College Killers: School Shootings in North America and Europe - Columbine, Jonesboro, Bath, Thurston, Red Lake, Virginia, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Texas Tower, Beslan, Erfurt, Dunblane

by Gordon Kerr

  Cold, Callous Killing

  He was cold-hearted in his approach. An art teacher was ushering her pupils from a classroom when Steinhäuser approached her. She turned and tried to run away from him, but he kicked her from behind and she fell to the ground. ‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed, ‘I’ve never done anything to hurt you!’ But he paid her words no heed. He merely stood over her and pulled the trigger.

  A caretaker called the emergency services at 11:05, the first police officers arriving seven minutes later. Steinhäuser killed one of the first officers on the scene, a 42-year-old patrolman, with a shot to the head from a window.

  Suddenly, Steinhäuser ran into one of the teachers he hated passionately – 60-year-old Rainer Heise – who taught history and art. Steinhäuser was just taking off his mask and Heise claims to have stared deep into his eyes. ‘You can shoot me now,’ the teacher said. Steinhäuser hesitated. ‘Mr. Heise, enough for today,’ he said. Heise continued talking to him, luring him towards the doorway of the empty room 111. The teacher leaned forward suddenly, pushing the gunman into the room and locking the door. Steinhäuser, realizing that his cause was hopeless, shot himself.

  In ten minutes, Robert Steinhäuser had murdered 13 teachers, a policeman and two schoolgirls.

  It would be four hours before the building was declared safe and the trapped and terrified pupils and surviving teachers were freed.

  Winnenden School Shooting

  Year: 2009

  Perpetrator: Tim Kretschmer

  Murdered: 15

  He was ‘unremarkable’, according to local education authorities in Stuttgart, an inconspicuous, unexceptional student who never did anything that would have aroused suspicion. But on 11 March 2009, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer became one of Germany’s most notorious mass murderers when he went on a shooting spree that resulted in 16 deaths, including his own.

  He was the only son of Jörg Kretschmer who ran a packaging company, employing 20 people, including his wife, Ute. They appeared to be a normal family that was well integrated into the relatively small community of Leutenbach in Baden Würtemberg in south-western Germany, where they lived fairly affluently.

  No Friends – For Good Reason

  Jörg had, on occasion, taken Tim with him to the local gun club where they would fire high-calibre weapons together. At home, he kept a small arsenal of guns and apart from a Beretta handgun – the one used by Tim in his spree – he stored them in a locked cabinet. The Beretta was kept in the bedroom of Jörg and Ute.

  Tim had his own weapons cabinet, covering several square metres of his bedroom wall and filled with about 30 firearms, mainly air pistols. Every day, he could be heard shooting in the forest behind his house or in the basement. He was reported to be a good shot.

  One friend who lived nearby later reported how Jörg and Ute had begged his parents to let Tim play with their son as he had no friends. The boy described how Kretschmer always took pot shots at him and his friends with his air pistol when they were playing outside. As a result, they were understandably reluctant to play with him.

  A slightly overweight, bespectacled youth, Tim Kretschmer seemed to be disillusioned with his life, if his social networking pages were anything to go by. On one, he wrote, ‘What do I like? Nothing. What do I hate? Nothing. Job? I’m afraid I’m still a pupil’. Indeed, Kretschmer had graduated from Albertville Realschule in Winnenden in 2008 with relatively poor grades that had prevented him from obtaining an apprenticeship. Because of this he had to attend a ‘commercial high school’ to help him prepare for an apprenticeship instead.

  When not playing violent video games and shooting his guns, Kretschmer played table tennis and harboured dreams of turning professional. His coach, however, remembers him as a spoilt young man whose mother gave in to his demands. As a result, he had great difficulty in accepting defeat, throwing tantrums and tossing his bat away. He had a very high opinion of his own abilities and denigrated the play of his teammates. The coach tried to talk to Kretschmer’s mother about his bad attitude but, unsurprisingly, she took the side of her son.

