Heath High Shooting

Hi, I'm Holly. And I'm Hailey. Welcome to Mountain Mysteries Tales from Appalachia. Welcome back.

Hello. So as you noticed, we pulled from the Patreon vault. It was, you know, sometimes you just have those crazy weeks. So I do want to get a shout out.

Okay. We have a new listener. I'm not going to say her name, but she is my physical therapist. Yes.

And so she was telling me, she was just talking and she said, oh, what kind of hobbies do you have? And I said, oh, you know, this, that, oh, I have a murder podcast. And she, what? And I was like, yeah, she was like, what is it?

I love podcasts below. So I told her what it was. I apologized in advance. And the next time I came in, she was like, I've listened.

And I was like, what? Really? And she was like, yes, you told me to skip the early ones. So I was like, yeah.

And she's like, so I listened to the most recent ones. And she was like, I love it. Because it reminds me of, I guess a podcast with two girls like early on before they got like real big in corporate. She told me what it was, but I can't remember what it was.

Anyway, but she was like, no, I really love it. And it's great. And so I was like, oh, thank you. And I did apologize again.

Just in general, as I do, you know, just enough. Sorry. Just over over everything for what was, what is and what will be, you know? So if you're listening, hopefully you are.

Hello, big shout out. I saw you earlier today. You know who you are. You know who you are.

Yes. Yeah. So that's my big shout out. Cool.

Hailey, I just want you to know that this story today and for the rest of you guys to know, story is a little intense. Yeah, it involves the school shooting. Yeah. So I just wanted you to be aware, but it's a story that I have actually never heard until recently when I was researching it.

So it gets an important story to tell because this is pre-column buying the story. Oh, wow. So this goes back a little bit. So we're starting in December of 1997.

You're pooping in your diaper, you're drinking a baba, you're doing all the things. I was a teenager. He was a bit with December? December.

So it's your first Christmas. A few months old. Yeah. Yeah.

Eight months. Yeah. Yeah. Live in your best life.

Not sleeping at night, crying a lot. It's a very colicky baby. Yeah. Screened a lot.

Your mom probably had regrets. She did. Yeah. She might still.

No. Now she's like, oh, what a wonderful child. Oh, this is so great. We are like those friends.

I think that you had to get through that tough time. And yeah. Yeah. Of infancy.

Of infancy. Right. To then, you know. And then my teenagers.

Yeah. Those were rough times. Absolutely for anybody. But now we're close.

Now we're tight. I really like that. I never expect that. It's great.

It's good. Okay. So December of 1997, our number one song here, Haley, is Candle in the Wind 1997. This was Elton John remaking his original song that was about Marilyn Monroe.

He altered the words to Patreview to Princess Diana, who passed away that year. Yeah. The number one movie at the box office was not yet Titanic because it opened December 19th. It was Flubber.

You ever seen this one? I'm not seen it, but I know like, I've seen the poster. Yes. This is a Robin Williams movie.

He's like a mad scientist and he creates this thing, this like green slime stuff called Flubber and it creates a life of its own terrible film. At least I went to see it at the theater. It was not worth our ticket money, but you know, then again, I saw Titanic like nine times. So there's, there's that scene.

I'm not a Titanic fan. I enjoy Titanic. I think I am of my generation. You know, where I'm like, Oh Leo, you know, and you just hope the ship doesn't go down.

But you don't will every time every time every time. But today we're headed to Paducah, Kentucky. Oh, okay. I love Kentucky.

More specifically, we're going to Heath High School. Okay. It's December 1st, 1997. Students are coming back to school from their Thanksgiving break.

A little after 7 a.m. a Christian youth group begins their meeting, which always concludes with a prayer. While the youth group is in front of the school, a freshman by the name of Michael Carniel rode to school with his older sister. Michael had a blanket covering what everyone thought was an art project that he had been working on.

So just covered up. What was actually under the blanket was no art project. It was a shotgun and a rifle. In his backpack contained a loaded Ruger MK2, which was actually a 22 caliber pistol.

Yeah. Michael's sister parked the car in the two, um, winter separate ways. Michael walked towards the front of the school and swiftly inserted ear plugs into his ears and took out the 22 caliber pistol out of his backpack. Meanwhile, the youth group was ending their prayer in each said, Amen, as they began to hear a loud popping noise.

The youth group walked towards the entranceway of the building where they were met with bullets whizzing by their heads. Wow. Ten rounds of bullets were fired at quick secession, striking five students from the youth group. One student, Brittany Thomas, recalls turning around and coming face to face with a gunman.

