Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  Then the nightmares about those faceless dead boys started. Tony began to fantasize about how Maust’s corpse might have looked.

  Tony and Dave had been too similar for Tony’s comfort. Abandoned children with profoundly flawed mothers and absent fathers. An unbearable yearning for a real family. Violence. Poor education. Emotional issues galore. Prison experience. Contentment on the far edge of society.

  In 2005, on parole for his federal charge of being a felon in possession of guns, Tony met his current girlfriend. They had a son, Ethan, two years later and are making plans to marry someday soon. He finally has his family, and they have become his sole reason for staying straight.

  Tony’s been clean for two years, and for the sake of his son, he works hard to keep his criminal past—and his demons—from coming back. He got into a trade school for cabinet-making and now lives in a tidy apartment in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

  David Maust still haunts him, but the dreams aren’t as frequent now. Tony’s shaved head bears a web of grotesque scars where Maust beat him nearly to death. And some nights, fewer than before, he allows himself to sink into bouts of self-blame.

  He is agonizingly aware that his own choices in life make him a less sympathetic victim, and he can live with that.

  While victims often sort through their anger and guilt by forgiving their attackers, Tony hasn’t forgiven David Maust. He hasn’t even forgiven himself. He’s now locked in a prison of his own making.

  “It’s just hard now to know what’s true,” Tony says. “David Maust was the only guy who ever pulled the wool over my eyes. That’s what I live with every single day. My life sucked, but I have to believe these kids … these kids had a better shot than I ever did. It’s so unfair. I feel like I let them down, and they know it.”

  THE SUN HADN’T YET RISEN on a cold, melancholy Kentucky morning, and Missy Jenkins was already running late. What fifteen-year-old girl would be in a hurry to roll out of a warm bed into a chilled and gloomy world for the first day of school after the four-day Thanksgiving break?

  When she couldn’t suspend time any longer, Missy yanked on a pair of black sweatpants, a white blouse borrowed from a friend, and a black sweatshirt, quickly pulled her hair back into a ponytail, grabbed her tennis shoes and a Pop-Tart, and hit the front door with her twin sister Mandy in tow. No time for hugs and kisses good-bye.

  “We’re leaving!” she hollered to her parents. She didn’t wait for a reply as the door slammed behind her.

  Missy and Mandy caught a ride to school, as usual, with a friend whose sister was a senior and had a car.

  The tight-knit Heath community wasn’t big, and the rural Heath High School was only fifteen minutes from Missy and Mandy’s house. With about six hundred students, the high school was the center of community life, typical of many small towns. The biggest discipline problems were tardiness, unexcused absences, and minor classroom disruptions.

  The girls were cutting it close if they wanted to join the prayer circle, where a few dozen students gathered in the school lobby every day before class to join hands and pray. Worse, Missy wasn’t feeling well, she needed to go to the bathroom, and she had a first-period test in World Civilizations.

  TWINS MISSY (LEFT) AND MANDY JENKINS BOTH CAME CLOSE TO DYING WHEN THEIR FRIEND MICHAEL CARNEAL OPENED FIRE DURING A PRAYER MEETING IN THEIR KENTUCKY HIGH SCHOOL FOYER IN 1997.

  Courtesy of the Jenkins Family

  Missy glanced at her watch. Time was suddenly speeding out of her control.

  They hurried into the school foyer to find the prayer circle already coming together. Missy quickly spied a friend, Kelly Hard, whom she asked to come to the bathroom with her.

  “Let’s just do the prayer circle,” Kelly said, “and we’ll go to the bathroom after.” No big deal, Missy thought. The ceremony was often short and sweet, and she could make it through, no problem. So they put down their books and joined the circle of a few dozen students that curled around the entire foyer. She held hands with Kelly on her left and with sister Mandy on her right.

  The girls bowed their heads and closed their eyes to pray for any of the students who offered prayer requests. Missy put a lot of stock in prayer. She trusted it. It comforted her.

  When they finished, the circle’s organizer and prayer leader, a senior football player and son of a preacher named Ben Strong, said a simple “Amen.”

  Then all hell broke loose.

  LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE SHOOTINGS AT HEATH HIGH SCHOOL, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD SUSPECT MICHAEL CARNEAL PLEADED GUILTY BUT MENTALLY ILL TO MURDER CHARGES AT MCCRACKEN COUNTY COURTHOUSE IN PADUCAH, KENTUCKY. HE WAS GIVEN A LIFE SENTENCE AND WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR PAROLE IN 2023.

  Associated Press

  ALIENATED AND ISOLATED

  Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old freshman, rose before dawn, too. He showered and dried himself, as he usually did, with six separate towels. He dressed in dark clothes and reached under his bed for a hidden bundle.

  Today was going to be a big day at school for him. He was a B student and played in the school band. He came from a good family and attended church. His popular older sister was a Heath valedictorian. He was bright and compliant with his teachers but also forgetful and nervous. And although he had friends in passing at Heath, no one was close, and he existed on the fringe of several cliques, truly belonging to none.

  Five-foot-two (1.5 meters) and considered a little dorky, Michael suffered teasing and some bullying, ranging from being called “four eyes” to being noogied until his scalp bled. On a band trip, he was rolled up in a blanket and hit with sock balls by upperclassmen before a chaperone broke it up. In eighth grade, some kids called him “gay” and a “faggot” after a student newsletter’s gossip column reported that he liked another boy.

  One day, a classmate came up to Michael and asked for one of the doughnuts he was eating. Michael shared the package with the kid, who spit on one of the doughnuts and threw it back.

  But Michael was also a jokester who gave as good as he got, craving attention and friends alike. He could be just as harsh with his own remarks and childish pranks on his classmates. Once he showed the band kids a homemade button with Missy’s picture on it and teased her for being “fat.”

  He had made the kind of trouble freshman boys at country schools make, but he wasn’t a troublemaker. He set off a stink bomb in eighth grade and once sold a baggie of parsley to a friend, claiming it was marijuana. In his first two months at Heath High School, he racked up five relatively minor infractions, including using a library computer to visit the Playboy website, marking a classmate’s neck with a ballpoint pen, and stealing a can of food from his life-skills class.

  In many ways, Michael Carneal was just a cloying, awkward misfit wrestling with puberty and desperately seeking his peers’ approval. In other words, he was a lot like millions of kids.

  But there was a darker side to Michael that most never saw. Self-conscious and insecure, he felt picked on and pushed around. His alienation from other kids made him think about suicide. The summer before school started, he sliced his own forearm, but told adults he was injured in a bicycle accident.

  Weird, secret delusions were cropping up, too. He was afraid to sleep in his own bed because he feared monsters were coming to get him, so he often slept in the family room. He was afraid falling trees would crash through his house. He hid kitchen knives under his mattress. He laid towels over all the bathroom vents because he believed he’d seen glowing eyes watching him. He sometimes walked on furniture because he imagined slashers with chainsaws were hiding near the floor to cut off his feet. He often announced when entering his bedroom, “I know you are in here.”

  Into the wee hours of the dark night, he sat at his computer, playing violent video games, visiting chat rooms, and sending out hundreds of e-mails, safely distant from all the perils of personal contact. But he was also surfing porn sites that he shared with schoolmates, reading about bomb- and weapon-making at The Anarchist’s Cookbook site,
and studying war gamers’ attack plans. Even his school essays began to take on a more violent, suicidal tone, but not enough to send up red flags.

  GOTHS AND GUNS

  In an effort to fit in, he often gave stolen CDs as gifts to other students—or sometimes gave away his own possessions and said they were stolen—because he believed low-grade crime made him cool. Not long before this dark, cold morning, he stole some hundred dollar bills from his dad’s wallet and gave them to the goth kids he was now trying to impress.

  Michael wanted badly to be so cool that his imaginary enemies could be belittled. He wanted to be a goth, to belong to a group of kids who didn’t belong. He even wore mocking homemade buttons that said “Preps Suck” and had written a short story he called “Halloween Surprise,” in which all those popular kids were attacked with grenades and a shotgun by the brother of a boy named Mike, who gave the corpses of the slaughtered classmates to his mother as a gift.

