And then the calm before the storm. A few minutes where nothing seems to happen.
And then the first explosion.
“Pause it,” I say. “Run it back a couple of minutes.”
He does.
As he’s rewinding it and as it begins to play again, we both study the school for the shooter.
“Where is he?” Tyrese asks. “I don’t see him.”
“I’m not—”
As soon as the first explosion takes place the first two cameras go out.
“Look,” I say, pointing to the area where we lost the feeds, “the first two cameras they took out are just inside and outside of the back door. I bet that’s where they entered from. They take them out first so they’re not seen coming in, then once they’re inside, the zip tie the door and begin their rampage.”
“You think they did this entire thing without being seen by the cameras?” he asks.
“We’re about to find out.”
After the first explosions, Tyrese runs out of the main office, says something in his radio, then runs back in. Kim and LeAnn run out of their offices, say something to each other, then Kim crosses the commons and up to the main hallway as LeAnn runs into the back door of the main office.
The two janitors rush out of their room in the opposite hallway and out the front door as the lunchroom ladies run out of the back door of the kitchen. Neither group stops—all of them get in their cars and drive off.
Various teachers open their classroom doors and look out briefly before locking them and going back inside.
Kim making her way up the south side of the hallway.
More explosions. More camera feeds blinking off.
The librarian stepping out of the north entrance, looking around, starting to run, then stopping and returning to the library and locking the door behind her.
Other teachers and students making similar calculations.
Then several more explosions. More camera feeds dying. Smoke and debris filling the hallway.
“There,” Tyrese says. “There’s one of them.”
41
Not only is violence not the solution, it’s not even the problem. It’s just the symptom.
“Right there,” Tyrese says, pausing the system.
I move over and focus on the feed he’s pointing to.
There, in the southwest section of the hallway, just as witnesses described, is one of the shooters, dressed in black, with a leather duster, boots, military style black hat, and blank white expressionless mask.
The collar of his duster is turned up, he’s hunched over some, and both the quality and angle of the video are not ideal but he appears to be one of the smaller, slighter members on our suspects list. Of course, that’s most of the skinny, undeveloped kids on our list.
As he stalks his way around the hall, he seems to be firing randomly—putting rounds into the ceiling, walls, doors, and floor. Occasionally he takes aim at the security cameras tracking his movement but rarely hits one.
“Not a very good shot, is he?” Tyrese says.
“Most school shooters aren’t,” I say. “And don’t have to be to do a lot of damage.”
More explosions occur back over in the south section of the hallway, more camera feeds are lost.
“The other shooter must be over there where the cameras are out,” Tyrese says. “Maybe he’s headed east and they plan to meet up on the other end of the circle.”
I nod.
Another feed shows Ace Bowman attempting to lock his classroom door.
In the feed next to it, the shooter takes aim at something outside of the frame. A moment later, back in the other feed, Ace’s hand explodes and he lets go and falls back, leaving the key in the door, the white, now blood-splattered cord holding his keys and lanyard dangling.
Eventually, the shooter steps into the frame that Ace’s hands had been in and then into the classroom and out of view.
After just a few moments, the shooter steps into the hallway again and heads back in the direction he has just come from.
As he passes the northwest library entrance he fires several rounds into the glass doors without slowing his pace.
Continuing east, the shooter begins to try the doorknobs of the classrooms he comes to, finding them locked, moving on, occasionally firing into the rooms through the narrow glass pane.
More explosions rocking the school.
More smoke in the hallways.
Another feed shows a young, skinny, long-legged boy running out of the upper boys’ bathroom and in the direction of the shooter, his bony arms pumping feverishly through the smoke.
He doesn’t make it far.
Rounding the north curve, he comes face to face with the shooter and tries to lock it up and turn directions.
In the other frame, the shooter in the long black leather duster and expressionless white mask raises his assault rifle and fires.
Back in the boy’s frame, his left ankle appears to be hit, his leg flying out from underneath him as he stumbles and falls headfirst into the cinderblock wall.
And though the boy doesn’t move, the shooter fires more rounds at him before continuing on in the direction the boy has just come from.
When the shooter reaches Janna Todd’s room and finds the door open, he goes inside, but quickly comes back out again.
As he’s doing this, another feed shows Janna and her small class running down the short hallway toward the back exit.
Finding the doors locked, they turn and begin to run back down the short hallway toward the main circular one.
Like witnessing a horrific car collision in slow motion, we can see the shooter moving southwest, steadily approaching the area where the back hallway splits off the main one.
Looking back and forth from frame to frame, we can see Janna and the students running down the back hall, getting to a little past the halfway point, as the shooter curves around and reaches the opening. The shooter stopping, turning. The students stopping, turning. The shooter raising his rifle. The students trying to run in the opposite direction though there is nowhere to go, tripping over each other, stumbling, flailing, falling. The shooter firing. Janna being struck in the head, crumpling to the floor, students collapsing around her.
