Horror in Red Lake
A school shooting, and no answers
The new culture room at Minnesota's Red Lake High School is a thing of beauty, a circular space rising two stories to the skylights above. Eight feet up, the walls are ringed with wood carvings of the symbols for the seven major clans of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa: Bear, Turtle, Bullhead, Eagle, Mink, Pine Marten, and Kingfisher.
This is where members of a Native Culture class crouched behind benches and tables while their fellow student, Jeff Weise, tried to shoot his way in through the locked door.
The setting may not be familiar to most Americans, but the events are chillingly so: Last Monday, Weise, 16, walked into his high school and began shooting. Ten minutes later, he had killed himself--along with five other students, a teacher, and a security guard. Seven additional students were injured. Weise also killed his grandfather and grandfather's companion.
Like the Columbine killers before him, Weise was branded an outsider in the homogenous village of Red Lake, a label he did much to cultivate. He was attracted to goth culture--black clothing, dark music--and Nazism. "I guess I've always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals," he wrote on a nazi.org Web forum--despite the fact that he was an American Indian. He was known to have had a crushingly difficult life: his father a suicide, his mother confined to a nursing home after a devastating car accident, his early years reportedly marked by abuse and neglect. He had made threats and written stories about shooting up a high school. His few friends at the Red Lake Indian Reservation didn't take the threats seriously.
Legacy. Six years after the nation's worst school shooting, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., much has changed at America's high schools. But does the Red Lake massacre mean that we still have a long way to go?
"Red Lake could be a wakeup call," says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a private consulting group. "But the real question is if we will just hit the snooze button and go back to sleep." He says that although school safety rose on the agenda of many administrators after Columbine, during the past two years some of the progress has "stalled and is even sliding backwards."
And yet there is every indication that Red Lake administrators were prepared as much as possible. "Based on what we have available to us right now, it seems like this school had many of the general safeguards in place," says Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, a school-safety advocacy group based in Westlake Village, Calif. Despite a relative lack of funds, "they had a school safety plan; they had an intervention plan with law enforcement."
But there was no way to prepare for the radical solution building inside Weise. "We write these [shootings] off as unusual, and they are," says Harvard psychologist William Pollack. "I call them the tip of the iceberg." Most unhappy kids will never turn up with a gun, but they still need help.
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