by John Niven
The dead included the suspected gunman, whom law enforcement sources have identified as Daniel Kemp, 21. Police said that Kemp first apparently killed his father, Ted Kemp, at the home they shared in Schilling. Then he drove in his car to Truman Elementary.
In the car, authorities said, were three guns: a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle and two pistols, a Sig Sauer and a Glock.
At the school Kemp proceeded to shoot and kill three adults – including the school’s principal Michael Schneider – and 19 children. They were shot in two different rooms of the school, police said.
It has become the third deadliest school shooting in US history, after the massacres at Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA, and Sandy Hook in Connecticut. But the sheer scale of Friday’s killing – and the nature of its victims, small children shot in the sanctuary of a school – deepened the horror, and unleashed a shaking kind of grief.
President Trump spoke about the shooting from the Oval Office, calling the shooter ‘A coward. A loser,’ before going on to say, ‘The victims and their families are in our thoughts and prayers.’ The president promised ‘major, major action to prevent more tragedies like this,’ but did not say specifically what he might do. ‘I do want to thank the first responders,’ Trump added. ‘The police, the paramedics who were on the scene in, just record time, I think. Two or three minutes. Incredible when you think about it. Just record time.’
Among the dead were mother and son Pippa and Adam Brill, according to law enforcement sources. Pippa Brill had taught at the school for just over a year, when her five-year-old son Adam had been enrolled. ‘Pippa was always enthusiastic, always smiling, always game to do anything,’ said Chrissy Carson, a former president of the school’s parent-teacher association.
In a phone interview, Carson choked up as she recalled Brill hugging students at the start of the school year. ‘She was so loved by those kids.’
Joe Deering, who lived for a time on the same street as the Kemps, recalled Daniel Kemp as withdrawn, but not threatening in any way. ‘I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t look you in the eye,’ Deering said in a telephone interview Friday night. ‘Just kind of weird, maybe.’
Police described the school itself as one of the most horrific crime scenes they had ever encountered, and officials said the first-arriving responders would be given counseling. The gunman kept firing, keeping law enforcement officers at bay for nearly an hour after he fired the first shots. Tragically many of the victims may not have died right away.
Children who were evacuated from the school said later that they had been told to keep their eyes closed until they were outside. Police said that as the day went on they had accounted for every child who attended the school, tracking down even those who were absent because of illness.
The guns used in Friday’s shootings were believed to have been purchased legally, and were registered to a family member of Daniel Kemp’s, a law enforcement source said.
Police had been summoned by a number of 911 calls. Both state and local police converged on the school around 12.10 p.m. according to Indiana State Police Lt. L. Peter Rance, and began ‘a complete active shooter search of the building’.
In this small town south of Indianapolis, police cars began screaming toward the school. At First Trust bank, teller Jane Marcellus thought she saw 30 police cruisers. In the middle of a transaction one of her customers screamed, ‘Oh my God! I have to get my kids!’ Later, Marcellus learned she had a connection to the Kemp family: she had helped Ted Kemp with bookkeeping over the years, and had even bought a dog from him. Such connections are common in a small place like Schilling, she said. ‘You can’t get any closer to home than this. It’s definitely going to affect this community badly.’
Police were finally able to enter the school at 1.48 p.m. and officers searched the classrooms for a shooter. When they found the gunman, however, he was dead by his own hand.
No officer fired a shot.