She states she was quote, kind of facing down the barrel of a gun. Students, teachers and the principal alike were stunned and horror and actually shell-shocked. One student even said that she was yelling at her principal to do something and he was just standing there. I mean, I mean, couldn't do anything.

Well, this is like, you said pre-call online. This is pre-call online. So everybody has context for this. Right.

There's no, like, this is so out of like now it's so normal. But back then before, I mean, this was unfathomable. This is a year and a half before Columbine and the world didn't know what to do with this. I mean, it was, you were safe at school.

Yeah. Especially this school. Right. It's very small and everybody kind of knew everybody.

So for something like this to happen, nobody knows what to do or how to handle it. When Michael finished his rampage, he placed the pistol on the ground and surrendered to the school principal, Bill Bond. It was at this point that Michael, in the horror of what he had just done, turned to another student, Benjamin Strong, a member of the Christian youth group, and he said to him, quote, kill me, please. I can't believe I did that.

So we've got this guy who's filled already with like complete regret, like what just happened? How do we get here? How do we get here? How did this happen?

I can't believe I did this. Who am I, you know, like all those questions when you, I mean, do something. I mean, we all have regrets, right? Like, oh, why did I get that speeding ticket?

Well, you know, why did I invite Haley to my house? Why did I invite Holly to my house? You know, those are the kind of regrets that people have. Why did I invite the two of them to my party?

Yeah, a lot of people have those regrets. So just if you think we were cool or not, no, you don't want this. So let me tell you a little bit about Michael. So Michael, Adam Carneal was 14 years old.

He had been struggling for a long time with anxiety and depression, but as time went on, he began to have increasing paranoia. Michael had been bullied a lot at school. Kids would taunt him, tease him that he was gay and that kind of thing. Now, I want to say, in the 90s, that was very common.

You know, obviously we don't have the social conscience that we have nowadays to be like, what is that? You know, it was like, Oh, you're gay. And you know, these children who were growing up, you know, curious about sexuality and that kind of thing, you know, they, this was horrible. This was like a horrible thing for them, you know.

So he is really upset at home. Michael feels pretty disengaged with his parents and just has his overwhelming sense that they just don't love him. They just don't care about him. They don't love him.

That was his perception, I will say. His increasing paranoia led him to cover the windows and air vents in his bathroom because he believed he was being watched. It's a bad sign. Yeah, that's not good.

That is not good. Several weeks prior to the shooting, Michael had stolen a 38 caliber revolver from his parents' bedroom and attempted to sell it at school. Wow. That's old.

When another student caught wind of Michael's plans to sell the gun, he said, Give it to me. Give it to me or I'm going to the cops and I'm going to tell. And I don't know if Michael ended up giving him the gun or not, but Michael did warn, something big is happening on Monday. End quote.

No one took him seriously. Well, I keep thinking like, okay, we have all these warning signs, all this stuff. But again, I put myself back in the time period that we are in. This is really pre having school counselors in the building, having school social workers, having SROs even.

My first thought was like, where's our SRO? Well, they didn't have one because that's not a thing we did. That was not a thing. And it's interesting.

I was thinking about it in high school towards the end of my high school, probably maybe junior or senior year, they were like, oh, we're going to get an SRO in here. And I was like, what? And they didn't even call the SROs at that point. I forget what they just I think they just called it a resource officer.

That was it. I don't even remember. But anyway, I mean, it just wasn't a common thing. So you know that in 1997, they don't have anybody who can help deal with this who can help the kids.

There's probably not a school counselor, like in the traditional sense. Right. And for our international listeners, I know you're out there and this is a foreign thing for some of you all thing. Goodness.

That's a very common thing in America. SRO is school resource officer, which is usually a sheriff's department. Our county is sheriff's deputies who are specifically trained for school duties. So our SRO is out of building every single day.

We always have an SRO on campus with us, which is some schools don't have that are every school in our county has an SRO, which is great. And he's a very big part of our school culture. And we've we're really cognizant about, you know, making sure that his interaction with students for the most part is positive, which is great. And he's great with kids.

He'll tell you he's not he's a big softie. We love him. But you know, I do feel as a employee in the school building, like I feel safer when he's there. Yeah, like if something were to happen, I feel better knowing that he is in the building and that he is there.

And I feel like our kids are safer because he is there. And what he is not there. And there's someone not that they're not great too, like whoever comes in his place. But like I'm uneasy when he's not there.

