Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (37 page)

In March 2000, fitted with Dynamics’s leg braces and electrodes, Missy shuffled a quarter-mile (half a kilometer) in the Los Angeles Marathon in a drenching rain to prove something to herself and the world. Although still mostly confined to her wheelchair, Missy spoke briefly at the first Million Mom March against gun violence in Washington, D.C., and attended her own senior prom in a dress donated by a Hollywood fashion designer.

In June, to a thunderous standing ovation, Missy Jenkins walked slowly across the stage to accept her Heath High School diploma. And later that summer, having never cast a single vote in her life, Missy walked onto the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles to share her story, again to deafening applause.

Throughout her college years at Murray State University in nearby Murray, Kentucky, the media came calling, but Missy was dealing with more private worries. She began to wonder whether she could ever be loved by a man, whether she could have a baby, how she would lift that crying baby from its crib, how she could shop for groceries … how she could be the woman, wife, and mother she wanted to be. In her junior year, she was named Ms. Wheelchair Kentucky, but she wondered how to tell her dates all the humiliating truths about her damaged body. She wondered whether she would ever dance again.

Then she met Josh Smith, a former high school football star who had grown up on a tobacco farm and wanted to be a physical education teacher. They dated for two years before he finally proposed.

Missy graduated in 2004 with a degree in social work and a desire to work with troubled teens like Michael Carneal. In time, she got her dream job as a counselor at an alternative school where she works closely with defiant and marginalized kids who have run into trouble with grades, behavior, and social expectations.

MASS MURDERER MICHAEL CARNEAL REMAINS IN A KENTUCKY PRISON FOR KILLING THREE TEENAGE GIRLS IN HIS 1997 RAMPAGE AT HEATH HIGH SCHOOL IN WEST PADUCAH, KENTUCKY, ALTHOUGH HE IS ELIGIBLE FOR PAROLE IN 2023.
Associated Press

In 2006, she and Josh married. With the help of her brace and a walker, she was able to stand for the ceremony, and later danced her first dance. To stand up on this special day meant everything to her.

She also became a mother in 2007, when her son Logan was born. Her dreams were coming true. A second son, Carter, was born in April 2010.

And she began to think she should tell her story in a book.

AN ALTERNATE IDENTITY

Questions have been asked a thousand ways. Answers have never been satisfying.

Michael Carneal’s enigmatic massacre was the second in a series of American school shootings that happened within months of one another. Two months before Heath, two students were killed in Pearl, Mississippi. Less than four months after, four students and a teacher died in a middle-school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. After that, a teacher was shot dead at a school dance in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and two students were shot to death at a school in Springfield, Oregon.

Most forensic psychiatrists who have studied Michael Carneal believe he understood the consequences of his actions, but it’s not clear whether he was mentally ill when he opened fire. After the fact—because Michael had never been diagnosed with any mental illness before the attack—they all note his strange behaviors, odd paranoias, and difficulty interpreting social situations correctly.

Michael went on to develop full-blown
schizophrenia in prison and has been heavily
medicated, but psychiatrists still aren’t
sure whether his paranoid tendencies
played a role in the shooting.

Michael went on to develop full-blown schizophrenia in prison and has been heavily medicated, but psychiatrists still aren’t sure whether his paranoid tendencies played a role in the shooting.

As evidence, they offer the fact that Michael did not shoot at the “preps,” the clique he identified as his nemesis. Few preps participated in the prayer circle. And nobody—not even Michael himself—has claimed he was teased by the kids who were in the prayer circle that fated morning, many of whom were people he considered friends. When he was told that he had killed his close friend Nicole Hadley, Michael said the news made him feel “crappy.”

If he was unleashing pent-up rage at his bullies, would he not have attacked his bullies instead of friends and innocent bystanders?

Instead, they see a child at a fragile moment in the development of his identity, an immature boy who believed he was not the student his sister was, not his parents’ favorite, not important to anyone or any particular group—not noticed.

So psychiatrists believe he might have developed an alternate identity, one very different from the boy Michael Carneal saw in the mirror. “Everybody talked how I was not like my sister,” he told a psychologist after the attack, “so I figured if I was the exact opposite, people would pay attention to me more.”

Most school shooters are children who are especially socially isolated; they have few or no friends and have trouble making friends of the opposite sex. Michael was more complex: Many of his classmates considered him a friend, but he believed he was widely disliked and had no friends. His social insecurities were not unlike those of most adolescents, but they blinded him to the fact that he was not as isolated as he felt. In short, he isolated himself more than he was isolated by his classmates.

Thus, some say, the shooting provided him a very public way of asserting his power and winning respect from all the people who saw him as only a fringe figure and a marginal clown.

After the Columbine shootings, Michael fell into deep psychosis and twice attempted suicide because he blamed himself for those shootings.

After the Columbine shootings, Michael fell into
deep psychosis and twice attempted suicide
because he blamed himself for those shootings.

