First, you have an ethical dilemma.
For example, what do we do with people who commit crimes?
There is no question that Michael is guilty.
In 1998, a 14 year old boy was convicted of murdering 3 people and wounding 5 others. He plead guilty and was charged as an adult.
He has spent 25 years in prison.
“In 1998, Michael Carneal pleaded guilty to killing three students and injuring five others at Heath High School in McCracken County. It’s been nearly 25 years since the Dec. 1, 1997 shooting, and Carneal is set to appear before the state parole board in October. A survivor of that shooting is calling on the public to write to the parole board before the hearing.
Carneal, who was 14 years old at the time, shot and killed freshmen Nicole Hadley, sophomore Kayce Steger and senior Jessica James. One of the five students injured in the shooting, Missy Jenkins Smith, who was 15 at the time, was paralyzed from the chest down.
Jenkins Smith went on to write a memoir titled “I Choose to be Happy” with co-author William Croyle. In a February Facebook post, Jenkins Smith encouraged people to write to the parole board ahead of Carneal’s hearing.
Croyle on Wednesday published a blog to the website Medium advocating against Carneal’s release and encouraging people to write to the parole board.”
When he was 16, he apparently called and wrote to one of the survivors.
This is why William Croyle believes he should never be released. Because he wrote letters and then stopped, 22 years ago.
Croyle writes that he believes Carneal has not paid his debt to society, and that those who survived the shooting and the families of the three girls who were killed should not have to face the possibility of coming face to face with him in public.
“Carneal’s debt was life in prison. The early release provision after 25 years was conditional. And that condition should be based mainly on the comfort levels of the victims and their families, not on the criminal’s desire to live among them,” Croyle argues.
Croyle’s story on Medium is linked at the end of the local news coverage. The local news is not as invested as he is, in this story.
The local news says nothing about what other issues might be important for determining who gets parole.
Years earlier, the local coverage is about another school shooting that takes place years later, and the impact it has on the victims:
“I can’t believe this happened again, so close to home,” said Ellegood, who was 19 months older than her sister.
Carneal, who pleaded guilty but mentally ill to murder and attempted murder, later told a reporter he couldn’t give a single explanation for his crimes. He said contributing factors included his mistaken belief that his parents didn’t love him and taunting from other students, including some who falsely claimed he was gay.
“People want one simple answer — I can’t give it,” he said in a 2002 interview.
He said he never looked at who he was shooting and didn’t know who they were until he read it in the paper.
An earlier quote from the piece:
“I couldn’t believe this could happen to our small community again,” said Ellegood, 36, a paralegal in Paducah. “I was totally shocked. I told my boss it had to be a joke.”
Ethically, the dilemma I feel we should confront is the fact that incarcerating Carneal didn’t prevent all the other school shooters we have seen in the intervening years.
What is the purpose of incarceration?
Is it for society? Is it for our feelings? Is it for the incarcerated?
These seem like important questions to ask, but NO ONE IS DOING THAT IN THESE STORIES.
“Suggested citation: National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. (2003) Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Case Studies of School Violence Committee.
Mark H. Moore, Carol V. Petrie, Anthony A. Braga, and Brenda L. McLaughlin, editors.
Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.”
I want so badly to believe someone understands lethal school violence. But in finding this book from 2003 and reading the articles about whether or not to parole a kid who shot other children, I have come to the conclusion that violence is easy.
And sometimes, we will never know the reasons that someone chose violence.
“He would later say that he was not aiming the weapon but simply firing into the crowd. Every bullet struck a fellow student. Kelly Carneal was not in the prayer group but witnessed the shooting. She said later that she would not even have recognized her brother if she had not seen his clothes and his face. His posture was different and he seemed larger than his normal self when he was holding the gun. Carneal told one psychiatrist that he felt like he was in a dream.
