:::Victims Of Violence in Schools:::Violence

This page I will place newspapers articles on the violence that is around us.
Articles from Washingtonpost.com

Shooting Suspect Well-Liked Teen's Friends in Md. Shocked
Teen's Friends in Md. Shocked
The 15-year-old accused of opening fire and killing two Monday at a high school outside San Diego was remembered in his old neighborhood in Frederick County as a well-liked youth who nevertheless was taunted by some.

Police in Santee, Calif., say that Charles "Andy" Williams pulled out a .22-caliber handgun in a boy's restroom at Santana High School and began shooting. Moving into the school's main quad, then back into the restroom to reload, he wounded 13 people and killed two fellow students, police said. He now faces murder charges.
In California, those who knew Williams offered a description familiar from previous school shootings: a "scrawny" kid, struggling to fit in and punished by bullies. They said that Williams had talked before about shooting up the school.
But Williams's friends in the Frederick County town of Knoxville recalled a youth who was well-liked by many, although he also was bullied by! other kids because he was so small. Before leaving Maryland in late 1999, he often slept overnight at friends' houses and called his pals' mothers "mom."
Williams's father had intended to move to California, but he left with his son sooner than planned after vandals broke into their home and trashed some of the teenager's possessions. But the youth's girlfriend said he was unhappy in California. "They made fun of him for being a country boy, for his big ears. It didn't matter what he did, they made fun of him," said Kathleen Seek, 15, who added that he often had mentioned suicide. Still, Seek said she never thought Williams would lash out at others. She said she didn't recognize Williams when he appeared for a televised court appearance. "That face isn't Andy's," she said. "Andy's got a good heart."

� A 14-year-old from Largo was charged as an adult with attempted murder after a 17-year-old youth was shot outside Largo High School. Police say the accused, Dominic White, was arrested five times while he was 13 on various robbery, theft and assault charges. Neither of the teenagers attended Largo High.
by -- David A. Fahrenthold

* Gunman Opens Fire in Calif.
School
Cora Reeder, left, her father Joe
Lynch, and her sister Tiffany
Lynch, right, console each other
accross the street from Santana
High School in Santee, Calif.,
after a student shot 15 people
on the campus, Monday, March
5, 2001. Two teen-agers died
and the suspect, a ninth-grader,
was apprehended.

MARCH 19, 2001 VOL. 157 NO. 11
SOCIETY
"It's Only Me"
BY NANCY GIBBS

NANCEE E. LEWIS/POOL/AP

Young Killer: Once again, a lost boy shoots up his school and rattles our psyches

"It's only me," said the boy with the gun, as he surrendered to sheriffs in the boys' bathroom. If only that were true. In the 48 hours after Charles Andrew Williams shot up his high school in Santee, Calif., 16 more kids in California were arrested or detained for making threats or taking guns to school. An 11-year-old in Higley, Ariz., threatened to kill the girl he liked and the boy who had kissed her. He told police that he got the idea from news reports and was only kidding. Another 11-year-old, in Phoenix was arrested after threatening to shoot a teacher's tape player and then the teacher. He apparently did not like the teacher's "obnoxious music." Elizabeth Bush, the eighth-grader in Williamsport, Pa., who dreamed of becoming either a human-rights activist or a nun, shot the head cheerleader in the cafeteria. "No one thought I would go through with this," she yelled as she fired her .22.

It's not only Andy Williams.

A reasonable person who read the papers or watched the news last week might conclude that murderous violence could happen anywhere, at any time, in any school in America. The one thing that nearly every school shooting has in common is the chorus of parents declaring that "I never thought it could happen here." That's not because they know the statistics--that youth violence is dropping, that schools are getting safer, that fewer than 1% of teen gun-related deaths occur in schools--it's because many of us float our children off to school in a bubble, grateful to live in a wholesome town--"We are America," Santee Mayor Randy Voepel declared--and unwilling to admit that the danger could follow us no matter where we go.

Don't look for a pattern; by the time you find it, you will find a counterargument wrapped around it. Is it the absence of parents, the presence of guns, the cruelty of the culture, the culture of cruelty? School shootings are like plane crashes, rare but riveting for the primitive fears they evoke. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the executioners of Columbine, gave that fear a face: cold-blooded, calculating, seeking immortality, dancing with the devil. They gave our kids the awful shorthand: You're not going to do a Columbine? Williams' friends asked. They even frisked him that morning before school.

In a spasm of fear and frustration, the adults fire back at a moving target. Last week politicians went after the tormentors: in Washington State the senate passed a law requiring school officials to investigate--and notify parents about--incidents of bullying on their campuses. Police went after negligent parents: in Indianapolis, Calvin and Shawnee Sistrunk were charged with felony neglect after their six-year-old daughter arrived at kindergarten with a loaded handgun. She wanted to show it to her friends. The culture cracked down on itself: on Friday night KGTV, an ABC affiliate in San Diego, televised the memorial service for Williams' victims; then, for roughly 35 minutes, it dropped its regular programming and showed only a text message urging parents to turn off the TV and spend time talking to their kids.

Those are the conversations that matter most. Given the agony that Williams inflicted on his victims, it is awkward even to discuss the agony he was in. Some friends came to his defense, talked about how badly he had been treated, how the bullies stole his skateboard, stole even the shoes off his feet. Was there, this time, a measure of pity for a lost boy, who seemed to have had nowhere to go, who wore a silver necklace with the word MOUSE on it, who called at least three of his friends' mothers Mom, who in the end seemed to want nothing more than to be taken seriously and to be taken, at last, into somebody's custody?

One night recently police came upon Williams in the park with several huge bottles of beer. "They just told me to go home," he told friends later. His buddies heard him Saturday night, when he got drunk at a bonfire, talk about taking a gun to school and shooting the place up. "I'll show you one day," he said. When it was over, when the police came to take him away, wrapping him in that oversize white jumpsuit, no one heard him say anything about being sorry. And no one heard him ask for anyone, not even his mom or dad.

Read what Florida School Psychologist says

California School Deaths

Read thoughts posted on memo board on it

Columbian High School Tragedy

Shooting at Heritage High in Conyers, Georgia

Thurston High Oregon

:::Violence:::Articles 2:::

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