BOYS FACE 5 MURDER COUNTS.

Byline: Rick Bragg The New York Times

The two boys used to tease 12-year-old Erica Swindle about her glasses. She thought they were mean.

On Tuesday, those same boys, ages 11 and 13, were being held in juvenile detention at the Craighead County, Ark., jail, facing murder charges after shots fired outside a middle school Tuesday killed four girls and one teacher, wounded 10 other people and plunged this small city into despair.

For Erica, who stood unhurt as bullets flew around her and watched classmates fall in bloody heaps on the neat, white sidewalk, it revealed a meanness that she, like others in this small city, had not even imagined.

``They made fun of me all the time,'' Erica said, going back in her mind to a time when being cruel still meant mean words hurled at her by unruly boys on a yellow school bus. ``I didn't like them much.''

But as the apparently coldblooded nature and awful scope of the crime continued to baffle law enforcement officers and residents, prosecutors tried to find a way around a state law that, at least on its face, would require them to try the boys under the lenient guidelines of Juvenile Court.

The very thing that made the crime so shocking - the ages of the two suspects - could result in sentences of just a few years in juvenile detention for Mitchell Johnson, 13, and his cousin, Andrew Golden, 11, despite the ominous-sounding charges of murder.

As prosecutors built their case, counselors and ministers sat with children and parents still shaking from the bullets that ripped apart much more than bodies. Grown men, including the mayor, stood in parking lots and wept. White ribbons to honor the dead fluttered along the flat, gray landscape.

And all around this part of Craighead County, people who have seen such violence interrupt the lives of others in usually quiet places - like Paducah, Ky., and Pearl, Miss., where other students have died from gunfire - wondered if there was a place far enough in the pines to protect them from this kind of thing.

Judge Ralph Wilson of Juvenile Court ruled Wednesday afternoon that there is sufficient evidence to keep the boys in jail until a hearing April 29.

At the hearing, Brent Davis, the county prosecutor, said he will file charges of five counts of murder and 10 counts of battery - one for each of the wounded - against the boys.

But under Arkansas law, anyone under 14 must be tried as a juvenile and, if convicted, can only be held behind bars until their 18th birthday, unless they commit a crime while in juvenile detention, prosecutors said.

That would mean that if convicted, the oldest boy could be free after five years.

``We're looking at all other options,'' including federal charges against the two boys, Davis said. He would not say what those charges might include.

Law enforcement officers said the boys, dressed head to toe in camouflage and hidden in a grove of trees, opened fire on students at the schoolyard of Westside Middle School about lunch time Tuesday as the 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds filed outside the school during what they thought was a fire drill.

Investigators said a fire alarm - probably set off by one of the boys - lured the students outside, where the two started shooting. In all, 27 shots bored into the bodies of the students and two teachers, one of whom - the one killed - sheltered students with her own body.

Investigators had at first wondered if a third person was involved and had pulled the alarm, but students said they saw one of the boys do it.

Law enforcement officers say the boys used several handguns and rifles - among them semiautomatic rifles with clips holding as many as 15 rounds and a high-powered 30.06 hunting rifle - to spray bullets into the crowd of students and teachers. A white van, reportedly belonging to Mitchell's stepfather, was parked nearby. It was apparently loaded with other guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Late Wednesday, Andrew Golden's grandfather, Doug Golden, tearfully told reporters that the boys had stolen some of the guns from him.

``They used my guns,'' Golden said, his lip trembling. His grandson, he said, had been tutored by his father in the use of guns.

Law enforcement officials would not comment on most evidence in the case, leaving the hundreds of reporters who have swarmed into this town of nearly 50,000 people to get most of their information from the youngest witnesses to the shooting.

It was the students who went to school with the boys who first provided a motive: that Mitchell and Andrew had planned the shooting to get even with a girl who had broken up with Mitchell, and that Mitchell had bragged to them, ``I got a lot of killing to do.''

Andrew, students said, was just mean-spirited. One parent who knew him would not let his children play with him.

At the detention hearing, Mitchell, 13, sobbed and held his hands together as if praying. Andrew, 11, seemed unfazed, and smiled at his parents at one point in the hearing.

The parents of both boys were in the courtroom. They refused to talk to reporters.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) GOLDEN

(2) JOHNSON

(3) Dennis and Pat Golden, parents of one of the suspects in the Arkansas school slayings, leave the county jail Wednesday.

Mike Wintroath/Associated Press