Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [6]
“Did it make you mad?” Adams asked.
“I can’t believe she was talking about me. She didn’t have to tell the whole world.”
Adams asked Nicholas if he had overheard anything else, from other teachers.
“I’ve heard the secretary say that ‘he’s just the worst kid in school.’ I heard her say that.”
Adams then asked Nicholas which teachers in particular seemed to dislike him. He named a few, but the list omitted Karen Farley, a popular teacher who taught typing and other business skills, and whose own two children, Lora and Will, were also enrolled in the school.
When Adams asked Nicholas whether he got along with Mrs. Farley, Nicholas nodded yes.
This was clearly evident in a videotape Mrs. Farley made of her typing class earlier in the school year. The camera captured her voice as she simultaneously filmed the class and reminded her students to type without looking at the keys. At one point, as the typewriters clatter away, she asks the few students present if any other students are likely to show up that morning. She learns that two students, Nicholas and a girl named Shirley, have simply stepped out of the room for a moment, Nicholas for a drink of water. “Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Farley says. “I’ll have to get Nicholas. He’ll just die if I don’t get a picture of him.”
And soon she does. Nicholas sits facing the camera, a big, endearing smile on his face. He is wearing a white polo shirt, a black jacket, and light pants. He is small boned, lean, well groomed, his hair trimmed close. In this image, in the bright sun that floods the classroom, he is just a boy. Nothing in the smile suggests the stress and anger he is supposed to have felt—although by the time this videotape was made, he had already acquired his gun. The smile is one of brilliant delight.
Nicholas did not hate Karen Farley. It is doubtful anyone could have. She spoke in a soft, measured way, with a Tidewater pace and cadence. She was devoted to the school. The morning of December 16, 1988, she returned a check the school had given her as payment for the extra time she had put into helping produce the school yearbook. She told Rev. Mr. Sweet the school needed the money more than she.
She had begun her teaching career in 1970 at Booker T. Washington High School, an all-black school then on the verge of being integrated. The school had decided to integrate the faculty first, then the student body. She stayed for three years until the strains and dangers of teaching there and of trying to motivate a group of disinterested city kids wore her down. She resigned to become a first-grade teacher at the Faith Christian School, operated by Faith Baptist Church in Chesapeake. She left after one semester to have her first baby, Lora. A boy, Will, followed.
Mrs. Farley stayed home with her children until 1978, when she returned to Faith. She continued teaching there until the school closed in 1987, at which point she joined the teaching staff at Atlantic Shores. A colleague from the Faith Christian School, Bonnie Lovelace, recalled a night when she and Mrs. Farley found themselves still at work long after everyone else had gone home.
“Do you think anyone knows we’re here?” Mrs. Farley asked.
Probably not, her friend answered.
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Farley said. “Someday we’ll make headlines.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE LETHAL LANDSCAPE
BEFORE ADVANCING ANY FURTHER, I SHOULD first make my bias clear, for bias more than any other force shapes debate about guns in this country. I am not opposed to guns, not even handguns, provided the owners acknowledge the monumental responsibility conferred by ownership; provided too that they invest the time necessary to become safe, proficient users and to store those guns in a cabinet strong enough to hold burglars and toddlers