Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  Doctors began to work on Missy, hooking her up to a chest tube and IVs. They asked her to move her legs, and although it felt to her like she was, she wasn’t. Using a needle, they prodded her body to find out where she could feel and where she couldn’t.

  They also found the entrance wound, a small hole in her upper left chest, just below her collarbone, but they would need X-rays to know more.

  Missy’s distraught family began to arrive at the hospital, and the doctor allowed them to visit her for just a few minutes before she went to radiology. She read the sadness and fear in their faces. Some cried.

  Ironically, Missy comforted them. She had tried to make herself cry but couldn’t. She was at a strange peace with what had happened to her less than an hour before. She told them they shouldn’t cry because she was alive.

  The X-rays revealed a more sobering truth. A single bullet had entered Missy’s chest, punctured her left lung, and crashed into the T4 vertebra, splattering shards of lead and bone into her spinal cord before it exited just between her shoulder blades. While the spinal cord itself was not hit by the bullet, the fragments had paralyzed Missy below the chest and doctors believed that trying to remove them would only do more damage.

  She had a long rehabilitative road ahead, they said, but she would probably never walk again.

  Missy didn’t understand all the medical talk, but she heard what she needed to hear. She couldn’t fathom being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, which had hardly begun. She wondered whether the paralysis might go away sometime.

  She also learned that Mandy had narrowly missed serious wounding—or worse. At the hospital, somebody noticed an angry red scrape across Mandy’s neck where a bullet had grazed her. Suddenly, the twin sisters realized that they had both escaped death in miracles measured by millimeters.

  That night, before her family left the hospital at the end of a horrifying day, Missy asked to speak privately with her mother.

  Missy told her that she had forgiven Michael Carneal, who had paralyzed her for life just hours before.

  It stunned her mother, but she understood the strength of Missy’s faith, if not her willingness to forgive her would-be killer so quickly. Later, Missy’s mother shared her decision with the rest of the family who, in their own time, came to agree with her.

  “It was like I was in a dream … and I woke up,” Michael Carneal told a teacher while he sat in the principal’s conference room waiting for police to arrive.

  “I looked at him and he just had this glazed look in his eyes,” Principal Bond said later. “When I got the gun, I told him to go to the office and sit down. He didn’t react any more than if I had caught him smoking in the boys’ room.”

  When asked by investigators why he shot

  his fellow classmates, Michael’s first

  response was that he was tired of being

  teased and bullied, but he admitted that none

  of his vaguely described tormenters was in

  the lobby that day.

  Less than two hours after the rampage, Michael was sitting in the police station. When asked by investigators why he shot his fellow classmates, Michael’s first response was that he was tired of being teased and bullied, but he admitted that none of his vaguely described tormenters was in the lobby that day.

  “Was you mad at somebody?” McCracken County Sheriff’s Detective Carl Baker asked him.

  “Not anybody in particular.”

  “Wasn’t mad at your mom and dad?”

  Michael shook his head. “Uh-uh.”

  “Mad at the teachers?”

  “Not really.”

  “You mad at the principal?”

  “Uh-uh,” Michael said. “I guess I just got mad ’cause everybody kept making fun of me.”

  The kids at school called him “freak” and “nerd” and “crack baby,” he said as he began to cry.

  He described in some detail how he had broken into a neighbor’s garage on Thanksgiving to steal guns and ammo from a locked cabinet. He had stashed them in an Army duffel bag one night and carried them home, where he crawled through his bedroom window and hid them in his closet. Shortly before the shooting, he said, he took some of the guns to a friend’s house for safekeeping. The rest he wrapped in a blanket, secured them with duct tape, and shoved them under his bed.

  When police searched his room, they found more than two dozen empty cartridge boxes, a typewritten note titled “The Secret” on his nightstand, the handwritten lyrics to a song called “Paralyzed Monkey,” and “Mist-Erie,” a short story Michael had written about atomic bomb testing.

  Detective Baker walked Michael through the actual shooting—or what little he remembered.

