Arnie Bernstein - Bath Massacre: Americas First School Bombing

BATH MASSACRE

BATH MASSACRE

AMERICAS FIRST SCHOOL BOMBING

Arnie Bernstein

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS ANN ARBOR

Copyright 2009 by Arnie Bernstein

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America by

The University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

2012 2011 2010 2009 4 3

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bernstein, Arnie.

Bath massacre : Americas first school bombing / Arnie Bernstein.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11606-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-472-11606-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-472-03346-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-472-03346-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. BombingsMichiganBath (Township)History20th century. 2. Bath (Mich. : Township)History20th century. 3. StudentsCrimes againstMichiganBath (Township)History20th century.

4. MurderMichiganBath (Township)History20th century.

5. Suicide bombersMichiganBath (Township)History20th century.

6.Kehoe, Andrew P. (Andrew Philip), 1872-1927. I. Title.

F574.B18B47 2009

977.4'041dc22

2008048155

ISBN 978-0-472-02470-4 (electronic)

For the children of Bath

CONTENTS

A voice is heard in Ramah

lamentation and bitter weeping

Rachel is weeping for her children;

she refuses to be comforted for her children,

because they are not.

JEREMIAH 31:15

When lilacs are in bloom

I think of the Bath School explosion

because that day

the children brought bouquets to their teacher

MARTHA HORTON
SURVIVOR

PROLOGUE: APRIL 16, 2007

The morning of April 16, 2007, dawned clear and bright over central Michigan. In Dewitt, a small town about twenty miles from the state capital of Lansing, ninety-six-year-old Willis Cressman woke at his usual time, ate breakfast, then puttered around the house. A lifelong resident of the area, Cressman lived a good long life. Born in 1911, hed grown up in the nearby town of Bath. Before retiring, he was a jack-of-all-trades. In various phases of life, hed worked on road crews, farmed, and operated an excavation business. A veteran of World War II, he was one of the many brave soldiers who hit Anzio Beach on January 22, 1944. He never forgot that day and all the shells exploding around him. Yet Anzio wasnt the first time Cressman was in the midst of deadly explosions.

In her home on the outskirts of nearby Bath, not far from Dewitt, Josephine Cushman Vail, a woman just a few months shy of her ninety-fourth birthday, was beginning her morning as well. Vail and Cressman were old schoolmates, first as students in a one-room schoolhouse during the 1910s and then in a larger, consolidated school in the 1920s. Those days held fond memories of classroom accomplishments, athletic and social events, friends, and a sense of community.

Cressman and Vail had other recollections of the Bath Consolidated School: the events that unfolded on May 18, 1927. That day was something they never wanted anyone else to experience.

About the time Cressman and Vail began their mornings, Seung-Hui Cho, a twenty-three-year-old student at Virginia Tech, located in Blacksburg, Virginia, started his day. At 7:15 a.m., he entered West Ambler Johnston Hall, an on-campus dormitory, barged into the room of Emily Hilscher, a nineteen-year-old freshman, then shot her and twenty-two-year-old senior Ryan C. Clark, the resident adviser for the floor, who happened to be in Hilschers room. Both were dead at the scene.

Cho returned to his room in another dorm, changed clothes, deleted his campus e-mail, and removed the hard drive from his computer. As he walked through campus, another student saw Cho hurl what looked like a hard drive and a mobile phone into a pond.

Just before nine, one hour and forty-five minutes after murdering Hilscher and Clark, Cho went to the local post office to mail a package addressed to NBC News in New York City. He was lugging a hefty backpack filled with chains and locks, a knife and hammer, and two pistols. Cho had also stowed nineteen ten- and fifteen-round magazines and nearly four hundred bullets in the backpack.

He returned to campus and entered Norris Hall, where several classrooms and the universitys Engineering Science and Mechanics program were located. Cho methodically removed the chains and locks from his backpack and fastened them to the buildings three main doors, effectively cutting off any attempt to enter or exit Norris. Once the entrance-ways were sealed tight, Cho left a note. It said any attempt to break the chains would result in an explosion.

Cho walked up to the second floor, then poked his head inside a classroom. One person who saw him, Erin Sheehan, believed Cho was a student who didnt know what room his class was in. Strange, Sheehan thought, that someone should be lost on campus so late in the semester.

Downstairs a faculty member discovered Chos handiwork on the doors. He read the note. Although he didnt know about the earlier shootings, the teacher instantly realized something terrible was unfolding at Virginia Tech.

Cho entered room 206 and unleashed his firepower. The shooting spree continued in rooms 207, 204, and 211. There was gunfire. Screams. Students fleeing, knocking into each other, desperate. Blood, bodies, and bullet shells littered the classrooms. In just nine minutes, Cho fired at least 174 rounds.

He then pointed one of the guns at his head and pulled the trigger.

The package he sent to NBC contained a videotape prepared a few weeks earlier. It was Chos last message to the world. Killers, he declared, are made, forced into desperate acts by others, not born.

The news of the Virginia Tech massacre quickly spread. Cable stations broke into regular coverage, filling television screens across the country with stumbling facts, scraps of information, and some speculation as to what was going on at Virginia Tech. In total, Cho murdered twenty-seven students and five teachers before killing himself.