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| Photo Credit: AP. |
(AP) - When 14-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on his fellow students during a before-school prayer meeting in 1997, school shootings were not yet a part of the national consciousness. The carnage that left three students dead and five more injured at Heath High School, near Paducah, Kentucky, ended when Carneal put down his weapon and the principal walked him to the school office — a scene that seems unimaginable today.
Also
stretching today’s imagination — Carneal’s life sentence guaranteed an
opportunity for parole after 25 years, the maximum sentence permissible at the
time given his age.
A quarter
century later, Carneal is 39 with a parole hearing next week that comes at a
very different time in American life — after Sandy Hook, after Uvalde. Today
police officers and metal detectors are an accepted presence in many schools,
and even kindergartners are drilled to prepare for active shooters.
“Twenty-five years seemed like so long, so far
away,” Missy Jenkins Smith recalls thinking at the time of the sentencing.
Jenkins Smith was 15 when she was shot by Carneal, someone she considered a
friend. The bullet left her paralyzed, and she uses a wheelchair to get around.
Over the years, she has counted down the time until Carneal would be eligible
for parole.
“I would think, ‘It’s been 10 years. How many
more years?’ At the 20-year anniversary memorial, I thought, ‘It’s coming up.’”
Ron Avi
Astor, a professor of social welfare and education at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who has studied school violence, said public opinion
around school shootings and juvenile punishment has changed a lot over the last
25 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, Astor provided therapy to children who had
committed very serious crimes, including murder, but were rehabilitated and not
jailed.
“Today all
of them would have been locked up,” he said. “But the majority went on to do
good things.”
Jenkins
Smith knows first-hand that troubled children can be helped. She worked for
years as a counselor for at-risk youth, where her wheelchair served as a stark
visual reminder of what violence can do, she said.
“Kids who
would threaten school shootings, terroristic threatening, were sent to me,” she
said. Some are now adults. “It’s great to see what they’ve accomplished and how
they’ve changed their lives around. They’ve learned from their bad decisions.”
But that
doesn’t mean she thinks Carneal should be set free. For one thing, she worries
that he is not equipped to handle life outside of prison and could still harm
others. She also doesn’t think it would be right for him to walk free when the
people he injured are still suffering.
“For him to
have a chance at 39. People get married at 39. They have children,” she said.
“It’s not right for him to possibly have a normal life that those three girls
he killed will never have.”
Killed in
the shooting were 14-year-old Nicole Hadley, 17-year-old Jessica James, and
15-year-old Kayce Steger.
Astor said
that when it comes to the worst crimes, like many people, he struggles with the
question of what age children should be held strictly accountable for their
actions. As a class exercise, he has his students consider the appropriate
punishment for a perpetrator at different ages. Should a 16-year-old be treated
the same as a 12-year-old? Should a 12-year-old be treated the same as a
40-year-old?
Without any
national consensus, you end up with a patchwork of laws and policies that
sometimes result in very different punishments for nearly identical crimes, he
said.
The shooting
at Heath High School took place on Dec. 1, 1997, the Monday after Thanksgiving
break. Less than four months later, 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old
Mitchell Johnson shot and killed four classmates and a teacher at Westside
Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas. They wounded another nine children and
one adult. The pair were tried as juveniles and released on their 21st
birthdays.
Two decades
later, in 2018, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff members
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. At the same time
Carneal is being considered for possible release, a Florida juryis
decidingwhether to sentence Cruz to death.
Jenkins
Smith has tried for years to understand why Carneal opened fire on his fellow
students that day. She was in the marching band with Carneal, and, before the
shooting, “I loved being around him because he made a boring day fun,” she
said.
She met with
Carneal in prison in 2007 and had a long conversation with him. He apologized
to her, and she said she has forgiven him.
“A lot of
people think that exonerates him from consequences, but I don’t think so,” she
said.
Carneal’s
parole hearing is scheduled to start on Monday with testimony from those
injured in the shooting and close relatives of those who were killed. Jenkins
Smith said she knows of only one victim who supports some form of supervised
release for Carneal — less confining than prison but not unrestricted freedom.
On Tuesday, Carneal will make his case from the Kentucky State Reformatory in
La Grange. If the board rules against release, they can decide how long Carneal
should wait before his next opportunity for parole.
The parole
hearing will be conducted by videoconference, but Jenkins Smith said she will
position her camera to show her full body so the parole board can see her
wheelchair. It will be, she said, “a reminder that everyone who experienced
that impact 25 years ago is still dealing with it, for the rest of their
lives.”
News
Researcher Jennifer Farrar contributed to this report from New York City.