Alaska’s First School Shooting
A violent father, a horrific childhood, and a deeply disturbed mind combined to turn Evan Ramsey into a killer.
Evan Ramsey did not have an easy life. His parents, Don and Carol Ramsey, had a volatile relationship. When Evan was five, Don was arrested after an attack on a local newspaper office. He was given a 10-year prison sentence, leaving Carol to raise their three boys on her own. Unfortunately, Carol provided little in the way of parenting. After a call from Carol’s own sister, a social worker from the Department of Family and Youth Services was sent to the Ramsey apartment one night to do a welfare check. The social worker found Carol too drunk to even hold a conversation, and Evan and his two brothers huddled together for warmth. The temperature outside was more than 20 degrees below zero, but the apartment had no heat. The three boys were taken away from Carol, and they lived in a string of different foster homes over the next few years.
The boys soon found themselves lost in a shuffle of foster homes, many of them abusive. Evan, at only eight-years-old, began showing classic signs of depression. A state psychologist who treated Evan wrote in his notes that the boy never had any good dreams. In a two year period, the boys would live in ten different foster homes, and each one seemed to be worse than the last. All Evan knew in life was abuse, poverty, and…