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.
No support. And that help is perilously hard to find, despite the fact that the incidence of adolescent depression is quite high. An estimated 20 percent of all U.S. children and adolescents have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, and 13 percent of all adolescents experience "serious emotional disturbance."
Indeed, guidance counselors, primary conduits of support for troubled children, increasingly have little time to guide, says Jill Cook, a spokeswoman for the American School Counselor Association. Experts stress that ensuring each student has a relationship with at least one adult can go a long way toward defusing a bad situation. While the number of guidance counselors has grown steadily over the past two decades, Cook notes, they are often assigned to administer the litany of tests mandated by state and federal lawmakers. "It's basically almost all they have time to do," she says.
In their zeal to prevent school violence, teachers and counselors may rush to judgment based on a student's physical appearance or unconventional attitudes. A lot of kids like the nihilistic, gothic style, but they're often quite thoughtful, strong students, says Katherine Newman, author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings . "It may mean that they are expressing a kind of opposition to the football-cheerleader end of the social spectrum," says Newman, "but that [should] not make them into objects of suspicion."
Back at Red Lake, the shock has not abated. "It's devastating," said Red Lake Tribal Chairman Floyd Jourdain. "We all know each other, play together, shop in the same place. It's a pretty close-knit community."
The reservation is a sovereign nation roughly 100 miles south of the Canadian border in northern Minnesota. About 5,000 of the approximately 10,000 enrolled members live on the reservation, an expanse of lakes and forests. It is a very private community. As the national--and international--news media descended last week, Jourdain ordered them not to roam about the tribal property. At least two photographers were arrested and expelled from the reservation.
By Tuesday, the grieving had already begun, drawing on both Christian and Indian traditions. Healing songs were sung, sage was burned. The school fence was littered with flowers, stuffed animals, and messages. And outside Thursday's wake for student Chase Lussier, 15, tribe members were taking turns sitting by a watch fire they would tend for the three days until the funeral--the three days it takes a soul to make its way to the spirit world.
With Molly Miron, Helen Fields and Angie C. Marek
This story appears in the April 4, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.