Yeah, because he just has such a good relationship with our kids, the staff, like does have good instincts. I know he's competent. I know he's doing his job. I know he's constantly monitoring.

I just I feel safer with him in the building. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that that does bring reassurance.

I wish that that was a thing in schools in the 90s. I really do. I think, you know, my gosh, I wish we had social workers. Like, I think about that.

We have social workers in high school. And I know there's a lot of controversy about having like armed people in school. Like, I don't think anybody except our SROs should have a webin school. But we are very cognizant, especially in our building of making like he's a part of our student services team.

Whether he wants to be or not, we've included him. So like, there's times where like, if I have a question as a social worker, like I'm calling him to come in with me and we're talking to students together. And see that's the thing is it's not just put your hands behind your back. It's a I'm trying to help you so you don't end up down this path.

Right. And he is someone who will talk with kids and be like, and he and I, you know, he doesn't listen. But was I was I school dropout and you know, had some rough things, went back to school, did all the things. And you know, I've witnessed him have interactions like even just today with kids of like, you know, telling them like, Hey, you know, you look up to me and respect me.

But like, I was in your shoes, like I understand that this is hard. Yeah. And some of the things you're going to really hard, like I've been there. And it's willing to like make that connection with kids.

And that's so important. Because having an SRO in the building who is not that way can be so damaging. Somebody who is willing to be vulnerable, vulnerable in not a I'm going to let you take advantage of me kind of, but vulnerable in a way that children feel safe. Yeah.

You know, kids do they feel safe with him and they feel safe going to him. I'm so glad kids sometimes go directly to him. They'll be like, I want to talk to SRO because I want to tell him about this thing that's going on in my personal life or going on at home. And you know, he's able to have that conversation with them and pull in, you know, counselor, social worker, administrator, whoever we need that we need that for the kids who are being to eat.

So I'm glad he doesn't listen because I would I would want to get a big head. Wow, listen to that love him, but I keep him humble. We call him Eor sometimes because he's grumpy. Oh, he sounds like he needs a hug.

Okay. Good. He's a teddy bear. I am.

Hey, I have discussed this this quick. Anyway, I'm not a huggy person. Yeah. And you should see with my son though.

I'm all over him, but I'm not a huggy, lovey, w person. But for some reason, I feel like the way you're describing him, I want to go get my hug. Oh, he's a good guy. Yeah.

So if I if I ever see him, if I ever see you in this town, I'm going to give you a hug. Bring it in. Bring it in, buddy. All right, back to our story.

So nobody believed him when he said something big is going to happen on Monday. Nobody took him seriously. So this kid has already brought a gun to school to sell. And he's making these threats.

And I mean, already has some delusions. Nobody's taken this guy seriously. No one's saying like, maybe we should say something. Well, like these days, that would be, you know, instant instant.

Like back then it was much more a ha ha very funny, you know, great thing. So while nothing did happen that Monday at school, Michael began stealing guns from his home. On Thanksgiving day, he broke into his neighbor's house and stole some additional weapons. These included four, 22 caliber rifles, a 30 30 rifle, a 22 and 12 gauge ammunition, earplugs, and then later the Ruger and several 22 magazines.

Yeah. I don't really know what any of that means. Me neither. I'm sorry.

Gun expert emails us. I can't remember. I'm sorry. Sorry.

Hang on. Continue. I will call you Mr. Gun expert.

Good to get me mail two days after Thanksgiving, Michael stole two shotguns from his father's closet and hid all the weapons underneath his bed. Here's the here's the good news. I'm going to say I am anal about my son keeping his room clean. So if I maybe had guns or under his bed, I would have, yeah, yeah, currently it's monster trucks.

Right. Just answer here. It's important to note here that Michael had been obsessed with a Stephen King novel rage. So if you haven't heard of this book, which I hadn't, this book is about a high school senior named Charlie Decker who takes out his aggression on his teachers and classmates.

He kills several of them and holds other students hostage until his demands are met. Yeah. And that's what it's a Stephen King book and it's called rage. Okay.

Yeah. Michael kept a copy of rage and his locker. Yeah. And after hearing about the shooting, Stephen King requested that the novel be put out of print because he didn't want anybody else to be inspired to hurt others, which Bravo, Stephen King.

That's amazing because most people would be like, well, I want to make a profit. So I don't care. But no, he didn't. I love that.