  A History of Depression

  Kretschmer had received treatment for depression as an in-patient at a psychiatric clinic but, after his discharge, failed to follow up the treatment as an outpatient. Although his parents later denied that their son had received any psychiatric treatment, a psychiatric report prepared for the prosecutor’s office after the killings told that he had met with a therapist on a number of occasions and had discussed the growing anger and violent urges that he was feeling. The therapist had informed Jörg and Ute Kretschmer. Finally, three weeks before the massacre, Tim had written a letter to his parents telling them that he was suffering and that he could not go on.

  The day before Kretschmer ran amok, the television news had been full of an incident in Geneva County, Alabama in the United States in which 11 people had been shot and killed by Michael Kenneth McLendon, who later committed suicide. It has been suggested that Kretschmer was inspired by this atrocity to commit one of his own the very next day.

  On the morning of March 11, Tim Kretschmer stole the Beretta from his parents’ bedroom and donned a black combat suit, the type used by German Special Forces troops. He also pulled on an SK4-Schutz bullet-proof vest before making his way to his old school, the Albertville-Realschule in Winnenden only a couple of miles away.

  No Warning

  Arriving there at around 9:30 a.m., he entered the school, heading straight for the classrooms on the first floor. At the chemistry laboratory, he stopped and fired through the door, wounding the teacher inside. He then proceeded to room 301 – his old classroom – burst through the door, and without saying anything, opened fire. The terrified children screamed and threw themselves to the floor, trying to hide under their desks, but six of them, aged between 15 and 17, died – Selina Marx, Steffi Kleisch, Viktorija Minasenko, Jacqueline Hahn, Nicole Nalepa and Ibrahim Halilaj. He returned twice more to this classroom, emptying his gun on each occasion.

  Realizing the full horror of what was transpiring, the school headmaster broadcast a coded announcement – ‘Mrs. Koma is coming’, ‘Koma’ being ‘amok’ spelled backwards. This alerted the teachers to the fact that a shooting was in progress and that they should lock their classroom doors. This alert had been introduced after the Erfurt school massacre in April 2002 in which 19-year-old expelled student, Robert Steinhäuser, had shot and killed 16 people.

  Back out in the corridor, Kretschmer encountered two young female teachers – 24-year-old German teacher Nina Mayer and 26-year-old Michaela Köhler who, it is believed, courageously tried to block his access to the other classrooms. He coldly shot them dead and continued on his way.

  At classroom 9c, he stepped through the door and emptied his gun into the chaos of the room. Fourteen-year-old Jana Schober, 15-year-old Kristina Strobel and 16-year-old Chantal Schill died in the hail of bullets.

  Murderer on the Run

  At 9:33 a.m., a few minutes after the spree had begun, one of the pupils had succeeded in telephoning the emergency services. Afterwards she recounted how the man who answered could not understand what she was saying because she was screaming. He told her to go outside so that he could hear her better, but she shouted back at him, ‘I can’t go outside because a gunman is running around. There are many seriously injured. Come quickly!’

  Police arrived and began to seal off the school. While they did this, however, Kretschmer escaped through a rear exit.

  As he fled the scene, he shot and killed 56-year-old passerby Franz Just. In a car park, he then hijacked a Volkswagen Sharan minivan driven by Igor Wolf. Seated in the back seat, he ordered Wolf to drive to Wendlingen, about 25 miles (40km) from Winnenden.

  Wolf asked him at one point why he was doing this and Kretschmer replied, ‘For fun, because it is fun’. The teenage gunman also asked Wolf, ‘Do you think we’ll find another school?’ obviously planning to continue the carnage.

  At around noon, just b
efore a junction leading to the A8 autostrasse, Wolf swerved his vehicle onto a grass verge and leapt out, running towards a nearby police car that he had spotted. Kretschmer jumped from the car and sprinted towards a nearby industrial area. He entered a Volkswagen showroom where he threatened to shoot a salesperson he encountered unless he was given the keys for a car. Luckily the man managed to get away from him while he was momentarily distracted. But Kretschmer turned and shot dead another salesperson and a customer, pumping 13 bullets into them. While he re-loaded the others managed to flee the showroom.

