Kip Kinkel: A Boy’s Life, Part 2

Kip Kinkel’s two closest friends, Tony McCown and Nick Hiaasen, were walking onto Springfield, Oregon’s Thurston High School campus at about five minutes to eight on the morning of May 21st when a group of boys came running out through the double doors of the main entrance, shouting at the two freshmen to turn and run.

“These were guys we call ‘cowboys,'” Tony explained, “little hicks who are always hootin’ and hollerin’. Anyway, they came bursting outside that morning yelling, ‘You guys, run! Kip’s in there with a gun!’ We’re, like, laughing at them: ‘Get out of here, you guys.’ Then we saw that they looked honestly scared. But we still didn’t believe them. We thought they were just acting.”

Tony and Nick were less certain a moment later, when they saw several cars peeling out of the school parking lot. “It was parents who had just driven their kids to school,” Tony recalled. “We hear all these squealing tires and people shouting. Then we see these seniors, big old guys, running out to their cars, and we know something must be going on.”

The two boys turned around and headed back toward Nick’s house, just a couple of blocks from the school. “But we still really didn’t take it seriously,” Tony said. “The first thing that hit my mind was, ‘Well, at least we got an excuse for not coming to school.’

“But then just about the time we get back to Nick’s house, we start hearing the sirens. And we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s not fake. Something’s really going on.’ Then we look at each other and go, ‘They said it was Kip.'”

Just minutes earlier, a school security camera at Thurston had caught several frames of Kip entering the school from the north parking lot, where he had left his dead parents’ Ford Explorer. The video detected no sign of the .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle the boy held concealed under a long tan trench coat, or of the two pistols tucked into the waistband of his black cargo pants.

Unnoticed, Kip strode down a breezeway toward Thurston’s social center, the school lunchroom, where around 400 students had gathered during the last minutes before the bell for first period sounded. Before reaching the cafeteria, Kip encountered a sixteen-year-old named Ben Walker, whom he knew slightly. “We’d always given Ben and his girlfriend a hard time for kissing in the hall,” Tony recalled. “Like, ‘Get a room.'” Just a few feet from Ben, Kip pulled the rifle out from under his trench coat and shot the boy once in the head. Kip kept walking, then saw a boy he didn’t know, Ryan Atteberry, and fired at him also, hitting Ryan in his right cheek.

Moments later, Kip put the rifle back under his coat and stepped into the cafeteria. Several kids who saw him come in through the side door thought it was odd that he would be back on campus; most students knew he had been suspended the day before, after a loaded pistol was seized from his school locker. Also strange was the way Kip looked. He was a little guy, just five feet five inches and 125 pounds, with red hair, freckles and a smooth baby face that normally gave him the appearance of someone even younger than a fifteen-year-old freshman. That day, though, Kip “looked bigger,” one girl remembered. “I thought he was an adult at first.”

Kip was barely through the door when he pulled the rifle out from under his trench coat again and “just started blazing,” as one of the kids nearest to him described it, methodically firing off each of the remaining forty-eight shots in his fifty-round clip. “He just kept walking toward us with a blank look on his face,” one girl recalled, “shooting and shooting.”

Several students who saw Kip with the gun, holding the stock against his hip and swiveling it from side to side, thought he was part of a skit connected to the school elections. A lot of the kids in the cafeteria, however, including many who were shot, never saw either Kip or his gun.

Many students thought the popping sound they heard was being made by firecrackers. A girl named Melissa Taylor told friends later that she thought somebody was shooting a paint-ball gun. When she felt a sting on her shoulder, then turned and saw a red stain, Melissa said, “I thought, ‘Man, that guy ruined my shirt.'”

Kyle Howes and his girlfriend, Melissa Femrite, both sixteen-year-old sophomores, were standing at the snack bar while she tried to persuade him to buy a bagel for breakfast instead of Starburst candy. Melissa heard the popping noises and turned to look, expecting to see smoke from a string of firecrackers. Instead she saw a boy with a gun. When Kip whirled toward the snack bar, Melissa dropped to the floor, but as she did she felt a sting in her right elbow. Looking down at the floor, she saw her own blood and realized, “This is real.” Kyle was still standing when the first bullet hit his left leg. A second bullet hit his right shin before the boy could move. Then he ran stiff-legged toward the nearest exit. Passing through the double doors, he dropped to the floor and waited for help.