  The scruffy, cynical goth kids purposely didn’t fit in. They dressed in black, cut their hair in macabre ways, wore dog collars, painted their fingernails black, listened to death metal, and didn’t care what other people thought of them.

  The goths derided the Bible thumpers of the prayer circle as hypocrites, no better than the well-scrubbed preppies who thought they were better than everyone. The goth kids were openly derisive, talking loudly and laughing intentionally during prayer time.

  Although a lifelong churchgoer, Michael adopted the goths’ misanthropic sneering at religion. He began to call himself an atheist, but it was all for show, mostly just to fit in. He considered freshman Nicole Hadley, a prayer-circle regular who had recently moved to West Paducah from Nebraska, to be one of his best friends. She had walked with him at their eighth-grade graduation ceremony, a local custom of some significance between friends. Nicole often visited Michael at his house and openly nudged him to be more religious. It wasn’t unusual that he had called her on the phone almost every night in November 1997, ostensibly about science homework, but mostly just to hear her voice.

  And secretly, he had a crush on sophomore Kayce Steger, another prayer-circle girl and a devout Christian whom he asked on a date about a month before. She had politely rebuffed him.

  Nevertheless, the diminutive Michael thrived on the illusion that he was a tough-guy nonconformist. The day before Thanksgiving, Michael boldly told one of the goth kids that “the hypocrites in prayer group were going to go down, ’cause I am going to bring ’em down.”

  Indeed, Michael told several people, including prayer-circle leader Ben Strong, “something big” was going to happen in the school lobby soon. But ever since he’d logged on to a website called “101 Ways to Annoy People” and began a deliberate campaign to nettle his classmates, his grandiose threats rang hollow. He even warned some to stay away from the prayer circle after Thanksgiving, but most thought it was going to be another stink bomb. He mused in the cafeteria about taking over the school in an armed assault, and kids laughed. When he pulled a handgun on students in the band room the day before Thanksgiving, the kids chalked it up as just another of his infantile pranks. Nobody tattled because nobody took Michael Carneal seriously.

  That first Monday after Thanksgiving, he stowed his secret, duct-taped bundle and his olive-drab backpack in the trunk of his sister’s Mazda before she drove him to school. He told her they were props for a skit he was performing in English class that day.

  But they weren’t. Michael Carneal’s awkward kit contained two antique shotguns and two .22 rifles wrapped in an old blanket, all stolen from a neighbor’s gun cabinet. In his backpack were a .22 Ruger semiautomatic pistol he also filched from a neighbor’s garage, earplugs, three spare eleven-bullet clips, and more than a thousand rounds of stolen ammunition.

  When he arrived at school with his considerable arsenal, Michael entered through a back door into the band room (where a band teacher asked what he was carrying and was satisfied by the same English-skit response), wandered up through the empty auditorium, through back hallways, past the main office, and into the crowded lobby, where the prayer circle was gathering. He walked past his goth friends and put the blanketed bundle on the floor beneath the school’s trophy case.

  Somebody asked him what he was carrying and again, he said it was for a class play. Satisfied, the other student turned away, and nobody else talked to him. Michael was again alone in a roomful of people as he pulled out his gun.

  Nobody noticed. It angered him that, yet again, nobody noticed.

  You’ve got to do this for yourself, said the voice in his head. For yourself.

  He slung his backpack off his shoulder and set it on the floor. He unzipped it and reached in. He fumbled with his earplugs and dropped one.

  Stupid kid, he thought to himself. Can’t even get the earplugs right.

  He racked a clip into his chrome pistol just as Ben Strong said his final “Amen.”

  “PLEASE KILL ME”

  When the prayers finished, Missy Jenkins felt better. She hugged her friend Kelly and headed toward her book bag. She had only taken a few steps when she heard a pop that sounded like a firecracker.

  She pivoted toward the sound, her ears ringing. She saw Nicole Hadley fall limply to the tile floor with what appeared to be blood on her head. She’s faking this, Missy thought. This is some kind of a joke.

