by Erik Larson
“I’m not deaf,” Nicholas said.
But he could not remember.
Bill Farley learned of his wife’s death about two o’clock that afternoon from his pastor, who arrived accompanied by a female police officer. The Virginia Beach police had not found Mrs. Farley until ninety minutes after the shootings when the head count determined she alone was missing. A teacher saw her through the window in her trailer, but could not reach her because the door was locked. One of the Virginia Beach officers rushed over and broke the glass with his baton.
“It was unbelievable,” Farley said, recalling his reaction. “Nobody gets shot at a Christian school. It’s in a church building. Come on, get real. People don’t get killed in church.”
Detective Adams believes Karen Farley may have walked in on Nicholas as he was preparing his weapon before his return to the trailer where he encountered Sam Marino and Susan Allen. When police found her, she was still wearing her winter coat. The first bullet had struck her forearm before entering her torso, suggesting to investigators that she had raised her hand either to ask for the gun or to plead for her life, or perhaps merely in another of those magical efforts to defend against the bullet.
Nicholas fired twice, investigators found.
The first shot knocked her down. Next, they deduced, Nicholas walked over to her body and shot her again, firing downward at point-blank range—“execution style,” as the local press put it. The bullet passed through her body and lodged in the trailer floor. The formal cause of death as stated by the state medical examiner was “gunshot wounds of trunk perforating heart. Internal hemorrhage.”
The gun contained a half-empty magazine, one of the six fully loaded thirty-two-round magazines that Nicholas had brought with him to school. “It’s the only magazine of all the six that misfires,” Adams said with a touch of awe. “If he’d gotten one more round off, it would have stopped misfiring and he could have done whatever he wanted at that school.”
The next night, Lora and a friend, Jennifer Cook, picked out what Lora’s mother would wear for her funeral. They also wrapped Christmas presents that Mrs. Farley had hidden in a closet. Months later, in March 1989, Lora and Will would find yet another cache of presents salted away ever so secretly.
“I just try to think about the good times that we had together,” Farley told me as we spoke in the living room of his home. “I miss her, I wish she was still around.” He had remarried, but clearly the pain remained acute. He is a gravel-voiced man of the old school, but as he described his life after Karen’s death, his voice broke. “She was a person I spent almost twenty years of my life with. She was the mother of my children. We all have to go on and make the best of it, but it’s really hard. We were real close. We didn’t have any friends, like lots of people have friends—you know, where they have ‘Bob and Carol’ over all the time. We didn’t have anybody like that. We were each other’s best friends. I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”
The more Farley learned about the gun and the way Nicholas had acquired it, the angrier he became.
Soon after Nicholas Elliot’s arrest, the state of Virginia formally charged him with one count of murder, four counts of attempted murder, and fourteen other related offenses. Three months later, in April 1989, Nicholas’s mother filed a $1 million lawsuit against Atlantic Shores Christian School, alleging the school should have known about the harassment aimed at her son, and had failed to monitor his emotional adjustment, thereby contributing to what the lawsuit describes as the “mental breakdown” that prompted Nicholas’s shooting spree. She later withdrew the suit.
On October 31, 1989, during a court hearing, Nicholas pleaded guilty to killing Karen Farley and to thirteen of the remaining charges. In return for his plea, the state agreed to drop the five least serious charges. During the hearing the prosecutor detailed the evidence against him. Nicholas sat at the defense table with his fingers in his ears.
On December 12, almost one year to the day since the shootings, Nicholas attended his sentencing hearing. The defense presented three character witnesses, including his mother and his barber, Jimmy Edney, who lived just across the street from Nicholas. Edney testified that he had known Nicholas ever since the boy had moved onto the block. He described how Nicholas had done his grocery shopping and tended his lawn after he had returned home from a stay in the hospital. “I wasn’t able to handle it,” Edney said. “… I never had any trouble out of him. He always correspond to me very well.”