  “I was just sitting there and I reached in my backpack and pulled out a handgun,” Michael recounted calmly.

  “What kind of handgun was it?” Baker asked.

  Michael would describe himself as being in

  a transfixed hypnotic state while he was

  firing the pistol, shooting more at movement

  and shadows than at specific people.

  “It was a .22 Ruger, and I put in a clip and turned off the safety and cocked it and then just started firing.”

  “Who all was standing in that group, do you know?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Did you know any of the kids in that group?”

  “I knew Ben.”

  Oddly, Michael didn’t mention his dear friend Nicole Hadley, whom he had shot in the forehead and who was, at that very moment, on life support. Or Kayce Steger, the girl he had asked on a date and who was already dead. Or Missy Jenkins, his friend from marching band, now paralyzed. Or any of the other students whom he had lived and gone to school with all his life in his small town.

  “What was going through your mind while you was firing the gun?” Baker pressed.

  “I don’t know, it was all, like, blurry and foggy. I just didn’t know what was going on. I think I closed my eyes for a minute.”

  In later interviews, Michael would describe himself in a transfixed hypnotic state while he was firing the pistol, shooting more at movement and shadows than at specific people. Strangely, his waking dream was shattered when he saw one of his bullets chip a plaster wall and it snapped him back to reality.

  Michael looked around at the carnage. He saw kids bleeding on the floor, others screaming and running helter-skelter. He was not entirely certain what had just happened, or why.

  “Then I stopped and I realized what was going on and I just sat down and Ben popped up from behind a column and told me to calm down. So I set the gun down and he, he came over there and he, he was telling me to calm down and not to worry about it.”

  “Is he kinda, sort of a friend or just somebody you know?” Baker asked.

  “He’s nice to me,” Michael said. “Then Mr. Bond came out there and grabbed me and jerked me away and we, and then he pulled me down the hall, and Ben kept yelling, ‘I need to talk to him for a minute!’ And Mr. Bond just said, ‘Get away.’”

  Under further questioning, Michael talked about how he and a friend had fantasized about shooting up the school or the mall for more than a year after they had seen The Basketball Diaries, a 1995 movie in which the main character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) dreams about storming his classroom and systematically shooting a teacher and five classmates to death while other students cheer.

  “When you pulled the trigger for the first time, did you realize people could get hurt?”

  “I, I don’t know,” Michael replied. “I really wasn’t thinking until, until I stopped shooting.”

  “Okay, when you took the guns to school, had you thought about the fact that somebody was probably gonna get hurt?”

  “No, uh-uh.”

  As the first of many police interviews ended, Michael’s lawyer asked him whether there was any message he could deliver to his family.

  “Tell ’em I’m sorry,” he said, crying again. “I’ve ruined t
heir lives.”

  MISSY JENKINS SMITH, RIGHT, WHO WAS PARALYZED IN THE 1997 HEATH HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, AND KELLY HARD ALSIP, WHO WAS ALSO SHOT, TALK TO REPORTERS IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, IN 2008 AFTER LAWYERS ARGUED IN FRONT OF THE KENTUCKY SUPREME COURT THAT MICHAEL CARNEAL WAS TOO MENTALLY ILL TO PLEAD GUILTY TO THE MURDERS IN 1997. THE COURT UPHELD THE PLEA.

  Associated Press

  A SYMBOL OF SURVIVAL

  Five days after the shooting, an overflow crowd in the two-thousand-seat Bible Baptist Heartland Worship Center wept over three white caskets, each lined in blue crepe and scrawled with messages from grieving classmates, like “I loved you” and “I will miss you in English.”

  Some mourners tucked stuffed animals inside the casket of Nicole Hadley, whose head rested on her favorite Winnie the Pooh pillowcase. Beside each casket stood a framed display of casual photos, and the biers displayed their favorite possessions: Jessica James’s French horn, Kayce Steger’s clarinet, Nicole’s Pooh bear.

