Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [5]
“You only use that for when you are sick, Mom,” Nicholas protested. “You can’t use it for being threatened. The teachers are supposed to handle it, but they don’t do anything.”
Nicholas seemed able to find solace consistently only in his pet birds, and in guns. Everyone at school knew of Nicholas’s passion for firearms. It served only to widen the gulf between him and his peers. At lunch while all the other boys were reading skateboard magazines, he’d thumb through Guns & Ammo. His locker was papered with glossy ads depicting powerful handguns. In conversation, according to a fellow student, Nicholas loved to discuss “which bullets had more firepower.” His classmates worried about Nicholas. One told a Norfolk newspaper, “All the kids said he was going to shoot someone.”
Even the guns became fodder for taunts from Billy Cutter, and from other students. “They were always making fun of me,” Nicholas told Adams. “They always said stuff: ‘You know so much about guns. You never even shot a gun in your life.’ ”
His mother worried most about her son on Fridays, the day, she believed, when passions kept in check all week were most prone to be released. “Nicholas,” she said. “Why would you take a gun today? You said that Billy hadn’t hit you since Wednesday, so why would you take a gun on Friday? I told you how Fridays are. You lay low on Friday, because everybody is upset.”
When she arrived at headquarters to meet Adams and her son, she was consumed with grief and guilt over Nicholas’s attack on the school.
“I will be up praying all night, all day tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to pray.”
Nicholas, trying to rein in the day and get things normal again, abruptly shifted the conversation to matters of daily routine.
“Are you going to work?” he asked.
“No. I don’t want to go to work.”
Genuinely perplexed, Nicholas asked, “Why not?”
“Because that’s what got me, trying to work and earn, to try to keep my head above water and losing you.”
“You can take my money out of the bank,” Nicholas offered.
“Gaining the world,” his mother cried, “and losing my soul—”
“It’s not losing me,” Nicholas pleaded. “It’s just people picking on me. That’s all it is. If God would have just stopped them—if I was nice enough and He would have made it so they were nice to me and didn’t hit me, everything would be fine. That’s as simple as it is, or He could have just made them keep their hands to theirselves. That’s very simple.”
His mother, during a later hearing, described Nicholas as a “very obedient, quiet child.” She and Nicholas had moved to Norfolk from California in 1983, so that she could care for her ailing mother. Nicholas’s father, Clarence, stayed behind.
Nicholas had always done poorly in school. In California, he failed the first grade. “At that time,” Dr. Wallace testified, “he was tested in the California school system and started in learning disability classes, which continued until the time the family left California.” By the time Dr. Wallace saw him, in April and May of 1989, Nicholas was sixteen and in the tenth grade. Dr. Wallace’s examination, however, found Nicholas lagging far behind his fellow sophomores. “On the wide-range achievement testing, he was reading at about a seventh-grade level,” Dr. Wallace testified. “But his spelling I believe was at a second- or third-grade level, and his math about a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”
On arriving in Norfolk, Mrs. Elliot enrolled Nicholas in Kempsville Elementary School, a public school, but in September 1987 transferred him from the public system to Atlantic Shores. Even though Atlantic Shores would cost an additional $240 a month—hard to afford on her salary as a public-school nurse in the city of Chesapeake—she felt the school would be well worth the cost. She told the court, “The public schools seem to have a lot of problems, and he was a child who needed special help, and I felt in a Christian environment he would get that help, and I was advised he would.”
Atlantic Shores brought no miracles, however. School