School shootings: quest for answers

LITTLETON, Colo. -- I cried a long time on my hotel bed that night, thinking about their faces. So many children -- 14, 15, 16 years old -- drawn tight with grief and exhaustion. 

It was Tuesday, April 20, 1999, and two boys had just killed 12 classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School here in this Denver suburb. I had attended an evening prayer service, listening to students whisper their fragments of fear: 

"He was shot twice. In the back." "Right in front of me." 

"My sister . . . "

I wanted so much to hold my 11-month-old baby, my Hannah, to keep her home, safe, forever. 

In the years since, I felt that same shakiness with each school shooting I covered. In each city, on each campus, the same empty words echoed: It's a senseless tragedy. Our hearts are broken. We never thought it could ever happen here.

So why did it happen, time and again?

There had to be answers. I sought assignments that would bring me close to those who might have them. 

I drank iced tea with the mother of Mitchell Johnson, who, at age 13, ambushed his classmates in Jonesboro, Ark., killing five on a spring afternoon. 

I followed a guard through the clanging doors of the Kentucky State Reformatory to sit in a bare room with Michael Carneal, who killed three high school classmates in West Paducah, Ky. 

Parents, principals, police. Sociologists, psychologists. Neighbors, roommates, survivors. Over the years, I have asked the same questions of so many. 

On Friday, the day after a graduate student killed five in a geology class at Northern Illinois University, I went back and read those old stories, seeking answers, hoping for something more than "senseless."