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- EUGENE, Ore. - The teachers,
family, and friends who testified about the Kip Kinkel they knew described
a kid like a lot of others -- funny, a little wild, struggled with reading,
got mad when he was teased.
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- What made him different -- the Kip Kinkel that no one
knew -- were the voices screaming in his head.
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- Those voices, Kinkel told experts, drove him to shoot
his father in the back of the head. They made him kill his mother after
he told her he loved her. And they pushed him to load a rifle and two
pistols, head for Thurston High School in Springfield, and open fire on
the crowded cafeteria.
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- "He carefully hid it so that he would not be stigmatized.
The sad part of it is, we are fairly good at treating mental illness.
But it has to be detected," said Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor
of law and psychology at State University of New York at Buffalo.
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- After pleading guilty, Kinkel, who was 15 at the time
of the May 1998 shooting spree, was sentenced Wednesday to nearly 112 years
in prison for killing his parents, two students, and wounding 25 others.
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- A preschool teacher remembered Kinkel as a red-haired
whirlwind who made her think of the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character.
An elementary school classmate recalled him trying to hurt other kids
in dodgeball. A neighbor recalled him throwing a bowl of cherries into
the air after being told he couldn't keep them.
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- But mass murder?
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- Kinkel and the other teen-age boys who have opened fire
at schools around the country don't really fit any profile, said Jeff Sprague
of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior at the University
of Oregon.
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- "They didn't fit the classic profile of an antisocial
kid, a kid who comes from poor, criminal, drug-abusing parents, with a
history of abuse, whose first arrest was when he was 4 years old,"
Sprague said.
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- "All these boys -- at Jonesboro, Paducah, Pearl
-- they were all that much more hidden in that regard. They didn't stick
out as much."
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- There was the fascination with guns and explosives.
Kinkel's mother was alarmed enough that she took him to a psychologist
for treatment.
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- The psychologist was not concerned enough to do more
than send him to a doctor who prescribed the antidepressant Prozac. In
the midst of it, Kinkel's father gave in to his son's pleading to buy a
pistol.
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- Dr. Park Deitz, whose Threat Assessment Group works with
corporations to prevent workplace violence, said he found Kinkel deeply
depressed when he examined him for the prosecution, but that didn't fully
explain what the teen-ager did.
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- "We've got thousands of cases of people with more
warning signs than Kip Kinkel who didn't do anything," Deitz said.
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- But the voices, delusions, and suicidal depression give
events a framework.
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- Kinkel told experts that he bought a stolen gun because
he felt threatened after he kicked over a reflective triangle while a stranger
was changing a flat tire. He stockpiled explosives because he was afraid
the Chinese army was going to invade.
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- Experts testified that the voices got louder and harder
to resist as Kinkel became more depressed and stressed. The voices peaked
when he was expelled from school for having the gun in his locker -- the
same day he shot his father and his mother.
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- Afterwards, Kinkel wrote in a note that they could never
have lived with the embarrassment of his expulsion, and he wanted to die
himself.
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- "But I have to kill people," he wrote before
taking his guns to school. "I don't know why. I am so sorry."
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- Kinkel kept a hidden journal that was filled with self-loathing,
despair over being rejected by a girl, and anger at a member of the football
team.
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- Still, there are many people who share Kinkel's problems,
but few commit mass murder, Deitz said.
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- "In every school there are angry kids, threatening
kids, suicidal kids," Deitz said. "That's where our attention
should be, not trying to prevent mass murder so much as the other suffering
and harm that routinely goes on in every school."
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