Judge Alan E. Rosenblatt found the testimony unconvincing. “These were offenses that were deliberately and cold-bloodedly thought out by Nicholas Elliot,” he told the court. “If the gun had not jammed, there’s no question in my mind I’d be presiding over a mass murderer.” He described Nicholas as a “time bomb” that had finally exploded. “In this court’s opinion,” he said, “he’s a time bomb that could go off again.”
He asked Nicholas if he had anything to say before he pronounced sentence.
Softly, almost too quietly to be heard, Nicholas said, “I’m sorry for what I did.”
“I’m sure you are, Mr. Elliot. But it’s too little, too late.”
He sentenced Nicholas as an adult to life in prison for the murder of Karen Farley. He added another 114 years for the remaining felony charges, then suspended fifty of them. Even at this, however, Nicholas would be eligible for parole fifteen years later, in 2004. He was assigned to the Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia.
His mother held a Bible throughout the hearing. “My child did not get justice,” she said afterward. “He’s just a child.”
Curtis Williams too had been convicted and sentenced. His trial, in March 1989, brought out details of how Nicholas Elliot had acquired his gun that William Farley had not known. One afternoon, after reading fragments of testimony in a local newspaper, Farley decided to explore the possibility of suing both Guns Unlimited and S.W. Daniel. “Number one, I just wanted to get the attention of the gun shop, to say, ‘hey, you all have done something wrong. And just because ATF didn’t do anything to you doesn’t mean it was right, it just means you did it and got away with it.’ ”
He himself kept a handgun for home-defense; Karen Farley too had practiced with it. But the Cobray was different, Farley said. “There’s just no reason for that kind of weapon to be sold in the United States. If you need something like that to protect your home, you better move.”
He approached Randy Singer, a young Norfolk attorney whose wife taught part-time at Atlantic Shores and whose children were enrolled at the school. Singer and his family had been returning from a trip to Disney World when they learned of the shootings from a news report on the car radio. “One thing that struck me about Bill,” Singer said, “was that he was looking for something good to come out of this tragedy.”
Singer told Farley that he too had begun to think there might be grounds for a lawsuit. Farley hired him. In August 1989, Singer filed a negligence and product-liability lawsuit in Virginia state court charging Guns Unlimited with negligence in selling the gun to Nicholas, and charging S.W. Daniel with having indiscriminately marketed an unreasonably dangerous gun, one whose risks far exceeded its utilitarian value. The suit was one of an increasing number of such actions brought in courthouses around the country, including one filed by the family of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, the murdered costar of “My Sister Sam,” against the dealer who sold the murder weapon. The Schaeffer case was settled before trial, however. Farley did not want an out-of-court settlement. “Bill was in this case for the principle of the thing from day one,” Singer said. “His feeling has always been that if this case can make gun dealers follow the spirit and letter of the law, then all the better.”
The lawsuit progressed slowly. The first judge assigned to the case became ill, and soon died. The usual paper combat of motions, cross-motions, and discovery proceedings dragged on for nearly two years. The case finally went to trial in January 1992. In his opening remarks, carefully tailored to
avoid alienating a jury from the heart of Second Amendment country, Singer said, “This is not a case about gun control. The plaintiff is not here today asking you to adopt some new statute or legislation. This is a case about existing laws.”
He presented testimony from Lora and Will Farley, Curtis Williams, James Dick, ATF special agent Raymond Rowley, and others, including Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County police firearms expert. Supenski testified that in the hands of a juvenile, a gun like the Cobray was “death waiting to happen.”
Judge John K. Moore struck his testimony from the record, calling it inflammatory and prejudicial.
At one point, Beverly Cook, principal of the Atlantic Shores Christian School, took the stand to describe the impact of the shootings on the Farley family. Karen Farley, she said, had been the force that held the family together. It was Cook’s daughter, Jennifer, who spent the second evening after the shooting with Lora wrapping the presents and choosing Karen Farley’s funeral garb. The scene was so wrenching, Cook said, obviously fighting tears, that she was concerned for her own daughter’s mental health, how the trauma would affect her. At one point Cook herself visited the Farley home. “I left physically ill. It wasn’t the same home. It was darker, or I may have perceived it that way. Lora was boiling hot dogs while I helped Will with his schoolwork. It wasn’t alive like it had been. I just thought, this is one night, it’s tearing me up. They have to face this every night.”