Frank often thought about the timings when he was doing the Computations: 1.05, when he first checked the time, just before that fellow ran in and turned the TV on. He’d taken, what? Two minutes to get dressed? Ten or fifteen to get down there? He’d been fighting with the cops by 1.25 at the latest. The shooting had gone on for at least another ten minutes while Frank sat screaming on the kerb. With every ‘pop’ of the pop pop pop pop pop Frank had the same thought: was that my wife? Was that my son? They found Pippa’s body in a hallway. Kemp had shot her four times from behind with the 9mm Glock, at fairly close range, the bullets exiting approximately through her navel, mid-sternum, right breast (the breast you saw for the first time in the milky light of that hotel bathroom) and, with the last shot (Kemp clearly raking his fire upwards), the base of the skull. ‘That last shot? It was a blessing, Frank,’ Chief Jacobs told him a few days later. ‘She’d have died instantly. Wouldn’t know a thing about it from then on.’ The skull shot exited out of her mouth, blowing teeth and tongue and gums all into a pulp. It felt like the strangest kind of blessing to Frank. But then, when he thought about what happened to his son, he guessed maybe it was. They found Adam in his classroom, the first one Kemp had entered. The ballistics reconstruction concluded that he’d sprayed the room with the Glock and the Sig Sauer, one pistol in each hand, emptying both weapons, firing twenty-five shots. He’d killed the teacher (Miss Janos) and six of the five-year-old students and wounded eight. Adam had been hit in the stomach as he tried to hide behind a bookcase. He’d bled to death sometime between being shot (approximately 12.31 – around the time, Frank later worked out, that he was hitting his drive on the eighteenth tee, a nice long draw that just cleared the bunker on the right, giving him a good line into the green) and the police entering the room at 1.48, a few minutes after Daniel Kemp put the gun in his own mouth. Oh the hours, countless, that Frank had put into reconstructing those seventy-seven minutes. Would his son have been calling out for his mother? For him? ‘Please, Daddy! Help me, Daddy!’ How painful would it have been? Frank remembered accidentally trapping Adam’s fingers in the kitchen door when he’d been three. He could still hear the screams. But this? Just trying to imagine it, even now, nearly a decade later, made him teeter back on his heels, reeling. Frank had been to enough shooting ranges in his time to know his son would have been smelling the cordite in the air, the sharp, acrid smell of gun smoke. He’d have been seeing and hearing his classmates crying out in pain. There were twenty-two kids in the class. Eight of them had not been hit. What had they been doing? Did they try to help each other? Did any of them comfort the ones who’d been shot? Frank tried to get in touch with the parents of a couple of survivors from Adam’s class but was told they did not want to put their kids through the experience of reliving those moments.
So Frank was left, naturally, with his own imagination, which was happy to invent details for him: the puddles of blood on the floor, thick and oily, tiny fingers trying to hold in entrails, the exit wounds, big enough on adults, like saucers. On little kids? Like soup bowls, dinner plates. All the different little voices, high and shrill, crying ‘Mummy! Mummy!’, blending in a harmony from hell. The burn marks, the muzzle stamps, on the flesh of the ones shot at very close range. Incredibly, there was worse to come. Frank gave a brief interview to CNN a couple of days after the attack where, broken by grief, he mumbled something about the need to prevent these things from ever happening again. The clip went viral. Then he got the NRA people coming at him on social media, on Fox, calling him a communist. Calling him a queer. Calling him an actor. Some of them seized on the fact that his wife had been shot in the back, using it as proof that she’d been running away, that she’d been abandoning the children. (Frank knew exactly where Pippa had been running to – Adam’s classroom. She’d died in the hallway around twenty-five yards from it.)
‘Fuck this fag and his coward bitch wife’ @MAGASTEVE33
‘Libtard Frank Brill sucks dicks’ @patriothunter118822
‘I bet this guy’s kid died crying like a pussy’ @trumper21
On and on it went. Frank kind of liked looking at this stuff. The shock of reading some of them was about the only thing that could punch through the numbness he was feeling in those months, back through the endless, miserable summer of 2017, when he started drinking again after three years sober, soon working his way through maybe a bottle and a half of vodka every day. Crying and wailing and shouting and gnashing his teeth as he wandered around the hot, empty house in his underwear. No more chilled Pinot Grigio to open when he heard her car in the driveway. No more carrot sticks.