Did you find out? I'm working on it. Okay. Oh, it might be done.

I think it's stuck. But I'm looking at the gun to let us know. I know he will. Good.

I appreciate it. Good. Yeah. I'm 99% sure it's Doug who always gives us the lowdown on the guns.

Good. I appreciate that. Let us know. Let us know.

So we've talked about the shooter, but I think it's also important to talk about the victims of his rampage here. There were three young girls killed and five students wounded. So eight altogether. So those included.

These are the ones who were killed. Nicole Hadley. She was a freshman. She was in the school band.

She played on the basketball team. She actually when they first came, the ambulance first came, she was alive. So they took her to the hospital and she was able to live until about 10 o'clock that night when she passed away, unfortunately. She was a transplant to Paducah from Nebraska.

She had only lived in the town for about a year. Oh, wow. Yeah. So her parents donated her organs.

President Bill Clinton actually said that this was a very courageous decision for her parents to donate her organs. And because how hard would that be to lose your child? Yeah, and then have to make that decision. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So he said it was a courageous decision in his proclamation on the National Organ and Tissue Donation Awareness Week in 1998. The next one is Casey Steger.

She was a sophomore. She was 15 years old. She was in the school band as well. She played the clarinet and she was in the Agape Club along with the softball team.

What's the Agape Club? I know Agape is a Spanish word. Oh, yeah. And it means Agape Club.

It's a school club open to all students in all grades. That's great. Give me more. Oh, it's a Greek word meaning a complete compromising love like God's love for us.

So it sounds like the Christian organization. Okay. The purpose is for the school. Its purpose is to support the desire for spiritual fellowship of students regardless of faith or personal beliefs.

Book of the teaching and prayer will be Bible based and Christian oriented and focused on Christian teachings. Okay. Nice. I like that.

I like that. It's open to all and yeah, that's nice. Okay. Well, Casey was an honor student and she wanted to be a police officer.

So she was involved in the law enforcement explorer's club. Yeah, exactly. And she again was alive when she was taken by ambulance. But once she got to the hospital 45 minutes later, she passed.

And then Jessica James was a senior. She was 17 years old. She was also in the marching band. She died while in surgery the afternoon of the shooting.

So they weren't able to save her. The five students that were wounded in the attack but survive include Melissa Missy Jenkins. She was president of the future homemakers of America club. She was 15 at the time.

She was paralyzed from the chest down after being shot. Yeah. And she has since appeared on many, many things talking about this. I saw her and her twin sister Mandy.

So it was Missy and Mandy. They were in an episode of that show. I survived that I cannot stop. I probably should turn it off.

But that's where I was like, I never heard this story before. And I know incredible of her to talk about it in her story out there and just she was just talking about the fear that she had. She had actually transferred to the local Catholic school the year after the shooting. She just couldn't continue going.

I can see why. I can see why. Shelly Schaberg was a senior. She was 17 years old, described by the principal as a school's best female athlete.

Oh, wow. Yeah. She had been voted Miss Heath High School by her senior class. She was a homecoming queen.

Although her injuries from the shooting prevented her from playing basketball. Her college honored her basketball scholarship. Yeah. Yeah.

And she went on to play soccer while at university. Wow. Yeah. Kelly Hard-Alspent was 16.

She was a member of the softball team in the future homemakers of America. She also, just like Missy, ended up going to the Catholic school the following year because it was just too much for her. Holland Home was a freshman, 14 years old, and was part of the academic team in the Spanish club along with the science Olympiad. And when he graduated in, I'm sorry, I thought I was a female, when he graduated in 2001, he reminded his class that he had lost not one but two class members in 1997.

And he just talked about how important it was to speak up if they felt like they were threats against other students, teachers, or their school, which oh my goodness. So I have your time. Lastly, Craig Keen was 15 years old. He was also a member of the agape club, the band, basketball team.

He also was shot and survived. So yeah. It's just, it's such a weird thought, right? To send your kids to school.

And it's just such a normal thing. It's like us going to work, right? You get up, you just do your thing. You don't, yeah, you don't ever know what the day is going to be.

I never know what my day is going to be. I think I do, but then it never goes accordingly because we work in crazy fields. So yeah, that's one thing like, yeah, I know it's going to be unpredictable, but this is just what? And this is something that I've struggled with since I started working in the school system is like, yeah, it's unpredictable.

We never know what each day will bring, but this is always in the back of my mind. Yeah. The fact that at any moment this could happen is always in the back of my mind. It is, I am probably, I'm hyper vigilant when I'm in the building.