On Valentine’s Day she called Bill Farley to check on him before going out to celebrate with her own husband. He was home by himself.
“I feel like Bill was just on automatic pilot for those months afterward,” Cook said. “He’d tell me he was fine, but I never felt that he was.”
Things got tougher still for the Farleys.
Bill Farley lost his job, found another, and lost that one too. “Within a six-month period,” he told me with a rueful laugh, “I lost two jobs and a wife.”
He told the court, “I really couldn’t imagine my children having a better mother than she was.”
The jury ruled in Farley’s favor, which in itself constituted something of a landmark in the history of firearms legislation, but the jury awarded the family only $105,000. “I was real happy that we won,” Farley said, “there was no question about that. The main thing we were interested in was winning. I was disappointed in the award, and there’s no question about that either. I have no idea what they were thinking about, with the numbers they came up with. I just have no idea what they had on their minds.”
Still, he said, he accomplished his goal. “I definitely got the attention of the gun store. But we didn’t get their attention as well as we had hoped. I gave it my best shot. I felt something needed to be done. We did all we could do.”
In one respect, however, the suit had failed entirely.
Long before the trial Judge Moore cut S.W. Daniel free of the case. In an order sustaining arguments made by S.W. Daniel’s attorneys, Moore wrote that reigning legal theories concerning negligence and product liability dictated that the “plaintiff must first show ‘goods were unreasonably dangerous for [the] use to which they would ordinarily be put or for some other reasonably foreseeable purpose.’ ”
One way to establish unreasonable danger would have been to prove that the gun was defective. But Farley, the judge wrote, had not made any such allegation. And even if he had, he might have had difficulty persuading the court a defect existed.
“Unfortunately,” Judge Moore wrote, “the weapon worked.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NEW TYRANNY
WHEN ONE FOLLOWS THE PROGRESS OF A single gun from design to homicide, the gaps in existing firearms regulations become painfully obvious. We accomplish little in this country by enacting bans on assault weapons and establishing waiting periods without first addressing the regulatory vacuum that allows manufacturers, distributors, and dealers to shrug off all responsibility for the diversion of guns from legitimate gun-distribution channels. An effective body of firearms laws must recognize an obvious truth obscured thus far by our cultural indulgence in the romance of guns and the effective propaganda of the gun lobby: when guns are easy to get, the wrong people get them easily.
Buying a gun should be the most difficult consumer ritual in America, instead of one of the easiest. Toughening acquisition will not harm legitimate gun owners. The right laws, in fact, can only help them. The right laws can reduce the incidence of impulsive teenage suicides. The right laws can limit the firepower of street guns and undoubtedly save the lives of a few innocent bystanders. The right laws, moreover, can give even gun buffs a greater appreciation of the dangers inherent in the weapons they buy and demonstrate society’s conviction that owning a gun imparts a monumental responsibility to the owner. The right laws could at last bring firearms into the twentieth century in terms of consumer-product safety. Who knows, someday our firearms manufacturers, so adept at devising ever more lethal weapons and ammunition, may even come up with a childproof gun. My Cuisinart food processor can’t be started without first taking a series of deliberate steps; how nice if the same could be said for the guns sold now to women and men for self-defense. Toughening the buying of a gun will not harm responsible users any more than toughening the licensing of hunters and boaters has harmed them. If anything, toughening the process will improve the fast-diminishing reputation of shooters, dealers, and manufacturers alike by reducing the “gun-nut” aura that now taints even those good souls who take pride in improving their marksmanship or who live in such desperate neighborhoods that gun ownership really is their only hope of self-defense.