Even on the small, low-quality videos it’s as horrific as anything I’ve ever seen.
With all the students on the blood-covered floor, dead or dying, the shooter continues west, disappearing as the hallway curves south and he reaches the section where most of the cameras have been destroyed.
In other areas of the hallway where the security cameras are still functioning, more explosions, more smoke, more gunfire, more debris.
We continue to watch the feeds but don’t see anyone else until I arrive and run through the commons and up toward the south side of the main hallway.
I’m picked up on various security cameras as I jog through the smoke until I vanish into the southeast area of the hall where the cameras have been bombed.
During this time we’ve not seen either shooter on any feed again.
One has been in the southeast section the entire time and the other disappeared into it after the back exit hallway massacre.
“Both shooters were in the part of the building that you ran into,” Tyrese says.
“Yeah, but by the time I got there I think they had already changed clothes and joined the other students.”
“Why didn’t they shoot Derek Burrell?” he asks.
“They were probably already changed and hiding among the students when he came out,” I say, “but it could have been that they saw him and hid from him, hoping he would get blamed for the shooting or shoot someone or get shot by someone else, which is what happened.”
“Is it possible he was in on it?” Tyrese asks. “He doesn’t seem like the type of kid who would be involved in something like this, but . . . I never figured any of our kids would really go through with something like this so I just don’t know anymore.”
&
nbsp; “It’s possible,” I say. “Right now we have to assume anything is.”
“If he’s not . . . and was just trying to help . . .”
“I know,” I say, frowning and shaking my head, as the hole inside me becomes a little more cavernous.
“Did the shooters shoot Kim or did Derek?” he asks.
“I think it was one of the shooters—probably the one who stayed on the south side of the hallway, but it’ll take ballistics for us to know for sure.”
“I wish we knew how she and Derek are doing,” he says.
“LeAnn’s supposed to call us as soon as she knows something.”
“I hope it’s good news,” he says. “And I know you—”
Before he can finish what he’s saying, one of the SWAT guys runs into the office and yells “We’ve found undetonated explosives. We’ve got to get out of the building now.”
42
A lot of us go to school in daily fear of physical violence. It’s the cruelest of caste systems. Everybody has his place and once you’re in it you can’t leave it. Once you’re a slut or a faggot or poor white trash or slow or stupid or smelly or fat or a nerd or geek or a big ol’ mother-loving, thumb-sucking titty-baby. And don’t even get me started on the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, or Muslims.
“They used a lot of explosives, but a bunch of ’em didn’t go off,” Kenneth Lee, the scruffy bearded, Einstein-haired, middle-aged bomb squad tech is saying.
“Thankfully,” Hugh Glenn says.
He and Chip Jeffers, who have been missing for most of the morning, have joined our small group, consisting of Tyrese, myself, the SWAT team leader, the patrol lieutenant, a sheriff’s department investigator, a medical examiner investigator, and an FDLE crime scene tech.
It’s early afternoon. We’re standing out in front of the high school. Students, teachers, parents, and staff have all gone home, taking their trauma with them.
When the additional undetonated explosives were found, the entire area had been evacuated. The school campus is now mostly vacant, the parking lots empty except for a few random vehicles—most likely those belonging to the victims, some of whom are at the hospital, some of whom are still lying dead inside the school.
The emergency vehicles now form a perimeter at the farthest edges of the school property, the massive media presence, local onlookers, and the few grief-stricken parents still waiting for word about their missing children are all on the other side of it.
Unable to do anything more here, Dad and Merrill are out following up leads and gathering more information about our suspects and the kids who wore black boots today.
While waiting for the bomb squad to finish searching and clearing the buildings, I interviewed as many teachers and students and staff as I could before they left, gathered as much information about every aspect of the attack as I could, and called LeAnn for updates far too many times—particularly considering all she could tell me each time was both Kim and Derek were still in surgery and she’d call me the moment either of them came out and she learned anything at all.
“Most of ’em were pretty crude,” Lee says. “Simple, basic design, not very powerful. Not surprised so many didn’t go off. More surprised at how many did. Since Columbine a lot of rampage shooters try to use some explosives as part of their attack, but most of the time they don’t work. There were probably more that worked at this shooting than most.”
He pauses, presumably to see if any of us have any questions, but continues before we’d be able to ask them.
“We’re talkin’ mostly pipe bombs and a few IEDs on timers. Simple but effective stuff.”
“How much more damage would’ve been done if they had all detonated?” I ask.
“Hard to say. Nothing catastrophic. In terms of the building at least. Wouldn’t’ve brought it down or anything. But we’d be looking at more injuries, possibly fatalities, but only if the kids were close to them. I’d say the devices used were either deployed to be used mainly as diversionary tactics or more likely they didn’t know what they were doing and made big firecrackers more than anything else.”
“Once we identify our suspects,” the sheriff’s investigator says, “can you let us know what kind of supplies they would need to build so we can look for them at their houses?”
