Kinkel is still worried about hurting his victims by speaking publicly, but as he watched people use him as the reason to exclude some of his closest friends from getting a second chance, he began to feel as if his silence was causing harm, too. We spoke for the first time last summer, about a year after the legislative roller coaster.
Kinkel heard voices in his head for the first time when he was 12 years old. Kinkel turned around, looking for someone behind him. But no one was there. He ran inside his house, but the voice followed him in, accompanied by a second. Frightened, he retrieved the rifle he had been given for his 12th birthday and held it tight, hoping it would protect him from the invisible intruders.
He lay in bed, waiting for the voices to go away. The two voices soon became three, all of them male. They had a hierarchy, and Kinkel could tell them apart. They sometimes argued with one another, and they often worked together to denigrate and manipulate Kinkel.
Everything they said was ugly, negative and violent. The voices terrified Kinkel. They warned him that everyone would think he was a freak if he tried to tell anyone about them. So Kinkel tried to make sense of what he was experiencing on his own.
Or maybe the devil. Over time, he became fixated on the idea that the Chinese were going to invade the West Coast. Not just guns, but knives and explosives. The anti-government paranoia resonated deeply with him.
The news was buzzing with events that seemed to Kinkel like validation of his fears: the deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas, followed by the federal assault weapon ban. The voices would come and go.
He noticed the voices often appeared when he had a bad day, so he resolved to have only good days. I have this solution.
But on the inevitable bad days, Kinkel was consumed by delusions. It was an isolating experience, and he slid into depression. His dad, Bill, was skeptical of mental health professionals — he viewed them as quacks who existed to drive up the cost of insurance premiums.
When Kinkel was in eighth grade, he and a friend got in trouble with the cops for throwing rocks off a freeway overpass. His parents searched his room afterward and found materials that could be used to make a bomb.
His mom, Faith, was at a loss. She insisted on taking Kinkel to a child psychologist. Faith told the psychologist, Jeffrey Hicks, that Kinkel had been getting in trouble and that he and his friends had an unhealthy fascination with weapons and explosives. Childhood-onset schizophrenia is extremely rare and difficult to diagnose. It can be hard to differentiate between imaginative play and signs of mental illness, and hallucinations can occur in healthy children as part of regular development.
Some of the more visible symptoms related to mood and behavior can be mistaken for other, more common mental illnesses, such as depression or bipolar disorder. During his nine therapy sessions in , Kinkel did his best to hide symptoms of mental illness — but sometimes he slipped up.
During one appointment, he admitted to often feeling bored, irritable and tired. Hicks concluded Kinkel showed symptoms of depression and recommended his parents talk to his doctor about prescribing an antidepressant. And I would not be allowed to own guns.
Unable to explain this predicament, Kinkel took Prozac for three months until the prescription ran out. By then he had been staying out of trouble and was no longer in therapy. He figured the antidepressant was like an antibiotic that only needed to be taken for a limited period of time. According to Kinkel, when Hicks learned that he and Bill sometimes went target shooting together, he encouraged them to do it more often.
For Kinkel, this presented an opportunity to talk his parents into buying him the handgun he had long wanted. His mom was hesitant but eager to see her son bond with his dad. In June , Bill agreed to buy Kinkel a 9mm Glock, a gun Kinkel chose and paid for with his own money. Hicks later said in court he had no involvement in the decision, and his contemporaneous notes do not mention target shooting or the gun.
Reached by phone earlier this year, he said he had no recollection of encouraging Kinkel and his father to practice shooting guns together. Having the gun made Kinkel feel secure, but the relief was short-lived. On his way home, he rode by a warning triangle sign. He kicked the reflective sign, breaking it, and continued on his way. When he came around the bend, he noticed a grungy-looking man standing near a trailer, staring him down. Moments later, the man drove up in a brown truck covered in bullet holes, got out and confronted Kinkel about damaging the sign.
At first Kinkel denied it. Then, as Kinkel remembers it, the man pulled out a gun. Kinkel gave him a fake one and the man left. He was still several miles from home, and the ride back was mostly uphill on a rural road with few cars. He worried the man would call the number, realize it was fake and come back for him.
As he raced up the hill, he mentally prepared to ditch his bike and run into the woods. It was no longer just abstract, distant entities like the government or Disney or China that were after him — the threat was right in his neighborhood.
He stopped making candy runs to the gas station. He slept with his loaded Glock under his pillow, convinced the man could show up any time to kill him and his parents. Kinkel started sleeping with a rifle he still had access to, this time being more careful to avoid getting caught.