  In the devoutly religious community, the emotion reached its crescendo when the Heath High School choir sang “The Prayer of Saint Francis.” Among the singers was Kelly Carneal, Michael’s sister.

  Snapshots of the three girls in life flashed across a large screen over the three caskets. Mourners included Kentucky governor Paul Patton, former Kentucky governor Julian Carroll, and popular Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman, a 1981 Heath graduate, who sang two songs.

  Nicole Hadley was a tall, fourteen-year-old freshman who played clarinet in the school marching band and was on the freshman basketball team. A few weeks before the shooting, she told her parents she wanted to donate her organs when she died. So two hours after a bullet pierced her brain, doctors transplanted her lungs into a forty-two-year-old man with emphysema, while her heart, kidneys, liver, and pancreas went to other needy patients. She had dreamed of being a doctor.

  Honor student Kayce Steger, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, also played in the school band and on the softball team, even though she worked after school at a Subway sandwich shop. She wanted to become a police officer after high school. She was buried in her favorite dress, a green satin homecoming gown.

  Senior Jessica James was seventeen, quiet, and studious. Deeply religious, she taught Bible school and worked one summer with inner-city kids in North Carolina. She, too, played in the school band and wanted to study psychology in college.

  After the service, as mourners stood silently in the bitter December cold, three white hearses took the girls to three different cemeteries to be buried.

  But Missy Jenkins couldn’t attend. Unable to raise her head from her bed in intensive care, she watched the service on teleivision through special reflective glasses.

  She cried because she couldn’t be there, and because their deaths were still not real to her. She couldn’t see her three friends lying in their caskets. The news of their deaths came to her through a morphine haze, and she still didn’t truly comprehend it. One day they said a prayer together and the next day they were all dead. And for an innocent fifteen-year-old girl, the concept of death is less transparent than the promise of laughter or the thrill of a first kiss.

  But Missy wasn’t dead. In fact, she had become a symbol of survival. Cards and letters began to pour in, as many as six hundred a day, from all over the world. So many of them contained money that her parents quickly opened a trust fund to pay for a lifetime of Missy’s considerable expenses.

  Visitors came, too. Among them were Michael’s parents. Missy tried to be sunny, but the Carneals were crying and shaken. They told her they were sorry for what happened, but the shooting was never mentioned again. The visit, though it only lasted a few minutes, was uncomfortable because nobody could find the right words.

  Missy knew they blamed themselves, and some angry people blamed them, too. But she also knew they were good parents who cared very much for their children, and who volunteered at the school. In the end, Missy felt sorry for them.

  Five months after being shot, Missy was released from the rehabilitation hospital in Lexington. She arrived home to celebrating friends, balloons, signs, and a newly built wheelchair ramp. Among the kids who came to welcome her home was a goth friend of Michael’s, and it pleased Missy to see him there.

  She started school again at Heath High School toward the end of the 1998 spring semester. Arriving on the first day in a special van donated to her family by a local car dealer, she found the entire school decorated for her. After a joyous greeting, students gathered in the prayer circle, as they had every day since the shooting.

  Missy wheeled herself to the exact spot where she’d stood the day she was shot and reached out to hold hands. But today, the prayer circle was bigger than it had ever been. Even some of the goth kids joined.

  When the prayer ended and students had left for class, Missy asked Mandy to show her exactly where she’d lain wounded that morning, to tell her what she had seen. It didn’t bother her to be there. She just wanted to know that her memory was right.

  AFTERMATH

  In October 1998, Michael Carneal pleaded “guilty but mentally ill” for killing three fellow students and wounding five others. The judge agreed to accept the pleas on condition that the maximum penalty—life in prison without possibility of parole for twenty-five years—would be imposed.

  Two months later—slightly more than a year after the shootings—Michael faced his victims and their families at an emotional sentencing. But he looked at the floor throughout most of the hearing.

  “As a mother, my life has forever been changed,” said Gwen Hadley, Nicole’s mother. “My family is no longer whole.”

