New look at school killings.

Byline: BOOK REVIEW By Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

The Shooting Game

By Joseph Lieberman

(Seven Locks Press, 328 pages, $17.95)

For many local residents, reading about the May 21, 1998, Thurston High School shootings is akin to ripping a scab off a still tender, unhealed wound.

In his introduction, Lieberman recalls his amazement upon moving to Eugene in 1999 that no one had written a book about the rampage. But the reason is no mystery to those who lived here during the shooting.

As Lieberman notes, more students were wounded at Thurston than in any other school shooting. And that's only counting those actually struck by bullets. As Kip Kinkel's sentencing hearing made clear, the psychological damage extended to those who lost family members, suffered permanent disabilities, witnessed the shootings, hid in terror elsewhere on campus or waited hours to hear if their children were among the victims. After bearing witness to such pain, no local reporter had the heart to revisit the topic.

But Lieberman was a freelance journalist living in Japan on May 21, 1998. Unscathed by the original tragedy, he may have been the perfect person to take a fresh look at how and why it occurred.

"The Shooting Game" is no mere gratuitous rehash. Using old-fashioned reporting and guided by a key source troubled by what went unsaid at the time, Lieberman reveals important information not made public during the original coverage of this community's most searing event. In particular, he examines evidence that loyalty to shooter Kip Kinkel's highly regarded, educator parents compromised the judgment of school district and law enforcement officials after the 15-year-old was caught with a gun at school on May 20.

The book's subtitle is "The Making of School Shooters," and it is at its weakest when flitting back and forth between cases of school gun violence - it's just too difficult to keep all the names and circumstances straight. But his unflinching look at some of the underpinnings of the local case make it an unsettling, cautionary tale.

Among Lieberman's conclusions:

In an effort to keep his son's academic options open after his May 20 arrest, Bill Kinkel "knowingly lied" and "sealed his own fate, that of his wife, and the lives of innocent children." According to then-assistant principal Dick Doyle, Kinkel insisted that his son posed no danger because police already had the stolen gun and "we don't have any guns here at our home."

Lieberman suggests that false claim influenced Springfield police officer Al Warthen's decision to release Kip to his father, rather than hold him in juvenile detention. Hours later, Kip would use Bill's own pistol to kill his father and another handgun Bill had bought him to kill his mother. The next day, he would open fire on his Thurston classmates with a semiautomatic rifle his father also bought for his son.

Thurston officials failed to "lock down" the high school May 21 - a step taken over previous threats involving weapons - despite statements by another student arrested in the May 20 gun incident that Kip had talked of using it to kill someone. Lieberman points to a Eugene Police detective's May 21 report, in which Doyle said the other student told him and Warthen that Kip had purchased the loaded gun with the intention of shooting someone. According to the report, Doyle also reported that information to two supervisors. A baseball coach at the school, Jerame Wood, also recorded in a May 20 diary entry that the other boy said the pair had discussed revenge against other students for "talking smack against Kip."

Deference to Bill and Faith Kinkel as respected colleagues may have soft-pedaled the danger posed by their son. Multiple educators reported concerns about Kip's hate-filled writing and obsession with weapons. But when one counselor pressed her view that the boy needed professional therapy, Leiberman noted, Faith simply asked another counselor and family friend, "as a favor to change her son's counselor."

Bill and Faith Kinkel were "victims of their own attempts to buffer their son from consequences and themselves from shame," Lieberman wrote. "But the community was supposed to have certain safeguards in place to protect the public against such disasters. The problem was, until now those safeguards were only aimed at obviously troubled kids with long police records from high-risk households, or with a history of abuse. Like a stealth bomber, Kip flew in under the normal radar screen, giving Oregon its first introduction to the comparatively recent phenomenon of 'commonplace' kids from decent homes that appeared to turn into vicious killers overnight."

BOOK SIGNING

"Shooting Game" author Joseph Lieberman hosts "Remembrance & Closure - The 8th Anniversary of the Thurston Shooting"

When: 1 p.m. Saturday

Where: Borders, 5 Oakway Center

What: Video presentation, Q and A session with the author and Springfield Fire Chief Dennis Murphy, founder of the Ribbon of Promise national campaign to prevent school violence