Mental Illness Set Kip Kinkel's Case Apart From Others Like It

EUGENE - The teachers, family and friends who testified about the Kip Kinkel they knew described a kid like a lot of others - funny, a little wild, struggled with reading, got mad when he was teased.

What made him different - the Kip Kinkel that no one knew - were the voices he says invaded his head.

Those voices, he told experts, were loud and unrelenting, drove him to put a gun to the back of his father's head as he sat at the kitchen breakfast bar and pull the trigger. Those voices made him kill his mother after telling her he loved her. And those voices pushed him to load a .22-caliber rifle and two pistols, head for Thurston High School in Springfield, and open fire on the crowded cafeteria.

"When you look at kids who kill, generally, a tiny percentage are seriously mentally ill," said Charles Patrick Ewing, a forensic psychologist and professor of law at New York's University at Buffalo.

"He carefully hid it so that he would not be stigmatized. The sad part of it is, we are fairly good at treating mental illness. But it has to be detected."

After pleading guilty, Kinkel was sentenced Wednesday to nearly 112 years in prison for killing his parents and two students and wounding 25 other students.

One after the other, people who had known him growing up said they were shocked.

But there were signs of trouble.

A preschool teacher remembered Kinkel as a red-haired whirlwind who made her think of the Looney Tunes cartoon character, the

Tasmanian Devil. An elementary-school classmate recalled him trying to hurt other kids in dodgeball. A neighbor recalled him throwing a bowl of cherries into the air after being told he couldn't keep them.

But mass murder?

Kinkel and the other teenage boys who have opened fire at schools around the country don't really fit any profile, said Jeff Sprague, co-director of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior at the University of Oregon.

"They didn't fit the classic profile of an anti-social kid, a kid who comes from poor, criminal, drug-abusing parents, with a history of abuse, whose first arrest was when he was 4 years old," Sprague said.

"All these boys - at Jonesboro, Paducah, Pearl - they were all that much more hidden in that regard. They didn't stick out as much.

"If a kid is just a little weird, or appears on the surface to be a little weird, it is easier to attribute it to some mild personality problem. You brush it off."

There was the fascination with guns and explosives. Kinkel's mother was alarmed enough that she took him to a psychologist for treatment.

The psychologist was not concerned enough to do more than send him to a doctor who prescribed the anti-depressant Prozac. In the midst of it, Kinkel's father gave in to his son's pleading to buy a Glock 9-mm pistol.

Dr. Park Deitz, who has examined killers from Jeffrey Dahmer to John Hinckley, said he found Kinkel deeply depressed when he examined him in September for the prosecution, but that doesn't fully explain what the teen did.

"It is generally the case that people who do mass shootings are both depressed and paranoid, although in the young they need be only depressed and angry," said Deitz, whose Threat Assessment Group works with corporations to prevent workplace violence.

"We've got thousands of cases of people with more warning signs than Kip Kinkel who didn't do anything," Deitz said.

But the voices, delusions and suicidal depression give events a framework.

Kinkel told experts who examined him after the shootings that he arranged to buy a stolen gun at school because he felt threatened by a stranger who wanted to hurt him after Kinkel had kicked over a reflective triangle while the man was changing a flat tire. He stockpiled explosives because he was afraid the Chinese army was going to invade the United States.

Experts testified that the voices got louder and harder to resist as Kinkel got more depressed and stressed, and it peaked when he was expelled from school for the gun in his locker - the same day he shot his father and his mother.

Afterward, Kinkel wrote in a note that they could never have lived with the embarrassment of his expulsion, and he wanted to die himself.

"But I have to kill people," he wrote before taking his guns to school. "I don't know why. I am so sorry."

He wrote of wanting to die and also wanting to blow up a school pep rally in a journal filled with self-loathing, despair over being rejected by a girl, and anger at a member of the football team. The journal was hidden in a chest in a loft over his bedroom.

The desire to die in a hail of bullets fits a profile the U.S. Secret Service has developed of a likely assassin, said Sprague, the university researcher.

There are many people who share Kinkel's problems, but few commit mass murder, Deitz said.