Most important, toughening the process will staunch the free flow of weapons to the bad guys and others who simply should not own guns. Sure, some will acquire guns through burglary just as they do now. Others will drive trucks through the front walls of gun dealerships. And no matter how strict dealer licensing is, there will always be renegade dealers willing to sell guns into the black market. Likewise, there will always be gun manufacturers who tailor their designs deliberately to the demands of felons. But street crime typically is a crime of opportunity. So too is juvenile homicide. Kids have always fought and will forever do so, but the ready acquisition of guns by kids is a new phenomenon. Even our increasing suicide rate, according to the studies I cited earlier, may be associated with too-ready access to guns, allowing the despondent to blow their brains out upon the least dark whim.
The firearms industry has resisted regulation, disavowing any responsibility for the widespread costs and harm produced by its wares. But then, it has always been adept at ignoring the paradoxes inherent in the production and marketing of weapons. It develops ever more lethal weapons while at the same time insisting that guns are not inherently dangerous. It claims the moral high ground by describing its wares as tools of salvation for those afraid to leave their homes, but somehow deftly manages to sidestep the fact that one reason most of us are afraid to venture forth is that someone with the same gun is going to leap out from behind a bush and shove the barrel down our throats. And that’s if we are lucky enough to encounter the old-fashioned crook who merely wants our money, not the snappy new model who likes to sneak up behind us and put a bullet in our brains so he can use our credit cards for a couple of hours without fear of interception.
The NRA’s greatest coup has been in constantly bleating that gun controls cannot and will not work, while working feverishly to ensure that indeed whatever regulations are enacted are so full of exceptions and gifts to the downtrodden dealers and manufacturers that they could not possibly have an impact. Notice, please, that wherever possible in this book I have avoided using the phrase gun control, a term the NRA has conflated with paranoid visions of jack-booted agents kicking down the doors of honest gun owners.
If one parts the curtain hung by the NRA, one sees that in fact firearms regulations can and do work, when given half a chance.
South Carolina, as I mentioned earlier, was a primary
source of crime guns seized in the Northeast until it passed the nation’s first law limiting sales of handguns to one a month. It quickly fell to the bottom of ATF’s list of states feeding firearms to New York. The National Firearms Act of 1934 sharply reduced criminal use of machine guns. The bad guys undoubtedly turned to other, more readily available guns, but at least when they used the guns, they fired one shot at a time. If still able to acquire machine guns from hardware stores and pawnshops, our felons and gang members would undoubtedly have done so, and the drive-by shootings we read so much about today would have taken far more innocent lives. Patrick Purdy’s attack on the Stockton schoolyard, for example, might have killed even more children had he used a true, fully automatic AK-47, rather than its semiautomatic equivalent. Machine guns made a comeback in the 1980s, but only because such manufacturers as RPB and S.W. Daniel placed guns on the market that could readily, if illegally, be converted from semiautomatic to fully automatic operation.
The Gun Control Act of 1968, however much reviled by the NRA, succeeded in establishing the national tracing network that law-enforcement agencies now take for granted. Strict gun controls in Washington, D.C., helped reduce gunshot homicides in the city by 25 percent from 1976 through 1987, but did not alter the rate of homicide involving other kinds of weapons or the homicide rate in neighboring Virginia and Maryland. This improvement, of course, was erased by the 1990s, when Washington experienced a wild surge of homicides that caused the city to be dubbed the murder capital of America. Although the National Rifle Association likes to point to this as one example of how gun controls cannot work, the real lesson is rather different. Gun controls in a single city cannot possibly succeed when that city is surrounded by regions with few or no controls.
Existing federal laws contain gaping loopholes that allow the free flow of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. We have seen, for example, that a consumer who makes a false statement in filling out form 4473 commits a felony; a dealer who does likewise commits only a misdemeanor. Dealers must keep detailed records of their sales of guns from their stores, but a private citizen can sell a gun to a friend with no restriction. A dealer operating at a gun show must follow all federal regulations, but a private citizen at an adjacent table can sell guns from his personal collection without so much as a signature. Federal law prohibits certain classes of individuals such as convicted murderers and dope peddlers from buying guns, then relies on those same individuals to exclude themselves by giving honest answers on form 4473. This last curiosity would be comical if not for its lethal effect.