Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [57]
Nicholas was carrying what looked to be a gun. “It appeared to me at that point it was sort of like an Uzi water pistol because it seemed very small at a distance.” (Cobray pistols are often confused with Uzis, police say.)
Through the glass window in the door, Matteson watched Nicholas approach. “I saw Nicholas go up to Mr. Marino. He was still hanging out of the door. He was approximately four to five feet away from him. I heard the shot go off.”
Matteson turned to his students.
“I told them to get down and get back, so the class quickly started to move to the back of the trailer. One young man had the presence of mind to come up, and he locked the door.”
The students—some three dozen of them—crouched at the back of the classroom, praying and crying. Matteson took up a sheltering position halfway between the students and the door and stood to see where Nicholas had gone.
“I was watching Nicholas as he came towards us. I thought perhaps he might go around the trailer. He came up to the stairway, tried the door. The door was locked. At that time, he shot the glass out and entered the room.”
Nicholas walked up to the crowd of now terrified children.
“Don’t do it,” Matteson pleaded. “Nicholas, this is no way to handle this.”
Nicholas had seen Matteson watching him through the window of the portable classroom. He knew Billy Cutter was probably in the class as well. “I don’t know how I got in,” Nicholas told Detective Adams. “I did not shoot the door. I did not shoot the door or the knob itself. I shot the glass in the door. I don’t know how I got it open.… When I shot the glass, I guess it shaked the door and got it open.”
Once inside, he quickly spotted Billy Cutter. Cutter had heard the shot and the sound of shattering glass, but was the last to rush to the back of the room and now lay on the floor ahead of the mound of students, fully in the open and utterly exposed. “There were chairs overturned and everything, so I would probably be about three or four feet in front of everyone else,” Cutter later testified.
“Billy,” Nicholas said, “I hate you, man.”
Cutter was screaming, “No, don’t.”
Nicholas aimed the gun at Cutter.
“I know I said his name,” Nicholas told Detective Adams. “I don’t remember exactly what I said about him, because I was mad.”
Others, however, do recall. “Billy Cutter,” Nicholas said. “This is for you. I’m going to kill you.”
As the other students huddled closer and wept and prayed, Nicholas pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ENFORCERS
GUN AFICIONADOS MAY LIKEN THE BUREAU of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to the Gestapo, but in its relationship to America’s gun dealers it behaves more like an indulgent parent. This is partly the result of concrete restrictions imposed on the bureau by budget and statute, partly of an institutional reluctance to offend its primary source of investigative leads and to provoke the always cantankerous gun lobby—a legacy of the bureau’s near demise in the early years of the Reagan administration at the hands of the National Rifle Association and its powerful allies on Capitol Hill.
In a 1981 congressional hearing, the bureau’s then-director, G. R. Dickerson, defended the bureau, proclaiming to the House Judiciary Committee that the bureau had for the prior two years “focused over ninety-two percent of its enforcement resources on the prevention of violent crime and the pursuit of violent criminals.” ATF had used aggressive, proactive tactics to enforce firearms laws, he said, including undercover stings designed to trap dealers into making illegal sales. The NRA and other members