From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson, part 8 (last)
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 18:19:36 GMT
Keywords: atlantic, anti-gun rubbish


WHAT NICHOLAS DID
   Nicholas awoke the morning of December 16 feeling sick, but for no parti-
cular reason.  "I didn't feel like going to school," he told Adams, "but I
knew I would get in trouble if I didn't, so I went...I was just so sick."  He
packed his backpack and caught his usual bus.
   The Atlantic Shores Christian School is run by the Atlantic Shores Baptist
Church, whose 3,500-member congregation makes it the third largest church in
the Hampton Roads area, where churches are about as ubiquitous as the U.S.
Navy.  The school, which consists of both permanent and portable classrooms
arrayed around a courtyard, has an enrollement of some 500 students, only
twenty-three of whom were black when Nicholas was a student there.
   Nicholas attended his first classes as usual.  On his way to Bible class
he encountered Billy Cutter, his nemesis and, according to some informants,
his part-time friend.  Nicholas, by his own account, had hoped to come across
Billy.  And Billy, true to form, again called him a name.  Nicholas went into
a bathroom and took his Cobray from his backpack.  He left both there, how-
ever, and exited the room.  His account gets vague at this point.  He wandered
to the band room and at one point helped a man named Mike Lucky move a box.
   Nicholas soon appeared at a trailer occupied by two teachers, Sam Marino
and Susan Allen.  He told Marino that he had come to take an oral French test,
but Marino asked him to return later.  He did return, almost immediately.
During his absence he retreived his gun and one of his six 32-round clips.
   Forensic investigators later test-fired Nicholas's gun repeatedly, inserting
each of his clips.  Of the six, this one alone proved faulty.  It misfed rounds
to the gun, but only to a point about halfway down the magazine, the fifteen
round point, where it began feeding bullets correctly.  Before he was stopped
that morning, Nicholas fired fifteen rounds.
   Marino had his back to Nicholas when the boy announced, "I have this really
neat tow I want to show you."
   Nicholas fired once through a window.
   Marino, shocked at the roar behind him, turned.  His first thought was
that the gun was indeed only a toy, and he told Nicholas to hand it over.
But Nicholas coolly took aim.  The teacher raised a French textbook as a
shield.  (Adams told me that victims of gunplay hold up articles of all kinds
in their last moments, in the magical belief that even a sheet of paper might
save them.)  Nicholas fired again, the shot blowing through the textbook as
if it were made of foam, though it didn't hit Marino.
   He fired a third time.  This bullet ripped into Marino's shoulder.
   Susan Allen bolted past Nicholas and down the trailer steps, with Nicholas
following.  She had the good sense to run serpentine fashion, like a character
in a Grade B war movie, as Nicholas fired shot after shot at her back, sweeping
the courtyard with a back-and-forth motion, stopping his pursuit now and then
to clear a jammed cartridge.  The sound was deafening, for both Allen and
Nicholas.  Her ears rang.  His hurt.
   She reached the end of the courtyard.  With nowhere else to go, she made
a sharp turn around the end of a trailer.  Something struck her with shocking
force and she fell to the ground.  She had sprinted face-first into a utility
shed.  Breathless and petrified, she wriggled under the trailer.  "It was
not the smartest thing to do, if you think about it," Adams told me.
   But two things distracted Nicholas.  A loud thumping noise nearby, and
Marino, who had risen and was clinging now to the doorjamb of his trailer.
   "All of a sudden, there he was again," Marino recalled.  Nicholas aimed a
bit lower this time.  The "gun that made the 80s roar" roared again.  There
was an elliptical flare.  The bullet penetrated Marino's abdomen and catapulted
him bacward into the room.
   The thumping got louder.  Nicholas knew the noise - he had heard it before
during a class, when kids in a trailer across the courtyard had been playing
a game to see who could stamp hardest on the floor of the trailer.
   In this case, however, the thumping was the sound made as terrified students
scrambled to the rear of the trailer.  On any other Friday, Nicholas would
have been in that trailer, attending the Bible class taught by H. Maurice
Matteson, "Hutch," the church's youth pastor.
   Nicholas climbed the steps and tried the door, but someone inside had locked
it.  "I don't know how I got in," Nicholas told Adams.  "I did not shoot the
door or the knob itself.  I shot the glass in the door.  I don't know how I
got it open....when I shot the glass, I guess it shaked the door and got it
open."
   Once inside, he spotted Billy Cutter.  "I know I said his name," Nicholas
said.  "I don't remember exactly what I said about him, because I was mad."
   Others, however, do recall:  "Billy Cutter," Nicholas said, "this is for
you.  I'm going to kill you."
   Nicholas leveled the gun at Billy as three dozen other kids huddled at the
far end of the trailer, weeping and praying.
   Nicholas pulled the trigger.
   The gun jammed.  The magazine apparently had misfed another round.
   He struggled to clear the jam, succeeded, and raised the gun again, just
as Hutch Matteson charged.
   Nicholas fired one last round.  It blew harmlessly past Matteson's head.
   Matteson tackled him, forcing him to the floor.  "What in the world would
make you want to do something like this?" Matteson screamed.
   "They hate me," Nicholas said.