  He emerged at around 12:30 p.m. and fired his gun at a passing car but by this time police were pouring into the area. One officer fired eight shots at the teenager, hitting him in each leg. Kretschmer limped back into the showroom and began firing at police from there before exiting through the rear of the building, firing at random. He re-loaded and suddenly raised the pistol to his head, pulled the trigger and crumpled to the ground, dead.

  At last it was over, but not before 112 rounds had been fired and 16 people had lost their lives.

  TERRORISM

  Ma’alot Massacre

  Year: 1974

  Perpetrators: Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

  Murdered: 22

  Ma’alot is an Israeli development town, one of a number of such settlements established by the Israelis in the 1950s. The intention was to provide permanent housing for the influx of large numbers of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, European Holocaust survivors and immigrants from around the world. It is situated on a plateau in the hills of Western Galilee, six miles (10km) from the Lebanese border.

  In 1974, its Netiv Meir elementary school was the victim of a horrific attack by three members of the terrorist organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP).

  The attack began during the night of Sunday 13 May when three members of the DFLP, armed with AK-47 assault rifles and carrying a quantity of Czechoslovakian-manufactured plastic explosives, crossed into Israel through a nature reserve located to the south of the Lebanese village of Ramish. They spent the next day hiding in orchards close to the Druze village of Hurfeish. At one point that day, an Israeli border patrol discovered their footprints, but reported back to headquarters that they probably belonged to smugglers, smuggling being a common pursuit in that border area.

  On the night of the 14 May, the three Palestinians emerged from their hiding place and set out for Ma’alot. En route, they encountered a van that was taking home some Christian Arab women from their work at the Ata textile works in the Haifa Bay area. One of the terrorists opened fire on the vehicle, killing one of the women passengers and wounding the others and the driver. One of the wounded women would later die from her injuries. With great presence of mind, the wounded driver immediately switched off his headlights and reversed at speed back up the hill in the direction from which they had come.

  Terrorism Knows No Bounds

  The terrorists continued to Ma’alot where they began knocking on doors. When Fortuna and Yosef Cohen opened their door, they were shot dead. The terrorists also killed their four-year-old son and wounded their five-year-old daughter. The couple’s 16-month-old baby, who was a deaf mute, was the only member of the family to survive the attack unhurt.

  For the terrorists, however, this attack was merely an appetizer. Their real target was the Netiv Meir elementary school where a party of students on a school trip were currently staying. Meeting a sanitation worker, Yaakov Kadosh, on their way to the school, they asked him for directions before beating and shooting him – leaving him for dead.

  They entered the three-storey school at 4 a.m. and announced that they were taking the 102 students hostage. A few managed to escape by jumping out of windows and running to safety, but by the time the terrorists had secured the building 85 students and several teachers remained. They were ordered to sit on the floor and the explosive charges the terrorists had brought were positioned amongst them.

  Later that morning, the three Palestinians made their demands known to the authorities. They wanted the release of 23 Arab and three other prisoners, amongst whom was the Japanese national Kozo Okamoto. Okamoto had taken part in the 1972 Lod airport massacre in which three members of the Japanese Red Army had killed 26 people at Tel Aviv’s Lod airport. If the authorities failed to meet these demands by 6 a.m. the following day, all the students would be killed.

  People were now gathering outside the school, kept at a safe distance by police and troops. At around 10 a.m. on 15 May, a young man named Sylvan Zerach, saw just how serious the terrorists were when he attempted to obtain a better view of the school by climbing a nearby water tower. As he did so he was shot dead by one of the hostage-takers from a window of the school.

  You Cannot Negotiate with Terror

  The Israeli parliament met in emergency session and it was decided to negotiate with the terrorists, but the Palestinians refused to extend their deadline.

  As the situation became increasingly desperate, the government eventually decided to act. The order was given to the commander of the Sayeret Matkal Special Forces, specialists in counter-terrorism and hostage release, to storm the building. Sayeret Matkal was modelled on Britain’s Special Air Service – the SAS – and even borrowed its motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’.