  Joe James, Jessica’s father, said he sometimes forgets, even after a year, that his daughter is dead.

  “Though my mind says she is gone, my heart still misses her enough to sometimes include her in my plans,” he said.

  Sabrina Steger, Kayce’s mother, couldn’t contain her tears.

  “Dinner is usually sitting in the family room [because] the empty chair at the dining room table is too painful of a reminder,” she said. “Even answering the simple question of ‘How many children do you have?’ has become very complicated.”

  USING STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGY TO HELP HER WALK AGAIN, PARAPLEGIC MISSY JENKINS WAS ABLE TO DANCE WITH NEW HUSBAND JOSH SMITH AT THEIR WEDDING IN 2006.

  Courtesy of Missy Jenkins

  Missy went last. She wheeled herself to face Michael and demanded that he look at her. He raised his face, and she looked directly into the empty eyes of a little boy.

  “I want to tell you that I am paralyzed. I’m paralyzed from my chest right here down. And I spent five months in the hospital and I still struggle. I feel really helpless that I can’t do things I used to do. I can’t go to the bathroom like regular people. It’s hard to get dressed. I see people running around doing stuff like everybody else, and I can’t really do it because I am stuck to my chair.

  “They tell me that I’ll never walk again. I think I will, though. But if God doesn’t want me to walk, that’s okay. And I just wanted you to know because I have to live with it every day now.

  “I don’t know why you did this to me and everybody else, but I know that I’m never going to forget it because I see it every day in my mind. But I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. I’m just upset that this happened and I’m upset that everything had to go this way, but I can live this way. It’s going to be hard, but I can do it.”

  Shortly after Michael’s sentencing, Missy got a call. The Ladies’ Home Journal had chosen her among its most fascinating women of 1998, among such notables as the Duchess of York, comedian Whoopi Goldberg, singer Trisha Yearwood, and Congresswoman Mary Bono.

  And soon after that, she was invited to talk about forgiveness to a nationwide audience on The Oprah Winfrey Show and other TV talk shows.

  “Walking in general is just something I miss,” she said in one interview. “You never really, you know, really think about what you have until
it’s gone. So I really want to walk again. And that’s what I wish for. I guess I kind of miss my childhood, too.”

  That spring of 1999, eager to share her story, Missy was just beginning to see how she might turn her affliction into an inspiring asset when a new horror thrust her—willingly or not—back into the media’s unblinking glare.

  Columbine.

  Missy was just beginning to see how she

  might turn her affliction into an inspiring

  asset when a new horror thrust her back

  into the media’s unblinking glare.

  Columbine.

  Two years after Heath, Columbine gave a ghastly new face to school violence. Two alienated Colorado teens killed twelve students and one teacher, and wounded twenty-four others, becoming the second-worst American school shooting to that time. Only Charles Whitman’s Texas Tower rampage was worse (see chapter 6).

  One of the few differences between Columbine and Heath was that the shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, killed themselves rather than be arrested.

  The media flocked to Missy, hoping she could offer the unique perspective of a student in the line of fire. She embraced the chance to talk about the pain, the aftermath, and the forgiveness, even though she spent her prom night dodging a dogged People magazine photographer.

  A few weeks later, with President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, she participated in a discussion about guns and violence televised by Good Morning America from the White House.

  The media exposure paid an unexpected bonus when a company, Dynamics Walk-Again Rehabilitation Center in Los Angeles, contacted Missy. Dynamics executives had seen her on TV and offered to fit her with a new high-tech brace they had invented to help paraplegics walk. In three months, they could literally put her back on her feet.

  In March 2000, fitted with Dynamics’s leg braces and electrodes, Missy shuffled a quarter-mile (half a kilometer) in the Los Angeles Marathon in a drenching rain to prove something to herself and the world. Although still mostly confined to her wheelchair, Missy spoke briefly at the first Million Mom March against gun violence in Washington, D.C., and attended her own senior prom in a dress donated by a Hollywood fashion designer.