Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (34 page)

AFTER A LIFETIME OF ABANDONMENT, CRIME, AND VIOLENCE, EX-CHICAGO GANG-BANGER TONY MAJZER SAYS HIS GREATEST MOTIVATION FOR STAYING STRAIGHT IS HIS SON ETHAN AND SOON-TO-BE-WIFE CARA
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Ron Franscell

After Maust was sentenced, Tony even plotted how he might be able to commit a crime and be sent to the same prison, where he would kill his tormenter. He tried to tell the cops about Maust again, but he was a convict, and they simply didn’t trust anything he had to say, so he gave up.

Then the nightmares about those faceless dead boys started. Tony began to fantasize about how Maust’s corpse might have looked.

Tony and Dave had been too similar for Tony’s comfort. Abandoned children with profoundly flawed mothers and absent fathers. An unbearable yearning for a real family. Violence. Poor education. Emotional issues galore. Prison experience. Contentment on the far edge of society.

In 2005, on parole for his federal charge of being a felon in possession of guns, Tony met his current girlfriend. They had a son, Ethan, two years later and are making plans to marry someday soon. He finally has his family, and they have become his sole reason for staying straight.

Tony’s been clean for two years, and for the sake of his son, he works hard to keep his criminal past—and his demons—from coming back. He got into a trade school for cabinet-making and now lives in a tidy apartment in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

David Maust still haunts him, but the dreams aren’t as frequent now. Tony’s shaved head bears a web of grotesque scars where Maust beat him nearly to death. And some nights, fewer than before, he allows himself to sink into bouts of self-blame.

He is agonizingly aware that his own choices in life make him a less sympathetic victim, and he can live with that.

While victims often sort through their anger and guilt by forgiving their attackers, Tony hasn’t forgiven David Maust. He hasn’t even forgiven himself. He’s now locked in a prison of his own making.

“It’s just hard now to know what’s true,” Tony says. “David Maust was the only guy who ever pulled the wool over my eyes. That’s what I live with every single day. My life sucked, but I have to believe these kids … these kids had a better shot than I ever did. It’s so unfair. I feel like I let them down, and they know it.”

THE SUN HADN’T YET RISEN
on a cold, melancholy Kentucky morning, and Missy Jenkins was already running late. What fifteen-year-old girl would be in a hurry to roll out of a warm bed into a chilled and gloomy world for the first day of school after the four-day Thanksgiving break?

When she couldn’t suspend time any longer, Missy yanked on a pair of black sweatpants, a white blouse borrowed from a friend, and a black sweatshirt, quickly pulled her hair back into a ponytail, grabbed her tennis shoes and a Pop-Tart, and hit the front door with her twin sister Mandy in tow. No time for hugs and kisses good-bye.

“We’re leaving!” she hollered to her parents. She didn’t wait for a reply as the door slammed behind her.

Missy and Mandy caught a ride to school, as usual, with a friend whose sister was a senior and had a car.

The tight-knit Heath community wasn’t big, and the rural Heath High School was only fifteen minutes from Missy and Mandy’s house. With about six hundred students, the high school was the center of community life, typical of many small towns. The biggest discipline problems were tardiness, unexcused absences, and minor classroom disruptions.

The girls were cutting it close if they wanted to join the prayer circle, where a few dozen students gathered in the school lobby every day before class to join
hands and pray. Worse, Missy wasn’t feeling well, she needed to go to the bathroom, and she had a first-period test in World Civilizations.

TWINS MISSY (LEFT) AND MANDY JENKINS BOTH CAME CLOSE TO DYING WHEN THEIR FRIEND MICHAEL CARNEAL OPENED FIRE DURING A PRAYER MEETING IN THEIR KENTUCKY HIGH SCHOOL FOYER IN 1997.
Courtesy of the Jenkins Family

Missy glanced at her watch. Time was suddenly speeding out of her control.

They hurried into the school foyer to find the prayer circle already coming together. Missy quickly spied a friend, Kelly Hard, whom she asked to come to the bathroom with her.

“Let’s just do the prayer circle,” Kelly said, “and we’ll go to the bathroom after.” No big deal, Missy thought. The ceremony was often short and sweet, and she could make it through, no problem. So they put down their books and joined the circle of a few dozen students that curled around the entire foyer. She held hands with Kelly on her left and with sister Mandy on her right.

The girls bowed their heads and closed their eyes to pray for any of the students who offered prayer requests. Missy put a lot of stock in prayer. She trusted it. It comforted her.

When they finished, the circle’s organizer and prayer leader, a senior football player and son of a preacher named Ben Strong, said a simple “Amen.”

Then all hell broke loose.

LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE SHOOTINGS AT HEATH HIGH SCHOOL, FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD SUSPECT MICHAEL CARNEAL PLEADED GUILTY BUT MENTALLY ILL TO MURDER CHARGES AT MCCRACKEN COUNTY COURTHOUSE IN PADUCAH, KENTUCKY. HE WAS GIVEN A LIFE SENTENCE AND WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR PAROLE IN 2023.
Associated Press

ALIENATED AND ISOLATED

Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old freshman, rose before dawn, too. He showered and dried himself, as he usually did, with six separate towels. He dressed in dark clothes and reached under his bed for a hidden bundle.

