Colville is in Stevens County, far eastern Washington state. A town of 4,600 people, it is a roughly 12-block center where a scattered rural population can come for necessities before returning to farms and homesteads. There is a hospital, a post office, a courthouse, and a border patrol station, as the town is only 50 miles south of Canada. The proximity to the border, and its relative isolation, mean that visitors without clear business are likely to be regarded with some skepticism. Checking into the Selkirk Motel, out-of-town guests are asked their age, town of origin, and purpose of visit with open suspicion, and have their ID checked multiple times. The local drug trade suggests that this is not so extreme a precaution. In residential areas of Colville, the houses are uniformly one level, prefabricated, often in pastel shades of green, blue, and yellow. It is not unusual to see a deer wandering through the streets.

In this far-flung, sparsely populated, wintry town, Fort Colville Elementary is a hub of activity and color. In the entrance hall are bulletin boards with headings such as “Spotlight on Character,” “Principal’s Award,” and “Be a Buddy, Not a Bully.” A poster with a rainbow of columns declares the “Six Pillars of Character” to be trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. The library is decorated with children’s drawings of their favorite books — Holes and A Pizza the Size of the Sun. Giant versions of origami cranes hang from the library ceiling. At reception is a rack of winter clothes under the “Coats for Kids” program, secondhand donations for children from poorer families.

Downstairs, near the fifth-grade classrooms, is the office of the school counselor, Debbie Rogers, and a paraprofessional in charge of discipline, Richard Payette, whom the children call Mr. Richard. (Many students also know him from Sunday school.) The room doubles as an indoor games area for children who might prefer not to be out on the playground, with Lego, Jenga, and board games, or for when it's too cold to play outside. Rogers describes her role as “one part social worker, one part mom, one part counselor, and one part discipline.”

Guns are a fact of life in Colville. They are used in hunting season for deer, elk, and bears, as well as for fending off coyotes or cougars and protecting livestock. Even more normal for a child than packing a gun is carrying a pocketknife. Rogers says it’s not uncommon for a knife to be brought to school accidentally; they’re often used for farm work. The parents are informed, the weapon confiscated, and one such incidence of forgetfulness is tolerated.

Around 7:30 a.m. on Feb. 7, 2013, Payette went as usual into the lunchroom to supervise, greeted by the din of children eating breakfast and filing in from school buses. A fourth-grader approached him and said a fifth-grade boy, David, had had a knife on the bus, which he’d brought into school.

Payette searched David, his sweatshirt and pants pockets, but found nothing. The boy protested innocence: “Knife? I don’t know anything about a knife. You’re talking about a butter knife?’”

He then led the boy to the hall and opened his backpack, again finding nothing. He went into the classroom, and asked his teacher, Mr. Jones, if he could look through the student’s desk. Mr. Jones replied that David hadn’t been in yet but a boy named Adam — both boys have been given pseudonyms here — had, and the two had been spending a lot of time together lately. Payette took Adam’s backpack off the hook and opened it. Inside he found a knife with a 3-inch blade, a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun, and a magazine containing seven rounds. That day, David was 11 and three months; Adam was 10½.

The police and the boys’ legal guardians were called. Officer Scott Arms of the Colville Police Department interviewed both boys, each in separate rooms, Adam with his father, David with his grandfather. Arms first asked David if he understood why he'd come.

David nodded and replied, “Because I was planning to kill a girl in my class.” He explained that the girl had been picking on him and his friends. The plan was for Adam to be the “shooter” and for David to be the “knifer.” Adam answered similarly, saying the girl had been rude to him and his friends. The officer felt both boys seemed without remorse or emotion. He pressed Adam, making sure he understood the implications of this, and Adam said, “Yes, I just want her dead.” (The boys’ confessions to Scott Arms were later ruled inadmissible at trial, as Arms did not explain to the guardian of either boy that it was they, rather than Adam or David, who were responsible for waiving Miranda rights.)

Adam also spoke with Debbie Rogers about the plot, expanding on the planned scale of the violence. “No, you don’t understand, there’s more to this," he said. "There’s other kids, we were going to hurt other kids.” He told her some names, and then picked out more from a class list, six in all. Adam’s revelation about the horrific scope of the plan might have been a child’s honesty, but it might also plausibly have been empty, if unsettling, bravado. David chattered freely about his plan, as well as the physical threat he posed, on the day of his arrest (he tapped on the glass of the in-school suspension room to motion a detective closer, before informing him, “I just want to let you know,” as he raised his fists, “that I’m in tae kwon do and can really use my hands, and when you take me out of school you better put the handcuffs behind my back”), yet, unlike Adam, he mentioned only one intended victim in all of his interviews.

The district sent out an auto-call to parents. Teachers' phones began ringing, emails piling in, parents arriving, some furious, some just wanting to speak to their child before afternoon classes, others to check them out for the day or for good.

When David’s grandparents and guardians Tamera and Gary were called to the school, Tamera presumed David had been injured on the playground, or that his bus had been in an accident. The scene that greeted them when they saw David detained was stark. “There was no chair, no desk, nothing in there," says Gary. "It was a just a white room, with plastic walls and a door with a window in it. He’s sitting in there all huddled up in the corner.”

Tamera did what she could for David as she waited for her grandson to be taken to processing. “He had said he was hungry," she recalls, "so I asked them, 'Can I have his backpack? He has some snack food in his backpack.' They said, 'Sure, we checked the backpack, there’s nothing in there.' I got the food out, gave it to him, gave him the book to read, said, 'Go ahead and eat your snack, let’s read a book.'" She took the backpack home with her. Adam and David were then driven to juvenile processing and would be charged the next day with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

A few days later, she remembered the backpack, and went to clean it out: "That's when I found the notes," she says.

I’ll show you the steps and I ma have changed plans. So Just Read my steps and tell if Im right or rong.

how I got this

Step 1 we ride the bus.

Step 2 stay in class until I say.

Step 3 during frist recess we go to the bathroom and get are masks on.

Step 4 we boit out side and run tord her nad you, me kill her and get are Freedom.

Step 5 we run up to the upper field and run tord my house.

Step 6 if the cops catch us put your hands up and get ready for pan.[pain]

Step 7 Be ready to go to Jail.

Plese write back

P.S. we shoud do it on tomaro.”

When children plan out a murder step by wicked step — when they bring a gun and a knife and an ammunition clip to school and speak openly and plainly about their intentions — their judgment, rather than being an academic, psychological question, must be decided absolutely in a courtroom. Knowing or unknowing, scheming or confused. How do their upbringings, however good or bad, exculpate or implicate them? The state has to determine beyond doubt a 10- or 11-year-old’s capacity to fully understand their actions; an infinitely complex problem becomes a yes or no question. When a guilty sentence is handed down, as it was for both defendants in the Colville case, it is unclear whether it serves to rehabilitate, or merely punish.