  The two more random pops rang out, then a rapid-fire series of seven more. The only gunshots she’d ever heard were on TV, and these pops sounded nothing like that. She was wondering who might pull such a frightening prank when her body suddenly went numb and she crumpled to the floor. To her, it felt as if she floated down. She never felt herself hit the floor, never felt any pain. She lay on the cold floor, unable to move, wondering what was happening.

  Screaming students were running all around her. Mandy was crouched over her, making sure she was alive and covering Missy’s body with her own.

  “What’s going on?” Missy asked her sister.

  “There’s a gun,” she said. Her voice was panicky, her eyes wide.

  “A gun? Who’s got a gun?”

  “Michael.”

  “Michael? Michael who?”

  “Michael Carneal.”

  It didn’t make sense to Missy. Nothing made sense. She didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know why she couldn’t feel her belly. She knew she must have been shot, but there was no telltale blood on her to mark a wound.

  For twelve seconds, Michael fired in steady succession, until his clip had only one bullet left. He never reached for extra bullets, even though he had hundreds at his feet.

  Kelly Hard had been hit in the shoulder. Nearby, Kayce Steger lay face-down and not moving. Jessica James, a senior in the band with Missy, had been shot beneath the shoulder and was wracked with violent convulsions as her life bled away.

  Principal Bill Bond rushed out into the chaos and took cover with Ben Strong behind a pillar near the shooter. But before they could jump him, Michael dropped his gun and slumped in tears. Bond and Strong rushed in.

  “What are you shooting people for?” Strong yelled at the whimpering little boy who had just shot into a crowd of forty teenagers.

  “Shooting people,” Michael heard himself say.

  “What for?” Ben asked, coming closer.

  Michael was in shock. “I don’t know.”

  Principal Bond grabbed the gun and trundled Michael into a nearby office.

  “Kill me,” Michael cried as he was hustled away. “Please kill me.”

  Missy’s algebra teacher, Diane Beckman, knelt by her side, trying to keep her awake. All she could do was pray.

  “Am I going to die?” Missy asked her.

  “No, you’re not going to die,” she said. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “But I’m paralyzed. I can’t feel anything.”

  THE GRIEVING BEGAN IMMEDIATELY AFTER FRESHMAN MICHAEL CARNEAL KILLED THREE GIRLS—NICOLE HADLEY, JESSICA JAMES, AND KACEY STEGER—AND WOUNDED FIVE OTHERS D
URING HIS SHOOTING SPREE AT HEATH HIGH SCHOOL’S MORNING PRAYER MEETING IN WEST PADUCAH, KENTUCKY, IN 1997.

  Getty Images

  “No, you’re not paralyzed. You’re just in shock,” she insisted. “You’re not paralyzed.”

  “But I know I am because I can’t feel my legs or my stomach,” Missy said. Suddenly, Missy felt like vomiting, and Beckman helped her turn to one side to throw up without choking herself.

  Before the ambulances arrived, Missy lapsed into a dream: She was walking and laughing with a stranger when a bicyclist aimed right at her. She jumped out of harm’s way, then resumed her walk. Then she was awake again, staring at the ceiling of Heath High School. That’s all she remembered about the dream, but while she had feared dying before, she was inexplicably at peace now.

  Paramedics, delayed by morning rush hour in the city and the two-lane back roads, finally arrived and quickly focused on the three girls most seriously injured—Nicole Hadley, Kayce Steger, and Jessica James. In a few moments, they gingerly slid Missy onto a backboard and wheeled her to a waiting ambulance for the 12-mile (19-kilometer) journey toward the hospital and the rest of her life.

  Michael Carneal, an awkward misfit who only wanted to be liked, had fired ten bullets into a crowd of fellow students, none more than 50 feet (15 meters) from him. Three were dead or dying, and five were wounded.

  And in less time that it takes to say “Amen,” Missy Jenkins’s life was changed forever.

  WAKING UP FROM A NIGHTMARE

  As Missy was wheeled into the emergency room, many of the doctors and nurses were weeping. They, too, had children at Heath High School, and they didn’t know who would be wheeled next through the ER doors.