I am aware of my exits. I am aware of where students are. I have a plan and just about every part of the building of where I need to get to, a loud noise goes off. And there's a moment, like if there's a loud noise that we don't recognize, where like if I'm in a room of people, there's that moment where we all, we tense.

And it's like, is this it? Yeah. And then it's like, oh, somebody dropped something on my hallway. And like, not, I mean, you know, 99% time is what it is.

Right. But there's that 1% chance. I'm sure it's greater than 1%. There's that chance that it's not.

Yeah. And that it's that's what it is. And we, this is very fresh for me because we recently had a lockdown drill, which is never fun, but very necessary to do, especially in American schools. And we did this drill.

And I remember asking, because I'm kind of stationed near the front office most of the time. And I remember asking my principal, like, you know, what is, what do you need from from us that are up here? Because we don't have students regularly with us. And he said, you know, we're going to play it out like what we would do in the situation.

So we have all had different assignments and you know, go into what all they were, but you know, we all different assignments. And you know, we're doing those things like practicing. And you know, one of the assignments was to, you know, get cameras up, like on our system, so where we can see movement in the hallways. And kind of at the end of that, we were talking about how, you know, like I was just trained on how to do that.

And I'm like, okay, should we, you know, rotate and everybody learn how to do this? And somebody made the comment, I can't remember now who it was, but somebody said, like, Oh, no, like, you know how to do it. Like, I'm like, okay, but in the real thing, what's to say that I'm in a different part of the building? Like, I'm not going to get up here.

Yeah, I'm going to get where it's safe. But also, like, looking around the table at the, you know, 10 of us that were in that room or so, I'm like, the thought in my brain was like, there's a very real possibility that all of us are going to make it into this room. Yeah. And whether that's because we're in different locations or because we're not physically able to make it into that room, because something has happened.

I was also thinking about, you know, we're talking about it. What happens when you're the one who makes it? Somebody else didn't. You just made it because maybe you got in that door faster than they did.

Maybe you just made it because you just happened to be at a place where the shooter wasn't like living with that, I think as well would be incredibly difficult. And so I think as much as it's like, if I lost my child, I would lose my mind. But also being the victim who survives in those feelings, I mean, you know, they're courageous ones too, because not only do they deal with the physical injuries, but they're dealing with the emotional baggage of that too. Why did I live?

Why did I live and why didn't my friend do? How, gosh, and to be, I mean, these, most of these kids were 14, 15 years old, like really young. That's a lot that's a whole lot to deal with. And I talk to people all the time about like, and I'm very open about the way I feel about, you know, gun violence and things like that.

But I'm very open with people about, like, you know, being prepared for, you know, if it happens in the place that I work. And people like, Oh, you know, you can't think like that. You don't think like that. Like, I should.

But I'm like, I think it's dangerous to not. I agree. Like, I wish I didn't have to. I wish I didn't have to.

But I do be naive for you. I do have to think about it. I think about it constantly, not to the point where I can't do my job. And I'm afraid to do my job because I love what I do.

And I love my school. And I love the kids that are in my building and the staff that are in my building and the community that we have, it is so great. And but I think it's dangerous to not have it in the back of your mind. Absolutely.

That this could happen. It could happen anywhere. At any time. It could happen in the grocery store.

It could happen. You know, it's not just schools, but we have to be so cognizant of it in schools, especially. And we have all these plans and we ran that drill and as it was happening and we were realizing things that weren't correct, that needed to be fixed. We were jotting a list down on the the whiteboard of like, okay, this place needs a radio.

This place needs a door fix. This place needs this. So we need, you know, blackout, whatever on this one. Like this one didn't have whatever.

Just whatever all these little things that like, if we weren't thinking about it, it could be a matter of life of death. Yeah. I'm so glad that you go through it and you practice it. And I will say, and I've always said this, you can practice it a million times.

If it were to happen, how would you react? You just don't know how you're going to react. You know, and that's what we like. And we don't do the whole, you know, like drills, I think drills can be traumatic as well.

Yeah, I think it's true. So we don't really do the whole like, I mean, the way we do it, like the lights off kind of thing. But we're very clear that, Hey, this is a drill. This is what we're talking about.

Okay, this is what it is. We'll announce it, you know, like we go to the intercom and say like, Hey, this is a drill is what we're doing. All clear. And we have at our school, thankfully, which is very, you know, once it gets to the point where we can use it, a really great safety app that's on our phones, where we're able to communicate with each other, and also account for all of our kids and get help faster, which is really, really great.

