Published: April 16, 2008 11:13 pm            

Knowing warning signs, communication can help prevent tragedies

TERRE HAUTE — Knowing what to look for and communicating with parents and law enforcement are the best ways to prevent what police call “active shooter” scenarios such as the one last year at Virginia Tech University, an expert told educators Wednesday.

“There is some common ground between all of these shooters,” said Capt. Perry Hollowell, an instructor at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, describing “huge red flags” that could have helped prevent shootings such as the ones at Northern Illinois University or Columbine High School.

Hollowell, who retired from the military before serving as a Vermillion County police officer and now teaches at the academy, said he’s “not a sky-is-falling kind of guy” when it comes to school violence, noting that youth ages 5 to 19 are 70 times more likely to be murdered away from school than at school.

However, one school shooting is too many, he said, and with that he offered educators at the conference on school safety staged at Indiana State University on Wednesday a compilation of the field’s latest research.

“Victim mentality is present in almost all of these shootings,” Hollowell said, naming off mass murderers from Charles Whitman’s 1966 tower shootings at the University of Texas up to Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech last year.

Hollowell said “revenge is a huge, huge motivator” at some level, murky as that reasoning might seem, in nearly all the shootings.

Columbine High School shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both felt bullied and picked upon, and believed that neither teachers nor parents nor police would protect them from the school’s athletes, he said.

Their answer was to shoot up the school, not much different than Cho’s solution when he felt rich people were looking down on him.

But as problematic as that might seem, Hollowell said it’s really a communication problem, because in each of the scenarios, school officials, family and law enforcement had lengthy periods of documentation on the individuals, but no one was sharing and so the pattern remained invisible.

“Profiling is generally a reactive tool,” he told the group, explaining that he can watch a drunken driver’s vehicle and determine by the movements that intoxication is a factor.

The problem with that, he said, is the driver is already drunk, and when that type of analysis is applied to school shootings, the victims are already dead.

The key is to spot potential problems and engage them before they reach that point, he said.

Hollowell was quick to note that violence in schools is not just a recent phenomenon.

The worst school killing in American history, Hollowell said, was not at Columbine, but occurred May 18, 1927 in Bath, Mich., when a disgruntled farmer wired a school building with dynamite to protest the proposal of a new school and the increase in taxes that it would bring.

Andrew Kehoe killed 38 children, seven teachers and wounded 61 more in the blast, also murdering his wife just before the explosion for fear that she’d try to stop him, Hollowell said.

And even, as it is now, the warning signs were evident throughout the small town, but no one thought much about it until too late.

Brian Boyce can be reached at (812) 231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com.

        

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