“’Course,” Lee says.
“Is it safe for forensics, ME, and investigators to go in?” Hugh Glenn asks.
Lee nods.
“Okay,” the FDLE tech says, “let’s get in there and get to work.”
As the FDLE crime scene techs and the ME investigators enter the building, the leader of the SWAT team walks over to me.
“We looked for what you asked us to,” he says. “Wanna see what we found?”
I nod. “Absolutely.”
So far no one has taken my weapon, put me on administrative leave, or asked me to go home. I plan to keep investigating until they do.
We follow the techs inside but head in the opposite direction.
He leads me through the commons, behind the curtain and backstage.
There among the costumes and props from Tristan and Denise’s play is a pair of black paramilitary style boots. They are partially hidden behind the box of guns used in the play.
“We haven’t touched them,” he says.
I slip on a pair of latex gloves and lift the books to examine the bottoms, as I make a mental note to make sure forensics and ballistics check to make sure none of the guns are real. There appear to be traces of blood on the bottoms of the boots.
“Great work,” I say.
“There’s more,” he says.
I replace the boots where he found them and say, “I’m ready whenever you are.”
“Follow me.”
He leads me back through the commons, up the hallway to the library.
Carefully stepping through the shattered glass of the doors, he leads me behind the counter, past the back office, to the media department where Zach Griffith works and the room he came out of following the shooting.
“We found another pair under the desk in here,” he says. “Under there.”
He points to a desk with a computer and camera on it.
I walk around it, kneel down, and look beneath.
There on the carpet beside the plastic chair mat is another pair of black boots not unlike the ones they found behind the stage.
I lift and examine them.
There are no obvious signs of blood, but they look like they’ve been cleaned recently, the bottoms still damp.
“Great work,” I say, standing up. “We need to get the crime scene techs in here to process them.”
When we exit the library, I thank him again, and he goes in one direction and I go in the other. Instead of walking back outside with him, I walk around the hallway to take another look at the scene and see how the FDLE techs and ME investigators are proceeding.
As I pass Ace Bowman’s classroom, I see one of the ME investigators examining his body.
In the classroom and all through the hallway crime scene photographers and videographers are documenting every aspect of the surreal site.
Most of the smoke is long gone from the building but the acrid odor remains.
Passing the back hallway exit and seeing the bodies of the teacher and two students being processed by an ME investigator I realize we had far fewer fatalities than we might have had. There are many who are wounded and I have no idea if any of them have potential life-threatening injuries, but as of this moment only two teachers and two students have been killed.
Nearing the place where I shot Derek Burrell my hearts begins to beat arrhythmically and a cold, sweaty sheen begins to cover my clammy skin.
I pause roughly where I had fired from and look over to where he had been standing. Even without the smoke and gunfire, pandemonium and adrenaline, the curve of the hallway wall and the little alcove he was in make it difficult to see.
It’s no wonder, given everything that was going on that from his
position and limited visibility, he shot at both Kim and me.
I continue around the hall, avoiding the debris and blood and working crime scene techs, toward the lockers where the shooters’ things had been found.
As I reach them, I can see that FDLE techs are already processing the lockers and the things in them.
After examining the lockers and their relative position to everything else, I stand beside them and look in both directions.
From where the lockers are located, Mason could have quickly jogged over and entered the library and Dakota could have run around the corner to join the bodies on the back hallway floor. And they could’ve done it without being seen by Kim or Derek—probably before Derek even came out into the hallway with his gun.
“Look at this,” one of the techs says, holding up the outfit from the locker with the assault rifle in it.
In the crime scene suit and mask, it’s difficult to tell if the blobish figure is male or female, and the small voice coming from behind the mask doesn’t help.
I turn to study the clothes. And am surprised by what I see.
The shirt, pants, and duster have all been sewn together to form one garment. They’ve also been cut down the middle in the back the way funeral homes do the clothes of dead people, but unlike the duds of the dead, these have velcro sewn in them.
“Made it easy to get in and out of, didn’t they?” the tech says.
“Yes it did,” I say. “They planned all along to discard their gear and hide among the other students.”
“It’s ingenious,” the tech says. “Like a costume for an actor who has to be able to change quickly backstage.”
“Both outfits are like that?” I ask.
Another tech holds up the other one from the locker with the handgun inside it and nods.
“They’re the same except for size and soil,” she says. “This one is shorter and smaller and, unlike the bigger one, has less damage to it, less blood on it.”
A ballistic tech about five feet away examining the two guns used by the shooters says, “That fits with what I’m seeing here. The assault rifle has lots of empty clips and was fired at an extremely high rate, but the nine wasn’t used nearly as much. Only has one clip—the one that’s in it—and looks to have only been fired about seven or eight times. Of course both weapons have the serial numbers filed off so they’ll be impossible to trace.”
Bloodshed (John Jordan Mysteries Book 19) Page 16