   Police and medical help arrived soon afterward.  An ambulance took Marino
to the hospital.  George Sweet, the senior pastor of the Atlantic Shores Bap-
tist Church, followed to be with Marino, who, for good reason, was convinced
he was going to die.
   At school the faculty gathered everyone together in the church auditorium
for a head count.  Many students, among them Will and Lora Farley, still didn't
know what had happened.  "I was, like, wondering where my mom was," Lora re-
called, before a dead-quiet courtroom.  Her mother was Karen Farley, a teacher.
"We weren't really concerned or anything, but when I first entered the audi-
torium, this girl said to me - me and my friends were laughing and stuff be-
cause we didn't really think anything was going on - and this girl said to me,
'Someone has been shot,' and it wasn't my mom.  It was another teacher, and I
was like - I couldn't understand.  I was like, 'Somebody has been shot at
school?'
   "We prayed and stuff that everything would be all right, and then we just,
like, left it up to the Lord.  We just sat there really being quiet and stuff.
I asked Will - I said, 'Have you seen Mom?'
   "And he said, 'No.'"
   One teacher told her that her mother was tending to the wounded teacher;
another said that she was comforting a teacher who'd been chased.  "I was like,
'Well, that sounds right too.  I can see her doing both of them, but I don't
know how she could do it at the same time.'"
   A teacher asked Will and Lora to come out into the hall.  "And one of my
teachers was standing there and she was staring off down the - like out into
where all the trailers were.  She like gave me a hug and then they said, 'Take
them back in the auditorium.'
   "So we went back in the auditorium, and then about ten or twenty minutes
later, they came and got us and they took us into Pastor Sweet's office, and
my pastor was there, and they never said that, you know, your mom has been shot
or your mom is dead.  They just - my pastor was crying, and then, I mean, we
just sort of know what had happened."
   One of Sweet's colleagues had reached Sweet at the hospital.  "George," he
said, "you need to get back here right away."
   "Why?" Sweet asked.
   "They found Karen Farley, and she's dead."
   Bill Farley, Karen's husband, learned of her death about one o'clock that
afternoon, from his own pastor and a policewoman.
   The police had not found Karen Farley until ninety minutes after the
shootings, after the head count showed her missing.  They discovered her body
in a locked trailer; she was still wearing her winter coat.  The first bullet
struck her forearm before entering her torso, suggesting to investigators that
she had raised her hand either to ask for the gun or to plead for her life, or
perhaps merely in another of those magical efforts to defend against the
bullet.  Nicholas stood over her and shot her again, firing downward -
"execution-style," as the press delighted in saying.  It was then, apparently,
that he moved on to Sam Marino's trailer.
   The next night Lora and a friend picked out what Lora's mother would wear
for her funeral.  They also wrapped Christmas presents that Karen Farley had
hidden in a closet.  Months later Lora and Will would find another cache of
presents hidden away.  Nicholas pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was
sentenced to life in prison.
   The more Bill Farley learned about the gun Nicholas had used and how he
had acquired it, the more angry he became.  Farley keeps a handgun for home
defense; even Karen Farley practiced with it.  But, Farley says, the Cobray
is different.  "There's no reason for those kinds of weapons to be sold in
the United States," he told me one recent evening.  "If you need something
like that to protect your home, you better move."
   He filed a negligence and product-liability suit against Guns Unlimited
and S.W.Daniel, Inc. - one of a growing number of such suits being brought
in courthouses around the country, including one filed by the family of the
actress Rebecca Schaeffer, the murdered co-star of 'My Sister Sam,' against
the dealer who sold the murder weapon.  The jury ordered Guns Unlimited to pay
Bill Farley and his children $105,000.  "I guess what I really wanted to do
was get the attention of the gun shop, and say, Hey, you all did something
wrong," Farley told me.  "Just because ATF didn't do anything to you doesn't
mean a thing.  You shouldn't have done it."
   Long before the trial, the Virginia court cut S.W.Daniel free of the case.
Judge John K. Moore argued that reigning legal theories concerning negligence
and product liability dictate that the "plaintiff must first show 'goods were
unreasonably dangerous for [the] use to which they would ordinarily be put or
for some other reasonably foreseeable purpose.'"  Farley, he wrote, hadn't
made any allegation that the gun was defective.
   Even if he had, his arguement might have failed.  "Unfortunately," Judge
Moore wrote, "the weapon worked."

   At the time of the shootings, business was brisk for James Dick and Guns
Unlimited - so brisk that within a year Dick expanded the Guns Unlimited
empire and added his third store.  One must be cool indeed to be a gun dealer.
The site Dick chose was a small shopping plaza on Kempsville Road in Virginia
Beach.  The Atlantic Shores Christian School was across the street.

------------------------------

Erik Larson ("The Story of a Gun") is a feature writer for The
Wall Street Journal.  He is the author of 'The Naked Consumer:
How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities' (1992).  Larson
is at work on a book about the domestic gun trade.

-- 
Larry Cipriani, att!cbvox1!lvc or lvc@cbvox1.att.com