Frank’s grief would eventually be overshadowed by an even greater American tragedy, in the autumn of 2020, just before the election. In response to the Schilling school shooting President Trump had appointed a new gun tsar – the former NRA chairman Dale Beckerman. An odd choice, some felt. Beckerman came up with the policy the press came to call ‘Rambo Teachers’. Gun-enthusiast educators were found in schools nationwide and given bonuses if they trained in armed combat and carried a weapon at all times during school hours. The policy was initially greeted with wild enthusiasm by the president’s supporters. This waned even among the hardcore after the Coolidge High shooting in Kentucky. Two seventeen-year-old students, Lee Marks and Howard Devlin, entered the building armed with AR-15s and a range of handguns and proceeded to mow down their schoolmates. They were engaged by shop teacher Donald Lafferty (armed with his own AR-15) and the school’s janitor, Walter Huff, who happened to keep a Beretta 9mm (as well as a fifth of Night Train) in his cleaning closet. Police estimated that over 3,000 rounds were expended in the resulting chaotic firefight. By the time the smoke cleared, ninety-four students and eight staff members (including Huff, shot in confusion by the police) were dead. A total of 102. Which now became the worst mass shooting in American history. Following Trump’s re-election two months after the massacre Beckerman formulated and then passed the Coolidge Law: legalised open carry in every state in the USA.
Only one good thing had come out of this hellish time. The morning after the shooting at Adam and Pippa’s school, the house phone had rung. Not unusual – it had been ringing every two minutes: the press, friends, cranks. Frank had let it go to voicemail, just lying there on the hall floor, drinking a beer, wondering where he was. Then he heard a girl’s voice, high and shaky, saying, ‘Hi, Dad. It’s me. Olivia.’
Olivia, Frank’s fifteen-year-old daughter.
The only child of his second marriage.
They hadn’t spoken in two years.
FOUR
‘That place is going to be the fifty-first state.’
A little after seven o’clock Frank printed off some maps and route plans, turned off the computer and headed out to eat. He hesitated at the car door, keys in hand. It was a two-minute drive or a ten-minute walk to Carlo’s, his local diner. Having weighed up how cold it was against the need to get some exercise, he was just pocketing the car keys when he heard ‘Evening, Frank’, and turned to see old Mrs Rosen, his neighbour, coming along the sidewalk, walking her little dog.
‘Oh. Hi, Rachel,’ Frank said.
‘Bitter cold,’ Mrs Rosen said.
‘Yeah. Had enough of it myself actually. I’m going to take off tomorrow. Head down to Florida for a few weeks. Play some golf.’
‘Good for you, Frank. Quite right.’
Frank stamped his feet. ‘Well, better get going.’
‘You take care now, Frank. Enjoy the sunshine.’
‘Sure will. Night, Rachel.’
She watched Frank head off beneath the bare branches of the avenue, shrugging down into his overcoat, seeking warmth, thinking what every neighbour who encountered Frank thought: you poor, poor man. Frank knew this. He didn’t mind. He sang softly to himself – ‘you take a little piece of me, with you …’ – as he walked, breath pluming behind him in the dark night. At the top of his street he waited to cross Lincoln, the main road that ran west to east across the town. Frank had lived here his whole life. His parents, children and one of his three wives were all buried here. The air around him – thick with ghosts. But he didn’t mind tonight. No, tonight Frank felt optimistic. Almost happy. Waiting for the lights to change he concentrated on his insides, trying to feel if it was really happening in there, this thing that was going to kill him. That had liberated him. That had finally made him green-light this thing he’d been thinking about for so long.
To his left, west, was downtown. To his right, east, was the area known as Barksdale. Little Germany they used to call it, where his high school, Jackson, had been. Thinking of this, a stray image flashed into his mind: him and his best friend Robbie McIntyre (orange file) in the spring of senior year, smoking a joint lying on the flat roof at the back of the school, overlooking the football field, where the team were training. You could hear the shouts of Coach Hauser in the distance, exhorting, pushing the jocks on. Robbie had been on the team. Then he wasn’t. Frank recalled Robbie now, sitting up, red-eyed, drawing on the little one-skinner as he stared off into the sun and said to himself, ‘That son-of-a-bitch …’ That was all Robbie ever said about it. Should Frank have known then? Him and Robbie had been so close.
