15 stand accused of threatening to blow up the campus. At Calabasas, students have to be reassured that a fire drill is nothing more than that. At Granada Hills, the principal demands that pupils take off their trench coats or go home.

School days, school days, dear old golden rule days.

Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic. And tests, every day now, with no answers. None.

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At scenes of the crimes, what must the innocent bystanders be feeling? How do they endure? What do the people of, say, Jonesboro, Ark., or Springfield, Ore., or, naturally, Littleton, Colo., do or say to get through each day? Because aside from the unthinkable--a child’s death--there are two great fears any parent has:

One, that his or her own child could turn into a monster . . .

. . . two, that other children around theirs turn into monsters.

What must that be like?

I can’t imagine, can’t imagine.

“I live in Littleton,” Christina Scull tells me, “and I felt like I got a kick in the gut, just like everyone else here.

“I can’t even begin to know what the people directly affected are going through, but I can’t see placing blame on most of the other 1,800 teens at that school, as some have done. Playing [the video game] Doom, listening to Marilyn Manson, etc., did not make any of them go off on a shooting spree.”

But parents are desperate for a solution. Scull says she doesn’t know how anyone can agree that “parents should periodically go through children’s rooms, computers, diaries, etc., to stop things like this from happening again.” Has it really come to this?

Some out there still hope not.

“You know, just as sure as 13 people were blown away in what is not really a school shooting but a full-blown terrorist attack,” says Lynn McEwen, who lives in Jonesboro, “there were millions of kids who went to school, sat in their seats, thought intelligent thoughts, and then came home to kiss their parents, do their homework, play their video games and do what other normal kids do.”

So what do we do, I wonder.

“If the damned media,” McEwen lets me know, “would simply tell the world that a couple of lunatics did the deed, and that their parents face the possibility of life in prison without parole, this behavior would probably stop.”

Probably? Maybe. I don’t know. Who knows?

All we know is that our students are an endangered species. We want something to blame, need something. The people in the towns where these shootings occurred, they wish they had more answers for those of us who fear we’re next.

“I’m just afraid there will be more,” says Don Burkard, who lives in Springfield. “When a person who feels he or she is a nobody can become world news overnight by doing some crazed act, I have no answers. I just have sorrow that some children out there feel they have no future, or anything to live for.”

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Faculty members, they’re scared too. They try to preserve the calm, prevent the storm. So what happens?

Brook Furey’s little brother, Devin, 16, wears his trench coat to school and gets into trouble, that’s what. Devin lives in Pennsylvania and has worn that coat for three years, Brook says.

“Soon after Littleton, my brother was approached by the school principal, asking him to stop wearing his trench coat,” Brook says. He refused. “. . . Was he supposed to freeze at 6 a.m. on his walk to the bus stop?”

Two days later, Brook says, Devin was suspended for two full school weeks. When their mother protested, authorities “informed her they could have Devin arrested,” Brook says, “because they have plenty of kids who will testify that Devin has a hit list of 39 students.

“My mother was shocked. My brother was shocked. They accepted the suspension out of fear. Devin was brought to the state police for interrogation. All he did was wear a jacket. What is going on here?”

Something monstrous. That’s what’s going on here. Something monstrous.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com