Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [4]
Nicholas had no close friends, just glancing school-hall relationships. Race, according to Nicholas, had indeed proved a powerful dividing line. He told Det. Donald Adams, a Virginia Beach homicide investigator, how the other students would pick on him. “They called me racial names and were like racial to me, and they punched me and hit me.”
The detective, a youthful-looking man of middle height with a mustache and an easy manner, tried hard to make Nicholas feel comfortable during his interrogation. He got him a Sprite to drink. He called his mother and had her join them—a mistake, as it happens, for her anger and sorrow would soon distort the interview and make it virtually impossible for the detective to get a clear sense of what had occurred an hour before. It would be the only detailed, publicly available statement Nicholas would make about what he had done.
The worst antagonist, according to Nicholas, was Billy Cutter. The name is my invention, although Billy’s true identity would not escape any student at Atlantic Shores. Billy was an abrasive white boy who seemed to vex everyone, not just Nicholas. The two shared many of the same classes. At times they seemed to be friends, at times the worst kind of enemies. “Like fire and ice,” as Rev. Mr. Sweet put it.
Billy would call Nicholas a nigger. Nicholas would call Billy a honky or white cracker. Half the time Billy would be the first to start calling names, according to Billy; half the time Nicholas would start. “The whole thing was a joke,” Billy testified later. He said Nicholas laughed about it. Billy added, “It was nothing I thought serious.”
But the relationship had a profoundly dark edge to it. At six foot one, 170 pounds, Billy was far taller and heavier than Nicholas. From time to time, at odd moments, Billy would shove and strike Nicholas. “There was some slapping,” Dr. Wallace testified at Nicholas’s sentencing hearing. “There was some sticking him with a probe in biology.… There was hitting in the stomach or in the belly area … repeated acts of this type.”
Dr. Wallace found that Nicholas had suppressed his anger and fear to the point where, that Friday morning, he experienced a “disassociative” episode. “He kept so much within him, like a pressure cooker,” Dr. Wallace said. “It built and built and then exploded, and that was the accumulation of all of the repressed and suppressed emotions.”
One week before Nicholas decided to go hunting for Billy, he and the other boy got into another war of words, this time during gym class. This time, however, Billy’s taunting seemed to wrench something loose inside Nicholas. The taunting and teasing may indeed have been a perverse game indulged in equally by both boys, but suddenly it became something far more sinister. As Nicholas left the class, he shouted to Billy, “I’m going to kill you.”
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“I can’t take him picking on me,” Nicholas told Adams. He had been afraid, he said, that Billy Cutter “would end up killing me. He always threatened me.… Like he would hit me in the back of my neck.”
His mother interrupted, “You could have gone to the phone and called me at work.”
“If he would have broke my neck,” Nicholas said, “my life would have been over. He kicked me. He hit me in the back of the neck.”
“Not all people, bullies, can threaten you,” his mother said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“But, Mom, he actually hit me and I don’t want my neck—if he would have broke my neck—”
“I’m trying to reason with you. You could have gone to the office and asked the people