And we have a, you know, thankfully, our administrative team is very on it about safety, like we're very safety conscious in our building. And I feel very good about the place that I work and the safety that I have. But it is still in the back of my mind every single day that I walk into that building that I may not walk out of that building. Yeah.

And that's like, that's not a, you know, doesn't stop me from doing my job. Right. But it is a thought in the back of my mind of like, you know, and that's anywhere that's at these two, especially in America. That's anywhere you go.

I was actually talking to my boss today. There's some information that in a little bit I have to deliver that's not, you know, gonna be pleasant. And I was just processing what the ramifications could be either in the moment that it's delivered or afterward. And you know, I was giving all these scenarios and she's like, what do you think like that?

And I was like, because my brain has to prepare myself for the worst. So that when the best happens, the best case scenario, I'm like, Oh, wow. Well, that was delightful. You know, that was much better than I thought.

So, but I have to allow myself to go there so that I can be mentally prepared as much as possible. And like, you know, I remember I remember I was in school in Sandy Hook happened. I was in high school when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. And I remember that was kind of my Columbine.

Yeah, was Sandy Hook. Like, I remember that I was glued to my television. I was, you know, like, I'm little kids to process. I needed all the information.

Like, that's the way that I process things. I have to know all of the things and I like the not knowing piece really freaks me out. So I was like, I have to know. So I watched all the things and you know, that was that was my quote unquote Columbine with Sandy Hook.

And like, I remember being in public school after that happened. Like, we drilled like we had a lock in the door every day that week afterwards. Like, I remember doing it and I remember it being a conversation. And I remember after all day, I was working in school system during the all day.

And there was a big push for increased, you know, everybody kind of stepped up on security and safety, which is, you know, I'm grateful that now we, you know, since Sandy Hook that we're realizing that it's not happening just in our high schools or our middle schools, but this is children and our elementary schools are being targeted. I worry about my son's preschool, you know, like that's up here. I have sometimes. So, you know, no one was really immune and I think that's the scariest part of it.

That is really scary. And so, yeah, and I don't know what the solution is. And that kind of gets into like political stuff that I don't want to get into here. But it's not the time it's based.

Right. But it is like there we have to do something. I don't know what that I cannot give you a solid answer. So what it is.

But something's got to keep doing this. Speaking to the and coffee, we've taken away from the we're coming back up. We're coming back. I think one of the biggest things that would be beneficial is more mental health resources.

I think it starts there. By first off, recognizing something is wrong with little Johnny. Johnny has been feeling depressed more than just bummed for a week or you know, like this is ongoing. Something is wrong.

You know, Johnny is talking to himself over there. Johnny is clearly hearing voices. I'm not being afraid to address it. Exactly.

And saying, you know, hey, I recognize that, you know, you're having having some struggles and I want to support you in that. Like what are some of the things, you know, that we can do to like, because the problem is we have weightless and weightless, you know, to see therapists and to get in and, you know, to have counselors and all these things to have people who are qualified to truly help you and address the issue. And that's one of our biggest, I think, one of the biggest crisis we're at right now is that we don't have enough support as far as mental health. And this is where this is what our kids need.

Post-COVID world. Everybody needs mental health support. I mean, 100%. You know, again, I keep saying, you know, Hello, I am to be in the district that I'm in and like, does it have its own problem?

Sure. Everyone does. But what I'm really, really proud of is the fact that we, even with cuts and things, you know, as frustrating as it is to lose positions, we've maintained, you know, a really solid mental health team in our county and like, speaking for myself as a social worker, I am the only, like, I only serve one school, which is usually unheard of for social workers. I serve one school.

I have a case load of about 400 students, which is tiny compared to friends that I have in other counties. And I am very lucky to have that and I get to have that relationship and that connection with kids that I can, you know, in our counseling team, we can quickly identify like, Hey, little Johnny, something's off with little Johnny, like we're able to quickly identify that. When you as a team, and I can say this because we worked together, you are trauma fricking bonded. Oh, and Haley and I have been through this.

And you know, when you are in a situation that is a crisis and you know, you're responding together, you're trying to like, you know, jump on this and get this all figured out and all these things that you're going through, you're kind of in the heat of the moment, but you're working together for a common goal. And then afterward, it's like, but somehow you're just so connected in that. So I think one of our administrators today said something kind of profound that's really stuck with me and I need to talk to her about it. You know, she made the statement of, you know, I think our number one job, yes, we are public education.

