Seconds Separated Life From Death

SPRINGFIELD, Ore. - Jim Calhoun was waiting to hear if his insurance company would pay to fix his truck when someone told him there had been a shooting at Thurston High School, where his daughter was a senior. Calhoun hadn't seen his daughter in a year - "teenager-father problems" - but he said when he heard the news, "I just knew it was her."

"I don't know how to say it. I can't explain it. I just had the feeling."

He was wrong. Michelle Calhoun was safe. But only by seconds.

She got up from a cafeteria table yesterday morning just as 15-year old Kip Kinkel walked in spraying bullets.

"My boyfriend got shot. Murdered," she said.

Next to where she had sat seconds before, Mikael Nickolauson, 17, was dead. They had been dating nine months - long enough for them to have agreed to join the National Guard together, but not enough for Michelle to know how to spell his last name.

She watched Kinkel shoot and injure fellow students. She didn't know until later that police believe he killed his parents as well.

Calhoun told her story - over and over - on the sidewalk in front of Thurston High School. This was the tidal zone between the blood-spattered cafeteria inside and the waves of mourners, gawkers and reporters outside.

By early afternoon, flowers were threaded into the cyclone fence. Students, inexplicably composed and concise, repeated the details of their horror, while schoolmates sold the chance to photograph Kinkel's middle-school yearbook photo for as much as $50.

`There are hicks and preps'

Thurston is a school that draws students from several worlds.

"There are hicks and preps," said freshman Marvin Hickman, 16.

Some friends said he was exaggerating. But yesterday afternoon, a group of large-size boys in jeans, cowboy boots and hats - one with a small Confederate flag in his back pocket - swaggered down the sidewalk and confronted some Kinkel friends being interviewed on TV.

"You weirdos, you knew this was coming!" one of the swaggerers yelled.

There are students at Thurston from the middle-class suburbs and mill-town remnants that make Springfield the blue-collar buddy to the better-known, more cosmopolitan Eugene.

The school is on the far east edge of Springfield, and from down the road come farmers' children, hippie kids living the Ken Kesey life and professionals looking for more space.

That's where Kip Kinkel came from: down a two-lane highway along the McKenzie River, past farms advertising "Worms $1," and through the blink of a town called Cedar Flats.

"You're in the country now," said Dave Wing, owner of Mather's Market in Cedar Flats.

Wing was Kinkel's soccer, baseball and basketball coach during the boy's elementary-school days.

"He had a bad temper when he didn't get his way," Wing said. "Not like this, though."

Kinkel's parents, Wing said, "did everything for that kid. They were very loving, caring people."

Wing ripped a flap off an apple box to write directions to the Kinkels' A-frame, two-story house. It's an area known as Deer Horn, a wooded tract in the hills of mostly upscale homes.

Police said a man and woman were found dead in that house. They assume they are the Kinkels, William and Faith. Kip Kinkel's older sister was out of state, said Lane County Sheriff's Lt. Bret Freeman.

Kinkel wasn't happy

Back in town - "Springfield: People Pride Progress" - Chrystie Cooper, 15, said the house was not a happy place for her friend Kinkel.

"He just really hated his parents," she said. "They had major problems."

About two weeks ago, Cooper, Kinkel and Monica Montes, 14, had ice cream after school at Bob's Hamburgers, a hangout just blocks from the school where a sign said yesterday, "Please God help save our children."

"We were laughing and having a good time," Cooper said. "But he said he had been grounded for the whole summer and said if he didn't get home, `My ass is going to get kicked.' "

Talk of family troubles didn't surprise Jim Calhoun. Something had driven him and his daughter Michelle apart after the death of her mother. Jim had lost track of his daughter, who had been living with friends.

"Sometimes," he said, "it takes something like this to bring you back together, you know?"

Even five hours after the first bullet was fired, father and daughter were still walking the sidewalk in front of the school, hugging, talking, promising that whatever had driven the junkman and the young drama student apart didn't matter anymore.

They had gone from reconciliation to fatherly advice on which reporters to talk to and a suggestion that she charge for her popular interviews - to raise money for charity.

Michelle, though, had had her fill of the media. A knot of reporters and photographers surrounded and moved with her as she paced the sidewalk. She thinks they're partly to blame for her boyfriend's slaying by overhyping past shootings at schools around the country.

"They put so much publicity on it. People just want to do the same thing," she said.

Sidewalk interviews, photo sales

There was an eerie, scripted feel to what unfolded along the sidewalk. Students seemed to know what to say; reporters asked the predictable questions.

It had been said before, of course, in Jonesboro, Ark., in West Paducah, Ky., and other places where school shootings weren't supposed to happen.

Kids would give detailed interviews, only to say they were repeating what they had just watched on CNN.

Kinkel's friend Aaron Keeney pedaled up on his small bicycle, losing the fight to hold back tears. He said the gun Kinkel brought to school the day before the shooting, which got him kicked out of Thurston, had been stolen from his home.

"I don't want to talk about it anymore," he said. Instead, he was looking for the two TV producers who had promised him $5 each for the chance to photograph his friend's picture in last year's Thurston Middle School yearbook.

Bicycle delivery service

"Here you go, payment for your bicycle delivery service," one of the producers told Keeney.

This later brought a big laugh from 16-year-old Hickman. He got $50 from "the guys from New York" for securing a Kinkel photo. When he told a TV crew he had a yearbook at home, they hustled him into their van, drove him home, shot the picture and dropped him off at the nearby 7-Eleven.

He and a buddy hopped out of the van, flashed the cash and made a grand entrance into the store.

Keeney, though, knows what's hot in the Kinkel market.

"I've got a video of me and him hunting, but I'm not releasing it," he told the TV producers.

By day's end, Jim Calhoun had tired of the life of a media celebrity and had evolved into a sidewalk media critic. He agreed with his daughter that overblown media coverage of other school shootings was partly to blame for the day's terror.

"Kids learn things off of TV," he said. "Everyone knows that."

Relief could be several days off.

Said one TV reporter on a media-jammed flight into Eugene yesterday, "We'll probably stay through the first funeral."

David Postman's phone message number is 360-943-9882. His e-mail address is: dpostman@seattletimes.com