  The troops were split into three units. Two of the units would break in through the main entrance while the third would use ladders to gain access to a window. Hidden by construction work, the soldiers moved into position and awaited the signal to sniper fire on the three gunmen inside the school. At 5:32 p.m. the first unit entered the building through the main entrance, pushing aside the barricade of tables and chairs that the terrorists had constructed. The Palestinians opened fire on them as they took the stairs to the second floor and one of the Israelis tossed a phosphorous grenade into the second floor corridor to create a smokescreen. Unfortunately the smoke hampered the progress of the second unit that had orders to take care of the terrorist who was located at the third floor window, from where he had shot Sylvan Zerach.

  When the Israelis broke into the classroom where the hostages were being held, one of the terrorists was immediately gunned down, but another seized student, Gabi Amsalem, and held a gun to his head. The third had made his way to the classroom from the third floor and managed to re-load his weapon. He turned to the terrified students and opened fire. He also tossed grenades out the window. Wounded on the wrist by gunfire, he still succeeded in throwing two grenades at a group of girls cowering together on the floor. Meanwhile, other students leapt from the windows to the ground below.

  When the gunfire died away and the three terrorists lay dead, it was discovered that 22 students had died and more than 50 had been wounded.

  The following day, Israel exacted revenge on the Palestinians, bombing seven Palestinian refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon, killing at least 27 people and injuring around 138. Once again innocent people found themselves at the forefront of the terror.

  Beslan School Hostage Crisis

  Year: 2004

  Perpetrators: Ingush and Chechen Terrorists

  Murdered: At least 385

  Secondary School No. 1 in Beslan, in the Republic of North Ossetia, was a large institution with 110 teachers and 1,100 pupils. For Chechen and Ingush people, however, it brought back bad memories. It had been used in 1992 by Ossetian militia as an internment camp for Ingush civilians – women and children amongst them – during the short but bloody Ingush-Ossetian East Prigorodny conflict, in which hundreds of Ingush residents of North Ossetia lost their lives. Not far away was an airfield that had been used by Russian planes carrying out air attacks on Chechnya.

  Under Siege

  On the morning of September 1, 2004, a band of heavily armed rebel guerrillas set out from their Ingushetian base for Beslan, arriving at Secondary School No. 1 in Comintern Street at around 9:30 a.m. They were dressed in balaclavas and belts containing explosives and the lo
cals thought they must be Russian police or Special Forces engaged in an exercise. Although the fusillade of shots fired into the air persuaded them otherwise.

  A number of people escaped the school grounds and alerted police who arrived on the scene shortly afterwards, opening fire on the terrorists, killing one and wounding several others. The terrorists, meanwhile, rounded up everyone in the school grounds and herded them inside. They barricaded the doors but smashed all the windows in order to prevent the authorities from flooding the building with poisonous gas as had happened during a recent terrorist incident in a Moscow theatre.

  The authorities issued the number of hostages as 345, but it was later estimated that there were actually 1,128 being held captive. The hostages were taken into the school gym where all their mobile phones were taken from them. The terrorists ordered them to speak only in Russian and not their local language so that they could be understood. One man trying to relay their instructions in the local language was immediately shot dead with a bullet to the head. Another – who refused to kneel – was also shot, this time being left to bleed to death.

  The people who posed the greatest danger to the terrorists – around 20 of the adult hostages – were led out of the hall and into a corridor on the second floor. There, an explosive belt being worn by one of the women terrorists detonated, killing her and several of the hostages. It is believed that the explosion was detonated by the terrorists’ leader – a man known as ‘Polkovnik’ – because the woman had objected to kidnapping children. Those who did not die in the explosion were ordered to lie down and were executed.

  By this time, Russian Special Forces had moved in, securing the perimeter and occupying three apartment blocks overlooking the school. Ossetian militiamen – the Opolchentsy – were also there in force as well as about 5,000 townspeople who had rushed to the scene, many of them parents of children being held in the gym hall.