The Only Two Living US Mass School Shooters Who Are Not Incarcerated (ABC News)

Adam Lanza killed himself. So did Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. And so did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine. And Christopher Harper-Mercer in Roseburg. And Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista.

If you go down the list of mass shootings at U.S. schools, most of the killers turned the guns on themselves after killing classmates and teachers. Several others were killed by police, and a few were taken into custody alive.

But only two are now out of prison, one of whom was arrested with a gun after his release, while the other has since applied for a concealed carry permit.

Not only that, but because Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden were minors at the time of the 1998 shooting – 13 and 11, respectively – when they killed five people in what was then the second-deadliest U.S. school shooting, Arkansas state law mandated that they be released on their 21st birthdays, with their records sealed.

Little has been reported about the lives of Golden and Johnson since they were released in the mid-2000s, but they seem to have one thing in common: neither apparently swore off guns after their time in juvenile detention.





THE DAY TWO BOYS BECAME MASS SHOOTERS

Debbie Spencer was a science teacher at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 and taught both Golden and Johnson. She said Johnson "was one of the most polite students I've ever had. Always 'Yes, ma'am, no ma'am,'" she told ABC.

On the other hand, she said, Golden was "sneaky."

"He would do enough to get by. I remember the conversation we had the day before [the shooting]. I was going over to see if they wanted to know what their grades were so far," Spencer said, remembering that Golden had just barely gotten a B.

"You just got by by the skin of your teeth, didn't you?" she recalled saying to him.

"And he said, 'Yup, I always do,'" she said.

"It gives me chills because he knew what he was going to do at this point," she said.







The two were reportedly planning a shooting and getaway, with news reports at the time detailing how Johnson took his parents' car and the boys broke into Golden's grandparents' home where his grandfather kept his guns unlocked. One of the pair then pulled the fire alarm at lunch and opened fire when people started to flee.

"They were hiding in bushes and shooting at us," Spencer said. "We didn't know what was going on. It was an ambush. It was chaos.

"I didn't even know it was that close to me until I was giving the police my statement and I saw, 'Oh look, there's a hole in my purse,'" she said.

Jonesboro was tied for the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history at the time, according to an ABC News analysis of FBI records.







Part of the reason it is not as well remembered today stems from a matter of timing, one expert says. Golden and Johnson didn't know it when they pulled their respective triggers, but little over a year later, a pair of teenage boys was going to open fire at their Colorado school in a horrific, deadly event that unfolded on live TV.

Journalist Dave Cullen spent nearly 10 years writing a book about that shooting at Columbine High School, and said the Jonesboro shooting and others contributed to Columbine's resonance.

"There had been the lead up to [Columbine] and the growing anxiety in the country about these school shootings," Cullen told ABC News. "If you had had Columbine out of the blue, it would have been horrifying but it would have seemed unique... it would seem more like a one off. The fact that it felt like part of a pattern is what made it much worse -- a pattern but taken to an extreme, way beyond our imagination."

In the subsequent 18 years after Jonesboro, the Westside Middle School shooting was knocked down from being tied for second to being locked in a five-way tie for ninth deadliest shooting in the nation, the ABC News analysis concludes.

Golden and Johnson are the only two U.S. mass school shooters from the past century who are alive and not incarcerated.





THE JUSTICE OF JUVENILES

In most mass killings, which the FBI defines as any incident in which three or more people are killed, the offenders put on trial are convicted of at least one charge of felony murder. Felons are barred from possessing firearms.

But in the case of the Westside Middle School shooters, they were tried as juveniles, which means they were technically found "delinquent" instead of "guilty," and even though they served time, they came out with sealed records.

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