A year after the December 1, 1997, shooting spree that left three girls dead at Heath High School, their grieving families filed wrongful-death lawsuits against more than fifty defendants, including Michael’s parents, the school, video game makers, websites, and the makers of the movie
The Basketball Diaries
, arguing that they all could have predicted Michael’s deadly violence and should have taken steps to prevent it. But they didn’t stop there: The families also sued seven Heath High School students—including Ben Strong—whom they claimed knew “something big” was about to happen and could have prevented the slaughter.

The Jenkins family was asked to be part of the legal case, but declined.

In 2000, a federal judge dismissed all defendants except Michael from the lawsuit. The court ruled that none of them, especially the video game, movie, and website makers, could possibly have known what Michael would do. Despite subtly disturbing signs, Michael had flown under the radar.

“This was a tragic situation, but tragedies such as this simply defy rational explanation and the courts should not pretend otherwise,” the judge wrote in a thirty-nine-page opinion.

So the girls’ families quickly agreed to a $42 million settlement offer from Michael’s lawyers—a mostly symbolic victory because Michael faces the rest of his life in prison with no assets.

A CHANCE FOR HEALING

Missy Jenkins sought answers in a different way.

Starting just two years after the shooting, Michael had called and written several letters to Missy, sometimes creepy but always apologetic. After the sixth letter and the second phone call to her house, Missy asked the prosecutor to stop any contact. It scared her. She simply wasn’t ready to deal with the boy who was both a friend and a killer in her mind. She had forgiven him, but that didn’t mean she wanted to be pen pals.

But then she saw a new chance for healing. Hers, not his.

At her request, the prison system allowed her and Mandy to speak to Michael Carneal privately for two hours at the Kentucky State Reformatory, where Inmate #151127 lived in the psychiatric ward.

They met in a conference room, Missy in her wheelchair and Michael in a tan jumpsuit, unshackled. Here before her was the little freshman boy she had known so long ago, 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall now and filled out, but still a little shy and meek behind his big glasses. The meeting started nervously for both of them, with Michael looking at the floor, just as he had at his sentencing.

But as they spoke, he warmed to Missy and made eye contact. The sisters told him how much they had liked him in school. Michael talked about the day of the shooting, the long-ago letters, what prompted the attack. Missy asked him whether he thought he belonged in prison, and he skirted the issue except to say he believed he should be punished but that he could also benefit from treatment.

She told him she forgave him, not to make him feel better but so that she could move on. She told him she would certainly miss out on a lot, but she refused to miss out on life.

And she told him that she regretted that she could not feel the kicking of a baby that was growing inside her at that very moment.

Michael apologized profusely to Missy and Mandy, and they accepted his contrition as sincere. Toward the end of the meeting, Missy asked Michael if there was anything he’d like for her to share in her many speeches and a book she planned to write about her experience.

Yes, he told her. Two things. First, tell kids to talk to someone, anyone, if they are having problems. And second, say nice things to people and understand how it can make a difference in a life.

STUDENTS AT HEATH HIGH SCHOOL (INCLUDING SENIOR BEN STRONG AT RIGHT) WERE STAGGERED BY FRESHMAN MICHAEL CARNEAL’S DEADLY 1997 OUTBURST AFTER A PRAYER MEETING BEFORE SCHOOL.
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Missy didn’t leave with all the answers she sought, but she left satisfied about many things. That Michael was damaged by bullying. That he had fired blindly, targeting nobody in particular. That he never considered the consequences until it was too late. And that he was truly sorry.

She felt some of her anger peel away. Being angry at Michael was giving him too much power over her.

“I’ve always said that there will never be closure for me,” Missy wrote later. “But I think that visit was the closest I’ll ever come.”

In 2007, Michael Carneal’s lawyers filed an appeal, saying he was insane at the time of the shooting and should not have been able to enter a guilty plea. In 2009, the Kentucky Supreme Court rejected his request for a new competency hearing and a retrial, so Michael must continue to serve out his sentence. He won’t be eligible for parole until 2023, when he will be forty years old.

“I can’t change anything that happened, by dying or anything else,” Carneal once told a reporter. “I wish I could change things but I can’t.”

Missy Jenkins almost never says “can’t.”

She still refers to herself as being
possibly
paralyzed for life, because she genuinely believes there might be a day when she is not.

In her dreams, she always walks.

She never thinks she should have died that day. The dead fulfilled a purpose in life, and so is she.

She doesn’t believe she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but rather in the right place at the right time.

“Before this happened to me, I really didn’t feel like I had a direction in my life,” she said in one of her many interviews. “I was a fifteen-year-old kid who thought nothing would ever happen to me like that. After this happened to me, it gave me direction.”

She didn’t want to carry any dark things around inside her, things that would weigh her down and embitter her.

“I could’ve died that morning, so I wanted to finish out life being happy, not being angry.”

She put everything down in the book she dreamed of writing. Teaming up with William Croyle, a newspaperman who followed much of her journey, she wrote
I Choose to Be Happy
(Langmarc Publishing, 2008). With a foreword written by gun-control crusader Sarah Brady—wife of Jim Brady, the presidential press secretary shot in the head during an assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981—and endorsements by ABC News’s Diane Sawyer and one-handed, former Major League pitcher Jim Abbott,
I Choose to Be Happy
is a clear-eyed, candid account of her near-death and resurrection as “a visual against violence.”