Our number one job is not to educate these kids. It's to keep them safe. It is it's changed. It is to keep our children safe.

And because if they're safe, they can learn if they're safe, they can be productive members of society. We are responsible and that's a huge, huge, huge responsibility. We are responsible for their safety. And when things happen where, you know, a fight breaks out, something like that, we have to respond in such a way that restores the safety of our building and of those students, like we have to, and I know trauma informed is such a buzzword now, but like we have to be have to be have to be have to be because I can't expect Little Johnny to go to math class when, you know, it's a world's falling apart.

Yeah. And him to be successful. Like, no, I'm sorry, your safety and well being is a little bit more important to me right now to whether you can do complex algebra. Exactly.

And who the hell can and who can anyway back to this? They know something I will say is that Maslow hierarchy of needs that idea that, you know, if we have a strong foundation, our needs are met and then we have that second level, which is the safety. If you feel safe, you can therefore build relationships, build connections, attach to people, be a functional human being, all those things that you need, you know, to trust and to grow as a human being, we have to feel safe and so absolutely. So going back to our story, I'm going to say all these kids were safe at school.

They were they lived in this bubble that, like I said, there was no context for 1997. Certainly not me in 1999 when I was in high school in Columbine happened. This was a year and a half after this. I remember doing drills in second grade.

That's my first memory of doing a lockdown drill. Never did lock down. Second grade never existed in my education. We did fire drills, sure.

And like tornado, you know, get down, put your heads over your head, that kind of thing. But we never did this strange person drill and all these other things like this just didn't exist and then Columbine happened and it changed a lot. So Michael was arrested and charged with first grade murder in the deaths of Nicole, Jessica and Casey, and he was charged with attempted murder for Shelley, Missy, Kelly, Holland and Craig. Shortly after his arrest, Michael was diagnosed with skits-type old personality disorder and dysthymia.

So let me give you a quick therapist minute so that you know what I was saying. Yes, I know exactly what those are. I know you do, but we've got to help our listeners exactly. And that's exactly why I did it.

Skits-type old personality disorder, which is also known as STPD, that's how we love a little acronym, is where an individual has difficulty with close relationships and social interactions. So these folks are typically characterized by being somewhat eccentric, not trusting others, sometimes having odd fluidity of speech. Sometimes they have magical beliefs. He's like, so I'm available.

Magic, I like magic. And then fears that others are out to get them. Yeah, apparently a piece comes in. Exactly.

Dysthymia. So this is an old phrase. I don't really use that one anyway. We don't use dysthymia.

We call it persistent depressive disorder. So this is an ongoing chronic depression, more than a major depression, something that has gone on and on and on. This really contributes to low self-esteem, lack of relationships, all that fun stuff. So while incarcerated, incarcerated, incarcerated, I call it incarcerated.

I like that. While incarcerated at the Northern Kentucky Youth Department, Dr. Kathleen O'Connor felt that Michael really had paranoid schizophrenia. Now days, we call it schizophrenia.

Just schizophrenia, because schizophrenia encompasses the area. So this is where individuals can hear voices. They can have visual and auditory hallucinations. They can believe that someone is out to get them or believe that they are hearing a voice that's telling them to do something bad.

We can also have individuals who are having psychotic breaks, who in those moments hear things like they hear the devil talk to them or God. Demons. Angels. Exactly.

Us. Yeah. Yeah. They hear our voice.

Angels. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. All right. Let's talk about the trial. So this took place less than a year after the shooting in October of 1998.

Michael made a plea deal. He pled guilty to do to mental illness, and he was given a plea agreement of a life sentence, but would be allowed parole within 25 years in 2022. The plea also allowed Michael to receive mental health services and medications throughout his incarceration. Thank goodness.

Thank goodness. Absolutely. Because it kind of goes back to what we were saying, like how important mental health services are. Michael has, in fact, been in and out of the hospital for mental health issues since his incarceration.

He's been provided with Zoloft, which is an antidepressant medication, along with Jhin, which is an anti-psychotic medication. I'm going to speak for an experience. Zoloft works wonders for me. It's a good thing.

It's a good thing for me. Yep. Sertiline is the engineer. Yes, which I think is what I get.

But yeah. So left helps a lot. So great. I mean, I'm pro that.