Then they graduated – Frank went to work at the paper and Robbie went off to college in North Carolina. The next time Frank saw Robbie was ten years later, at his funeral, laid out in a pine box, his skin so white. The first dead person Frank ever saw. Twenty-eight years old.
The lights changed and Frank crossed the street, communing with his dead in the cold Schilling night, the diner bright, the windows steamed up, Carlo moving around behind the grill in his whites, the waitresses in black with their coffee pots and water pitchers. The bell rang as he entered and a few people looked his way. Busy for a week night. He nodded a couple of ‘hellos’.
That’s poor Frank Brill.
His wife and son. His daughter too, you know.
Poor Frank.
Yeah, guess what, fuckos, Frank wanted to say. Now I’ve got the cancer too. How about that? Don’t that beat all? ‘Hey, Frank,’ the young Mexican waitress he liked – Carmel? No, Carmen – was saying to him, already leading him to a booth. Young? She was probably in her late thirties. ‘I saw you coming across the street,’ she went on as she settled him in with menu and cutlery, pouring ice water. ‘Cold night to be walking …’
‘Need the exercise.’
‘No no. You in your prime. Diet Coke?’
‘Please. What’s the special?’
‘Chicken pot pie.’
‘That too. Thanks, Carmen.’
Frank took the file out of his jacket and laid it down beside his water glass. Laughter from the booth across from him, four guys, in their thirties, sharing a pitcher and chicken wings. He didn’t know them. Looked like out-of-town. They all had their guns – three automatics, a big revolver – piled up on the table, barely enough room for the food and drink. You saw it all the time now. Folk would go to sit down for dinner and they’d have it digging into the small of their back, heavy under their armpit, even stuffed in their waistband (legally you were meant to have a holster, but this went pretty much unenforced in most states), so they all wound up on the table. The Coolidge Law. His drink arrived. Frank poured it into the frosted mug, not caring about the foam cresting over the rim, pooling on the table, and drummed his fingers on the orange file. File number one.
The List. How had it begun?
Three years ago, after Olivia. A psychologist would probably have called it ‘a coping strategy’. A way of directing his feelings of powerlessness and rage. But in recent months, since he’d started suspecting what had been confirmed in Dr Bowden’s office earlier today, Frank had found himself applying himself to it with a new fervour. As the cancer had grown, so had The List. It had gone from two names, to three to four, until finally, and after much serious thought and calculation, to five.
Five names. A blend of the personal and the political, even though, with the politica
l ones, it was still very personal.
Each of the names now had a file dedicated to them. Obviously some of these contained more research than the others, were demanding much more planning. But, yeah, as soon as the doctor had said the three magic words this afternoon, he’d known. Before Frank was even out of the place The List had gone from being any kind of psychological coping tool to being a real thing. In a way, he realised now, sipping his sugar-free soda, he’d been waiting for the diagnosis. Almost hoping for it. ‘On a long enough timeline,’ a doctor friend had told him once, ‘everyone gets cancer.’
‘And here you go, Frank. Need anything else?’
‘I’m good, thanks.’
A big roar of laughter went up from the booth across. They’d had another pitcher delivered while Frank was waiting for his food. He cut into the crust of the pie and let the cloud of steam fill his face, mist his glasses. The filling – chunks of breast meat in thick chicken gravy studded with carrots and peas – was too hot to eat right away. Frank dunked a forkful of mashed potato in it and chewed. He could tell it was good, but of course he had no appetite, had been forcing himself to eat for a while. He ate slowly and reviewed his route plan, which formed a kind of appendix to the file. It’d changed a few times as he’d redrawn the order, finally deciding the chronology based on level of difficulty rather than geographical convenience. Walk before you could run and all that. It meant he’d be kind of criss-crossing the country a fair bit. But that was OK. Money didn’t matter any more. He figured he had more than enough to see this through, or at least get as far as he was going to get with it. (Side note – he’d need to go to the bank tomorrow and withdraw a few thousand in cash, to cover travelling and accommodation expenses. He didn’t want to be using credit cards any more than he had to, to avoid leaving any kind of paper trail.)