Today was going to be a big day at school for him. He was a B student and played in the school band. He came from a good family and attended church. His popular older sister was a Heath valedictorian. He was bright and compliant with his teachers but also forgetful and nervous. And although he had friends in passing at Heath, no one was close, and he existed on the fringe of several cliques, truly belonging to none.

Five-foot-two (1.5 meters) and considered a little dorky, Michael suffered teasing and some bullying, ranging from being called “four eyes” to being noogied until his scalp bled. On a band trip, he was rolled up in a blanket and hit with sock balls by upperclassmen before a chaperone broke it up. In eighth grade, some kids called him “gay” and a “faggot” after a student newsletter’s gossip column reported that he liked another boy.

One day, a classmate came up to Michael and asked for one of the doughnuts he was eating. Michael shared the package with the kid, who spit on one of the doughnuts and threw it back.

But Michael was also a jokester who gave as good as he got, craving attention and friends alike. He could be just as harsh with his own remarks and childish pranks on his classmates. Once he showed the band kids a homemade button with Missy’s picture on it and teased her for being “fat.”

He had made the kind of trouble freshman boys at country schools make, but he wasn’t a troublemaker. He set off a stink bomb in eighth grade and once sold a baggie of parsley to a friend, claiming it was marijuana. In his first two months at Heath High School, he racked up five relatively minor infractions, including using a library computer to visit the
Playboy
website, marking a classmate’s neck with a ballpoint pen, and stealing a can of food from his life-skills class.

In many ways, Michael Carneal was just a cloying, awkward misfit wrestling with puberty and desperately seeking his peers’ approval. In other words, he was a lot like millions of kids.

But there was a darker side to Michael that most never saw. Self-conscious and insecure, he felt picked on and pushed around. His alienation from other kids made him think about suicide. The summer before school started, he sliced his own forearm, but told adults he was injured in a bicycle accident.

Weird, secret delusions were cropping up, too. He was afraid to sleep in his own bed because he feared monsters were coming to get him, so he often slept in the family room. He was afraid falling trees would crash through his house. He hid kitchen knives under his mattress. He laid towels over all the bathroom vents because he believed he’d seen glowing eyes watching him. He sometimes walked on furniture because he imagined slashers with chainsaws were hiding near the floor to cut off his feet. He often announced when entering his bedroom, “I know you are in here.”

Into the wee hours of the dark night, he sat at his computer, playing violent video games, visiting chat rooms, and sending out hundreds of e-mails, safely distant from all the perils of personal contact. But he was also surfing porn sites that he shared with schoolmates, reading about bomb- and weapon-making at
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
site, and studying war gamers’ attack plans. Even his school essays began to take on a more violent, suicidal tone, but not enough to send up red flags.

GOTHS AND GUNS

In an effort to fit in, he often gave stolen CDs as gifts to other students—or sometimes gave away his own possessions and said they were stolen—because he believed low-grade crime made him cool. Not long before this dark, cold morning, he stole some hundred dollar bills from his dad’s wallet and gave them to the goth kids he was now trying to impress.

Michael wanted badly to be so cool that his imaginary enemies could be belittled. He wanted to be a goth, to belong to a group of kids who didn’t belong. He even wore mocking homemade buttons that said “Preps Suck” and had written a short story he called “Halloween Surprise,” in which all those popular kids were attacked with grenades and a shotgun by the brother of a boy named Mike, who gave the corpses of the slaughtered classmates to his mother as a gift.

The scruffy, cynical goth kids purposely didn’t fit in. They dressed in black, cut their hair in macabre ways, wore dog collars, painted their fingernails black, listened to death metal, and didn’t care what other people thought of them.

The goths derided the Bible thumpers of the prayer circle as hypocrites, no better than the well-scrubbed preppies who thought they were better than everyone. The goth kids were openly derisive, talking loudly and laughing intentionally during prayer time.

Although a lifelong churchgoer, Michael adopted the goths’ misanthropic sneering at religion. He began to call himself an atheist, but it was all for show, mostly just to fit in. He considered freshman Nicole Hadley, a prayer-circle regular who had recently moved to West Paducah from Nebraska, to be one of his best friends. She had walked with him at their eighth-grade graduation ceremony, a local custom of some significance between friends. Nicole often visited Michael at his house and openly nudged him to be more religious. It wasn’t unusual that he had called her on the phone almost every night in November 1997, ostensibly about science homework, but mostly just to hear her voice.

And secretly, he had a crush on sophomore Kayce Steger, another prayer-circle girl and a devout Christian whom he asked on a date about a month before. She had politely rebuffed him.

Nevertheless, the diminutive Michael thrived on the illusion that he was a tough-guy nonconformist. The day before Thanksgiving, Michael boldly told one of the goth kids that “the hypocrites in prayer group were going to go down, ’cause I am going to bring ’em down.”