It works really well. For my own mental health. So Michael was taken to the Kentucky State Reformatory in Le Grange when he turned 18, and this is actually where he is still housed. Prior to that, he was held in the Northern Kentucky Youth Department in the Department of Juvenile Justice.

So he began serving his time as a big boy June 1st of 2001. In 2007, he filed an appeal claiming that he was too mentally ill to plead guilty to the shooting. And he asked the Kentucky Supreme Court for a retrial. Prosecutors ended up appealing this in the Supreme Court, just rejected the request, obviously.

In 2012, he attempted to withdraw his plea of guilty, claiming that he was mentally ill at the time that he made it. So it shouldn't stand. Later, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the request, stating that he should have acted sooner like he waited way too long because, you know, we're talking 15 years. He was originally scheduled to be eligible for parole November 16th of 2022.

So last year, however, his hearing was rescheduled for September 19th. So a couple days later, not a huge difference. So he goes to the parole board and they unanimously decided on September 26th of 2022 that his bid for parole was denied. He would serve out the remainder of his life sentence.

It was rolled under Kentucky law. This means that the inmate in question cannot be considered for any future parole hearings, though the pardon or the governor of the governor is still possible. So which I doubt would happen. This means that he's pretty much going to live out that whole life sentence.

But I wonder if it's kind of like a life sentence in other states. It's a number of times. Yeah, like 52 years. Maybe that's a good Google search or something.

So potentially, he could get out maybe in his late 60s. He's of the children who had passed away, actually agreed to a $42 million settlement from Michael. And at the time of the settlement, he had nothing. I mean, he was a 14 year old kid.

What would he have? And really, his parents insurance company, Kentucky Farm Bureau had insistently repeated during court hearings, you know, they weren't liable for his actions, which makes sense. So anyway, in early 1999, the parents of the three victims who were represented by attorney Jack Thompson filed a $33 million lawsuit against two internet pornography sites, etc. Several computer game companies and makers and distributors of natural born killers.

They claimed that media violence inspired Michael to do these things, which is this is very common. I mean, this is what was, you know, said in 1999 when Columbine happened, I think we want someone to blame. We do. And I think like the hurt is unimaginable.

I don't think obviously, like, plenty of people play those games and consume that type of media and don't do things like this. I think that can definitely be a trigger for some people who are already dealing with other things. Absolutely. Absolutely.

The case ended up being dismissed in 2002 with the US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that it was, quote, simply too far a leap from shooting characters on a video screen to shooting people in a classroom. Yeah, quote. So I mean, that's where we're at. That is the story of the Heath High School shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, which I had never heard of.

I'm here. And I feel bad that I never heard of this. I think it didn't get the spotlight that, or at least I don't recall, you know, I was a teenager, but I don't really recall it. I recall Columbine hitting really hard being such a, you know, I watched it similarly to you on television.

I had a doctor's appointment that day and we came home and my friend from school called and was like, Oh my gosh, you gotta turn on the TV. Something happened in Colorado. And I was like, wait, what? And then we heard about this and seeing kids, you know, come with your hands up and running out of a building and a guy falling from out of the library window, you know, he was hurt.

And just, all these things was like, this could happen at my school. You know, this is a possibility that never entered my life, you know, it's so. Yeah, I remember saying hook and then Parkland. Yeah, was a big one for me.

I just think, you know, we, we can't live our lives in peer number one. We can't have to, but we have to be smart and we have to think about the possibilities. I think we would be stupid not to. But at the same time, we can't allow fear to dictate our life so much that we're not living.

So the good news is only the good guy, young and neither Haley and I are good. She's young, but not good. But you know, we're not, we're not those people that they go, Oh my god, they put up a room. It's not us.

Um, yeah. Oh, we should probably tell folks how to get in touch with us. They are probably going, Oh my god, they spent so much time chatting about this junk. Exactly.

Um, we're usually here for your entertainment. This was a little more on the serious side. Yeah, there's not a, I mean, they're all serious, but this topic in particular is definitely, I think it hits very close to Haley. It does.

And it does to a lot of people out there. For sure. Yeah. So if you want to get in touch with Haley, make sure that she's okay.

Maybe send her a lovely email. She would appreciate it. You can do so by emailing us at mountain mysteries.appleaction at gmail.com. You can find us on Facebook at mountain mysteries tales from Appalachia.

Find us on Instagram at mountain mysteries.appleatcha and patreon patreon.com slash mountain mysteries. Haley, do you have a shout out? I sure do. Let's go.