Erik Larson - Lethal Passage - The Story of a Gun

But the relationship had a profoundly dark edge to it. At six foot one, 170 pounds, Billy was far taller and heavier than Nicholas. From time to time, at odd moments, Billy would shove and strike Nicholas. “There was some slapping,” Dr. Wallace testified at Nicholas’s sentencing hearing. “There was some sticking him with a probe in biology…. There was hitting in the stomach or in the belly area… repeated acts of this type.”

Dr. Wallace found that Nicholas had suppressed his anger and fear to the point where, that Friday morning, he experienced a “disassociative” episode. “He kept so much within him, like a pressure cooker,” Dr. Wallace said. “It built and built and then exploded, and that was the accumulation of all of the repressed and suppressed emotions.”

One week before Nicholas decided to go hunting for Billy, he and the other boy got into another war of words, this time during gym class. This time, however, Billy’s taunting seemed to wrench something loose inside Nicholas. The taunting and teasing may indeed have been a perverse game indulged in equally by both boys, but suddenly it became something far more sinister. As Nicholas left the class, he shouted to Billy, “I’m going to kill you.”

“I can’t take him picking on me,” Nicholas told Adams. He had been afraid, he said, that Billy Cutter “would end up killing me. He always threatened me…. Like he would hit me in the back of my neck.”

His mother interrupted, “You could have gone to the phone and called me at work.”

“If he would have broke my neck,” Nicholas said, “my life would have been over. He kicked me. He hit me in the back of the neck.”

“Not all people, bullies, can threaten you,” his mother said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But, Mom, he actually hit me and I don’t want my neck—if he would have broke my neck—”

“I’m trying to reason with you. You could have gone to the office and asked the people to call your mom. The other kids do. You could have called me.”

“You only use that for when you are sick, Mom,” Nicholas protested. “You can’t use it for being threatened. The teachers are supposed to handle it, but they don’t do anything.”

Nicholas seemed able to find solace consistently only in his pet birds, and in guns. Everyone at school knew of Nicholas’s passion for firearms. It served only to widen the gulf between him and his peers. At lunch while all the other boys were reading skateboard magazines, he’d thumb through Guns & Ammo . His locker was papered with glossy ads depicting powerful handguns. In conversation, according to a fellow student, Nicholas loved to discuss “which bullets had more firepower.” His classmates worried about Nicholas. One told a Norfolk newspaper, “All the kids said he was going to shoot someone.”

Even the guns became fodder for taunts from Billy Cutter, and from other students. “They were always making fun of me,” Nicholas told Adams. “They always said stuff: ‘You know so much about guns. You never even shot a gun in your life.’”

His mother worried most about her son on Fridays, the day, she believed, when passions kept in check all week were most prone to be released. “Nicholas,” she said. “Why would you take a gun today? You said that Billy hadn’t hit you since Wednesday, so why would you take a gun on Friday? I told you how Fridays are. You lay low on Friday, because everybody is upset.”

When she arrived at headquarters to meet Adams and her son, she was consumed with grief and guilt over Nicholas’s attack on the school.

“I will be up praying all night, all day tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to pray.”

Nicholas, trying to rein in the day and get things normal again, abruptly shifted the conversation to matters of daily routine.

“Are you going to work?” he asked.

“No. I don’t want to go to work.”

Genuinely perplexed, Nicholas asked, “Why not?”

“Because that’s what got me, trying to work and earn, to try to keep my head above water and losing you.”

“You can take my money out of the bank,” Nicholas offered.

“Gaining the world,” his mother cried, “and losing my soul—”

“It’s not losing me,” Nicholas pleaded. “It’s just people picking on me. That’s all it is. If God would have just stopped them—if I was nice enough and He would have made it so they were nice to me and didn’t hit me, everything would be fine. That’s as simple as it is, or He could have just made them keep their hands to theirselves. That’s very simple.”

His mother, during a later hearing, described Nicholas as a “very obedient, quiet child.” She and Nicholas had moved to Norfolk from California in 1983, so that she could care for her ailing mother. Nicholas’s father, Clarence, stayed behind.

Nicholas had always done poorly in school. In California, he failed the first grade. “At that time,” Dr. Wallace testified, “he was tested in the California school system and started in learning disability classes, which continued until the time the family left California.” By the time Dr. Wallace saw him, in April and May of 1989, Nicholas was sixteen and in the tenth grade. Dr. Wallace’s examination, however, found Nicholas lagging far behind his fellow sophomores. “On the wide-range achievement testing, he was reading at about a seventh-grade level,” Dr. Wallace testified. “But his spelling I believe was at a second- or third-grade level, and his math about a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”

On arriving in Norfolk, Mrs. Elliot enrolled Nicholas in Kempsville Elementary School, a public school, but in September 1987 transferred him from the public system to Atlantic Shores. Even though Atlantic Shores would cost an additional $240 a month—hard to afford on her salary as a public-school nurse in the city of Chesapeake—she felt the school would be well worth the cost. She told the court, “The public schools seem to have a lot of problems, and he was a child who needed special help, and I felt in a Christian environment he would get that help, and I was advised he would.”

Atlantic Shores brought no miracles, however. School remained a chore for Nicholas. Once, he overheard a female teacher and a secretary discussing his poor progress. “She said something about getting help in English that I am not good in,” he told Detective Adams. “She said, ‘I can’t believe this. He started off with a third-grade book… and he can’t even do that.’”

“Did it make you mad?” Adams asked.

“I can’t believe she was talking about me. She didn’t have to tell the whole world.”

Adams asked Nicholas if he had overheard anything else, from other teachers.

“I’ve heard the secretary say that ‘he’s just the worst kid in school.’ I heard her say that.”

Adams then asked Nicholas which teachers in particular seemed to dislike him. He named a few, but the list omitted Karen Farley, a popular teacher who taught typing and other business skills, and whose own two children, Lora and Will, were also enrolled in the school.

When Adams asked Nicholas whether he got along with Mrs. Farley, Nicholas nodded yes.

This was clearly evident in a videotape Mrs. Farley made of her typing class earlier in the school year. The camera captured her voice as she simultaneously filmed the class and reminded her students to type without looking at the keys. At one point, as the typewriters clatter away, she asks the few students present if any other students are likely to show up that morning. She learns that two students, Nicholas and a girl named Shirley, have simply stepped out of the room for a moment, Nicholas for a drink of water. “Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Farley says. “I’ll have to get Nicholas. He’ll just die if I don’t get a picture of him.”