Carneal stopped firing when he saw bullet holes in the wall and
Nicole Hadley laying on the floor covered in blood, with another friend of
Carneal’s calling her name. He put the gun on the ground. When the
student leader of the prayer group came over to Carneal, yelling at him,
Carneal reportedly asked the youth to kill him. The principal, Bill Bond
came running out of his office, pushed the prayer leader away and led
Carneal to the office, putting him in the conference room with Carneal’s
homeroom teacher, who reported that Carneal did not seem to recognize
what he had done. He asked many questions, but Carnal would not
answer them. The only thing he would talk about was the guns: where
he got them, what kind they were, and where the ammunition was. He
could not say what he had planned to do. When the school bells rang,
students were told to go to class, and they did, including at least two of
the victims who were wounded.One important question that still remains unresolved is whether other
students were involved in planning the attack. Two days after the shoot-
ing, the county sheriff stated to the media that he believed other students
conspired with Carnal prior to the shooting because, he reasoned
Carneal could not have used so many guns himself but must have antici
pated others helping him. Many of the police interviews with Carneal
and with witnesses were directed at determining whether students from
the Goth or freak group were supposed to have picked up the other guns
and joined Carnal. Carnal had four other firearms, multiple sets of
earplugs, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition with him the day of the
shooting. While he denied any sort of conspiracy in formal interviews
with the police and his lawyer, he did reportedly talk to a police officer
transporting him between one jail and another about how the group had
planned the shooting and the other students were supposed to help him
take over the school. As hearsay, these statements were not admissible in
court and later Carnal retracted the statements, insisting that he had
acted alone and that he had just been telling the police what he thought
the wanted to hear. In addition, one of the suspected co-conspirators
was seen staring at the crime scene and smiling immediately after the
shooting.”
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.
Not 6 years later, and not 25 years later.
“On one band trip, Carneal was rolled up in a blanket and hit with sock balls by older band members before a chaperone intervened. Carneal reported that he was picked on by older band members nearly every day.
He also reported being called “gay” and a “faggot” multiple times
daily after the publication, in eighth grade, of a student newsletter that
noted in the “Rumor Has It” gossip column that he liked another boy.
Numerous past and present students at the school said that they did not
know anyone their age who was openly gay, and that it was a source of
shame to have acquired that label. While such a stigma would be hard for
an adolescent boy to manage in any part of the country, it is possible that
the conservative social mores of the South make the accusation of homo-
sexuality particularly difficult. Carnal told his therapist that this bully.
ing had increased significantly after the publication of the column. This
was one of the factors that precipitated Carneal’s slumping grades in
eighth grade.There is a considerable discrepancy between what Carnal reported
about harassment or teasing and the views expressed in our interviews
with his fellow students. From his classmates’ perspective, Carnal was
not picked on any more or less than other students, and he quite consis-
tently picked on other students himself. Because he was loud, a prankster
and a jokester, many of the other students thought he was better able to
defend himself than other, quieter students. How do we reconcile these
two images of Carneal?”
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.
There is no need to reconcile these two images. We have a real person. We have his whole body in a prison, and we have people who want him to stay there.
“Many in the community united against the presence of the media,
particularly the national media, who bore the double onus of being out-
siders to the community and reporting on the worst incident in the town’s
history. The national media outlets, in fierce competition with one an-
other, staked out the school, the local barbeque spot, and the courthouse,
generally disrupting already fraught daily routines. Even more egre-
gious, in the view of many we talked to, was the badgering and harass-
ment of students to give interviews, often without parental consent and
sometimes without even the students’ own consent. One student de-
scribed how a reporter refused to accede to his request not to be inter.
viewed and chased him across the school parking lot. In one response to
the media onslaught, neighbors who lived on the street of the Carneal
home built a blockade to keep the media away from the beleaguered
family.”
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.
According to the victims’ families, they hired their own lawyer
in order to learn who was involved, why it happened, and to force Michael
Carneal and his parents to take responsibility for his actions. They also
hoped that the suits would help prevent future shootings by illuminating
the causes of the Heath shooting and by putting a wide variety of people
and institutions on notice that it was their responsibility to prevent them
Among those against whom they brought suit were Michael Carnal, his
parents, and the neighbor from whom Carnal stole the guns; students
who had seen Carneal with a gun at school before the shooting; students
who had heard that something was going to happen on Monday; students
who may have been involved in a conspiracy; teachers and principals at
Heath High School and Heath Middle School; and the producers of the
Basketball Diaries, the makers of the point-and-shoot video games that
Carnal played, and the Internet pornography sites that he visited.The families felt that students allegedly involved in a conspiracy had not
been fully cooperative with the police and that the suit would force these
people to answer questions that they had not previously addressed. They
also thought that Carneal’s parents had missed warning signs, such as towels
over the vents, a history of vandalism, and the disappearance of family guns
and knives that should have indicated that Carnal needed to be closely
monitored or given psychological help. The complaints alleged that the
schools had not noticed or addressed Carneal’s scholastic decline in the later
years of middle school and in the months before the shooting and had not
raised concern over violent stories that he had written. The complaint also
faults the school for not formulating any plan to prevent school shootings,
despite several past instances of school shootings in Kentucky.Not surprisingly, given the number of people sued, there was a significant community backlash against the families who brought the suit.