But the sense of normality was fleeting. In the spring of , Kinkel and his mom stopped at the gas station near his house. A car pulled up with two men inside. But to year-old Kinkel, the threat was real and immediate. He was experiencing symptoms of untreated schizophrenia, and there were signs of his unraveling mental health. He turned in Spanish homework with a violent, nonsensical note in the margin.
But almost immediately after they completed the transaction, Kinkel and his friend were caught by a detective who was investigating the missing gun. Kinkel was arrested and charged with possession of a firearm in a public building and receiving a stolen weapon. The gun was gone, and Kinkel was facing expulsion and a felony criminal record. Bill picked Kinkel up from the police station, and they stopped at Burger King on the way home. Bill was so upset with his son that he took his food to the car to eat alone.
The guilt and shame led to the voices emerging more powerfully than Kinkel had ever experienced. They told him that all of humanity was evil — that he, too, was evil. Concepts like love and care and compassion were lies, they said. The sense that I had no other choice was overwhelming. It became my reality. So he waited in the bathroom until enough time had passed that his dad would believe he had finished his food.
During the minute car ride home, the voices overwhelmed him. Most people with schizophrenia do not commit acts of violence — in fact, people with severe mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. And they had promised me that once I did this thing I could kill myself. The voices kept getting louder and louder. When they got home, Kinkel went to his room, crying.
He took two guns from his room and hid them in the attic, in case his dad went looking for them. That afternoon, he picked up the rifle, walked down the stairs and saw his dad sitting at the bar. Kinkel shot his dad in the back of the head, dragged the body into the bathroom and covered it with a sheet. As Kinkel waited for his mom to come home, he fielded several phone calls, asking how he was doing and where his dad was. He lied each time.
When Faith got home that evening, Kinkel met her in the garage. You have no other choice. He told his mom he loved her, shot her twice in the back of the head, three times in the face and once in the heart. He covered her body with a sheet, too.
Kill everybody. Go to school and kill everybody. He brought three guns, including the Glock his dad bought him in an effort to improve their relationship. He wore a long trench coat to help conceal his weapons. He taped a hunting knife to his leg and two spare bullets to his chest — he wanted to make sure to save ammunition to kill himself. As he entered the school, he saw three boys walking in front of him.
He recognized one of the boys, told him to stay away and headed toward the cafeteria. On the way, he pulled a rifle out of his coat and shot year-old Ben Walker in the head.
He continued walking and shot another boy, Ryan Atteberry, in the side of the face. He entered the cafeteria and emptied what was left of the round clip. As he paused to reach for the Glock, one of the students he had shot knocked him to the ground.
Kinkel fired a single shot from the pistol before he was disarmed by several students. Kinkel killed two boys — Walker and year-old Mikael Nickolauson — and injured 25 other students. He was not targeting any of his victims, he later said. They were just the ones who were there. As he lay on the ground, restrained by his classmates, all he could think about was how much he wanted to die. Having said that, this SOB should not get a new trial. Kip is the latter and there is no cure for that.
Like Like. The purpose of hospitals for the mentally ill is not to provide a comfortable life to those who have knowingly committed a crime while completely in touch with reality. It is to treat those who were not. Needless to say, I am in full agreement with Kdogg on this matter. However, many people would say that true psychopaths are evil despite perhaps being severely mentally ill. Whether they are treatable is highly debatable. You are commenting using your WordPress.
I killed my own parents, who I absolutely loved and who loved me and were good people. I killed two boys who were completely innocent. Prison gang members anxious to score points sought to start fights with him, seeing Kinkel as a high-profile target. Outside of one early scuffle that got Kinkel placed into solitary confinement, the transition largely went okay.
Kinkel and others give the new arrivals items like toiletries and commodities, as well as guidance to help adapt to prison life and avoid violence. This struggle compelled him to finally speak, after more than 20 years of shunning countless invitations by the media. Supreme Court. Those justices … basically just told us to go die. That our future should only be torment, pain, suffering and misery. Search Query Show Search. Streaming Options. Show Search Search Query. The medication episode was one of several occasions last month when Kinkel appeared to be upset or sick, according to jail records.
He has been on a suicide watch, checked every 15 minutes, for most of the time he's been at the jail. Jail commander Capt. Paul Sachet declined to discuss Kinkel's condition in detail. In general, he said, inmates who have been under the care of the jail's mental health staff as Kinkel has are watched a little more closely when they are facing a significant event such as a trial or sentencing.
Kinkel has been a model prisoner through most of the 14 months he has been held at the jail, invariably described in records a polite and cooperative. But jail records indicate he has had some recent problems, too.
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