I Have Been Terrified of an Active Shooter Situation Since I Was 11

There’s not really a more headline-y way to say it

Spring has always been my dad’s favorite season; he says it’s because everything is green and new and fresh. In the Willamette Valley, that’s especially true.

On May 21, 1998, I was two days shy of my 11th birthday. The rural Oregon spring was in prime condition; the deciduous trees were lush and green and the lilac bushes turned the air purple. The sky was exceptionally clear in the morning as my siblings and I—brother in middle school, sister and I both still in elementary—bustled around the dim house, waking up and getting dressed.

Most mornings, dad came home from his night shift as a deputy sheriff with plenty of time to help brush hair, make toast, and get us out the door. This morning, he did not; he’s working late, we figured. Happens all the time.

We undertook the unusual but not impossible task of waking mom and on to school we went.

Later, while we studied the salmon cycle and learned about the native trees of the state, a pale aide entered my 5th grade classroom with a brightly-colored sheet of paper in her hand.

My teacher went white.

Students were to be informed, it said, that a tragic incident had occurred in the next town over, at a local high school where many of us had attended plays and sporting events. A young man had entered the school with a firearm; several students were believed to be deceased and dozens more were injured. Relatives were being notified, but if the children had questions, the teachers were instructed to be careful in their answers.

Oh, I thought. That must be where dad was this morning.

Dad was often the first responder at serious situations, so this was nothing new. He was the kind of man you could rely on in an emergency; the kind of man that women who’d survived domestic violence situations trusted implicitly with their stories. Often, when he was missing in the mornings, we knew it was because he was doing something important.

But it wasn’t usually this bad.

As the day and the week went on, I would do two things—I would turn 11 years old, and I would learn the name Kip Kinkel.

Kinkel, just a handful of years older than I was, was a freshman at Thurston High School when he murdered both of his parents in their home and then proceeded to drive to his high school, where he’d been expelled the day before for bringing a handgun. Upon arrival, he would open fire and kill two students and wound 25 others before being tackled while he was reloading. That detail will matter later.

Sure enough, my dad was a first responder at the scene of the Kinkel house. If you watch the Frontline documentary about it closely enough, you may see him stringing up police tape in the B-roll.

That morning, after murdering his parents, Kinkel entered the cafeteria of the school with a semi-automatic rifle, two pistols, and a hunting knife. He carried, according to reports, 1,127 rounds of ammunition. All things told, Kinkel fired just 50 of those rounds.

By comparison, Omar Mateen fired 202 rounds inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

If the lack of an AR as part of Kinkel’s arsinal strikes you as unusual, recall that the assault weapons ban was still very much in effect in 1998 and would not expire for another six years.

Kinkel was tackled by a fellow student when he stopped to reload—an opportunity that would not have existed if he had been carrying and using a higher-capacity weapon.

Kinkel was apprehended alive and is currently serving a sentence of more than 110 years.