The families reported receiving some hate mail, being stared at in public,
and being avoided by some of their old acquaintances. One of the teach-
ers sued was still in his teacher training program at a local university at
the time of the shooting and successfully countersued. This story was
brought up by many as an example of the excess and carelessness of the
handling of the suits. Some thought that the families were not actually
interested in discovering the truth and were simply trying to win a large
monetary judgment. Others felt betrayed because they felt they had
reached out to the victims in their time of need, only to have them turn
around and bring suit. A large majority felt that the suits were inhibiting
the already very difficult healing process, making it impossible for the
community to move forward.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.
In the course of our interviews with adolescents, we are reminded
once again of how “adolescent society,” as James S. Coleman famously
dubbed it 40 years ago, 24 continues to be insulated from the adults who
surround it. While many of the values of adults and children are shared
and the hierarchies of the adult world are mirrored in the adolescent
world, the social dynamics of adolescence are almost entirely hidden from
adult view. The insularity of adolescent society serves to magnify slights
and reinforce social hierarchies; correspondingly, it is only through ex-
change with trusted adults that teens can reach the longer-term view that
can come with maturity. 25 No one knows this better than the teachers at
Heath; we could not put it better than the words of a beloved long-time
teacher: “The only real way of preventing [school violence] is to get into
their heads and their hearts. Everyone in the building needs to have one
person on their side.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2003. Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10370.
We are going to have to have this conversation again in about 18 years.
It’s not a secret.
It’s an industry.
“Rittenhouse, now 18, fired an AR-15-style weapon eight times in all during the unrest: four shots at an unarmed Joseph Rosenbaum, two shots at an unarmed unknown individual, one shot at an unarmed Anthony Huber and one shot at an armed Gaige Grosskreutz, Binger said.
Rosenbaum, 36, and Huber, 26, were killed, and Grosskreutz, now 27, was wounded.”
This industry fills the gap left by our easy access to firearms and lack of faith in civil services: most of the time the police will not save you.
They may even kill you when you have called them.
This is why we have to start being clear about our goals for laws and law enforcement. You either have the right to bear arms, or you do not.
You either have the right to speak or you do not.
“When Ma’Khia first entered foster care, she and her siblings were placed with her grandmother. But after her grandmother lost her housing due to limited financial support from the state, they shuttled through at least five foster homes over two years.”
This is a question about our duty to children. It is not ok to see the huge disparity in care and resources here. It is not ok to see that some kids can grow up with everything a child is supposed to have and become a murderer. It is not ok to see that some are brutalized and do not even get to grow old enough to cast a ballot.
But that is where the money is.
“Click also made sure to mention the American College of Pediatrics standing behind him, but was quickly shut down by outspoken Representative Beth Liston, D-Dublin, who repeatedly questioned him.
“I have to pause and make sure that we correct some misinformation,” she said. “The American College of Pediatricians is a socially conservative advocacy group of one to two hundred pediatricians, as opposed to the American Association of Pediatrics, the AAP, which is the professional organization of tens of thousands of pediatricians for whom gender-affirming care is the standard of care.”
When asked if he spoke to any hospital associations or doctors in Ohio, he referenced a specific doctor that asked him to make this bill, but would not disclose his name. He claimed to have spoken to the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association, but his language made it clear it didn’t endorse his bill — the team just agreed to a conversation.”
I cannot help but notice the way people emphasize their concern for children while they make it clear that children are not actually their priority.
So what is their priority?
In Fall 2022, Carneal is up for parole. And that means there is money to be made writing about all the kids who will kill each other.
And limiting the things teachers are allowed to say.
Edited to add:
He was denied parole in September of 2022.
