Jon Bellini - Childs Prey: The Rampage that Shocked the Nation

Pearl, Mississippi, 7:45 A.M ., October 1, 1997

The sun peeped through a thin haze of cloud, casting a warm orange glow across the sprinklers watering the grass verges that bordered the Pearl High School parking lot. Dozens of students strolled across the blacktop toward the tall double doors that led to the school commons area. Many of the teenagers had Bibles in their arms because theyd just been to early morning prayer.

No one noticed the pale-faced, overweight teen driving the white Corsica to the far corner of the parking lot. He pulled up, sat alone and unsmiling. He glanced across at the students and teachers entering the high school.

The sixteen-year-old youths gaze fixed on a student in her mid-teens. She was tall and shapely, her hair long and dark. She walked with a confident swagger. She was smiling.

As she went through the double doors into the Commons, the teen in the Corsica opened his door and headed across the parking lot.

At that moment another sixteen-year-old walked into the Commons with his buddy, a seventeen-year-old senior. The two boys settled at the spot where they sat every morning before classes began.

The overweight sixteen-year-old shuffled into the Commons area long enough to hand some notebooks to another boy, telling him to make sure he gave the notebooks to another older ex-student they both knew, then headed back out toward the parking lot.

The boy whod just been handed the notebooks told a friend standing next to him that something very bad was about to happen. They moved down the corridor toward the library away from the Commons. The tubby teen walked back through the swinging doors like a cowboy about to challenge all comers to a saloon bar duel, a .30-.30 Marlin hunting rifle rested casually on his hip.

He approached two girls. The bubbly brunette hed watched earlier looked up. The lone gunman was aiming his weapon straight at her, tears welling up in his eyes.

She instantly recognized the look of despair in his face and turned to run.

He squeezed the trigger and caught her in the back with two blasts before shed gotten two steps away. The sound of the shots echoed around the large hallway. Students began screaming. One fourteen-year-old ninth grader and a friend began running. The lone gunman aimed and fired at them. The bullet ricocheted off a brick post as they scrambled for cover.

The shooter aimed again at the fourteen-year-old ninth grader. A beat later the teen heard the bullet hit his book bag with a thud before it dropped to the floor and literally exploded.

The gunman swung his weapon toward another girl student whod been standing near his first victim. As she scrambled away, he shot her in the head. After the bullet struck, her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell to the floor.

A seventeen-year-old junior turned and ran for her life, but in the confusion ran straight into a wall. That was when she felt the severe pain in her left shoulder where a bullet had hit her. She scrambled back to her feet and made it to the bathroom across the hall, where she huddled and cried, too afraid to open the door.

Students and school staff continued running for cover behind pillars, tables, chairsanything that might protect them from the onslaught.

By now the lone gunman was firing randomly in all directions, his weapon still resting on his hip.

When the young shooter stopped to reload his rifle, one brave student tried to tackle him. He ran after the teen, grabbed him, and they grappled for a few seconds until the gunman shoved him to the ground and headed across the hall, his rifle resting on his hip again.

On the other side of the hall, a sports coach directed students out of the building. One seventeen-year-old senior helped another injured classmate to safety, taking off his own shirt to try and stop the wounded students bleeding.

The gunman shouted wildly in the direction of one male senior, You turned your back on us. Then he shot straight at the students hip. He instantly fell to the ground.

Out in the parking lot, other students heard the blasts and thought it was the cannon used at school football games.

One junior was struck by a bullet in the left side of her stomach. She fell to the ground screaming for her friend. As two other girls ran for their lives, they dropped school bags and one of them even lost one of her sneakers in the panic. Filled with an impending sense of doom, the two teens headed for a small wood beyond the parking lot and kept running.

Back in the commons area, bullets were striking the black-and-white floor and fragmenting before grazing students in the legs as they ran for cover.

One seventeen-year-old sophomore leaped in front of his girlfriend to try and shield her. He took gunshot wounds to both legs and crashed to the floor.

The gunman walked over to the sophomore to say he was sorry. Hed thought the student was someone else.

The lone gunman began firing again.

A fourteen-year-old freshman stumbled toward the schools band hall. It was only when a friend took a look at his leg that he realized hed been hit in the left calf.

Bullets ripped through lockers and chipped powder kegs of plaster off the walls as they ricocheted in all directions.

The lone gunman stopped almost as suddenly as he had begun. A cloud of dust and cordite wafted through the wall of silence that descended on the scene of carnage.

Gazing through the mist at the bloodshed he had just created, the shooter pointed the barrel down, turned around and shuffled back out of the school.

The community of Pearl, in Rankin County, Mississippi, would never be the same again.

No one else took care of him.

When he cried, I held him.

When he was in trouble,

I helped him when no one else did.

Grant Boyette