1998 Thurston High School shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The Thurston High School shooting in Springfield, Oregon, happened on the 21st of May 1998, in a cafeteria where about three hundred students were present. The gunman was Kipland Kinkel, known to everyone as Kip. He was a 15-year-old freshman. Two of his classmates were killed and 25 others were wounded. Yet the violence at the school was only the second act of a story that had begun the day before, inside the Kinkel family home. This documentary asks what happened in that house, and what a boy managed to hide from his parents, his teachers and his doctors for years. It also asks what became of the people left behind in Springfield.

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• 2. A Boyhood in Springfield

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  Kipland Phillip Kinkel was born on the 30th of August 1982, the second child of William and Faith Kinkel. Both parents were Spanish teachers. Faith taught at Springfield High School, while William had taught at Thurston High and at Lane Community College before retiring three years ahead of the shooting. By every account, they were ordinary, caring parents. Their older daughter, Kristin, was reportedly a gifted student.

  When Kip was six, the family spent a sabbatical year in Spain, and he was placed in a Spanish-speaking kindergarten. He attended in what was described as an unusual way, and his family said the lessons were a struggle. Back in Oregon, he went to elementary school in Walterville, about 5 miles (8 km) east of Springfield. His teachers found him immature and behind in physical and emotional development, so his parents had him repeat first grade. That year he was diagnosed with dyslexia, and by the start of second grade he was in extensive special education classes.

  Firearms and explosives drew him early, and the fascination grew as he entered puberty. He built bombs, mostly gasoline-based, and set them off in a nearby quarry to ease his anger. William first tried to steer his son away from violence. Later he enrolled Kip in gun safety courses and bought him a 9mm Glock handgun. At 15, Kip also received a .22 caliber rifle. William had already passed down the single-shot .22 rifle he himself had been given at 12. Faith disapproved at first, but she gave way after her son's psychologist, in the phrase attributed to him, gave her emotional permission to say yes. Father and son used the guns for target shooting near their home.

  At Thurston, classmates called Kip strange and morbid. Some labeled him psychotic or schizoid, noting his taste for Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine and Marilyn Manson. He talked constantly about violence. He told friends he wanted to join the U.S. Army after graduation just to learn what killing felt like. Asked about a family trip to Disneyland, he said he wanted to "punch Mickey Mouse in the nose." He gave his speech class a how-to talk on making bombs and set off stink bombs in classmates' lockers. In English class he read Romeo and Juliet, identified with its lovers, and became fond of the 1996 modernized film, which used guns heavily. His parents answered the warning signs by enrolling him in anger management and sending him to a psychologist.

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• 3. The Hidden Illness

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  Jeffrey Hicks, the psychologist, saw Kinkel over roughly six months. He diagnosed depression, and Kip began taking Prozac. Eight weeks into the prescription, Kip, his mother and Hicks agreed he was doing well enough to stop the sessions. When the prescription ran out in late 1997, Kip never refilled it.

  By then his thoughts had taken a darker turn. He came to believe that the government had implanted a computer chip in his brain. He also believed that the Chinese were about to invade the West Coast. Most striking were the three voices he later described. Voice A ordered him to commit violent acts. Voice B repeated insults and gloomy remarks about him. Voice C simply echoed whatever the other two said. Kinkel later said he was angry at God for letting the voices torment him, to the extent that he believed in God at all. He credited Voice A with pushing him toward both the killing of his parents and the attack at the school.

  Nobody around him knew. Kinkel said the voices had started when he turned 12, and he went to great lengths to conceal them. He feared being branded abnormal or "mentally retarded", being disliked by girls, or being locked away in an institution. The voices were so insistent that he considered hurting himself to silence them. Instead he drowned them out with loud music on his headphones and with bike rides. The full extent of his schizophrenia became clear only after his trial.

  The family itself had been silent too. Faith and William kept quiet with psychologists about serious mental illness on both sides of their families. Investigators hired by Kip's lawyers later dug it up. One uncle, in the late 1940s, had stabbed a state trooper after a traffic stop, convinced that the man had killed his brother during the war.

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• 4. The Day Before

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  A Beretta pistol sat in a paper bag in Kinkel's school locker on the 20th of May 1998. A friend had stolen it from the father of another friend. The night before, that friend arranged to sell it to Kinkel for $110. The gun was loaded with a nine-round magazine. When its owner discovered the theft, he told police and offered the names of students he suspected. Kinkel was not among them. School officials still connected him to the gun and questioned him. Asked to be checked for weapons, he reportedly said: "Look, I'm gonna be square with you guys; the gun's in my locker."

  He was suspended pending an expulsion hearing, and both he and the friend were arrested. Released from custody, Kinkel was driven home by his father. William warned him that he would be sent to military school if his behavior did not improve. Kinkel later said that the voices in his head were so loud during the lecture that he could not hear a word. Shortly before his own death, William told a friend that he was "terrified" and had run out of options to help his son.

  What happened next is known from Kinkel's taped confession. At about 3 p.m., he took his Ruger .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle from his bedroom and ammunition from his parents' bedroom. He shot his father in the kitchen and covered the body with a sheet. When Faith arrived home at about 6:30 p.m., he met her in the garage, told her he loved her, and shot her. He covered her body as well.

  Through the next morning he repeatedly played "Liebestod", the closing aria of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, on the family's sound system. It was the same piece featured in the Romeo + Juliet film and on its soundtrack. Police who entered the house later found it blaring, with the CD player set to repeat. On the living room coffee table lay his note. It began with the claim that two felonies on his record would destroy his parents. It went on: "My head just doesn't work right. God damn these VOICES inside my head." It ended with the words "I have no other choice."

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• 5. The Cafeteria

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  Under a trench coat on the morning of the 21st of May, Kinkel hid five weapons: two hunting knives, his rifle, a 9×19mm Glock 19 pistol and a .22 caliber Ruger MK II pistol. He carried 1,127 rounds of ammunition. He drove his mother's Ford Explorer to 61st Street, parked two blocks from the school, and jogged the rest of the way.

  He entered the patio area and fired two shots there. One struck 16-year-old Ben Walker, who was fatally wounded, and another student was hit. Kinkel then turned down a hallway and walked into the cafeteria. Crossing the room, he emptied the remaining 48 rounds from his rifle. Twenty-four students were wounded, and 17-year-old Mikael Nickolauson was killed. In all he fired 51 rounds, and 37 of them struck students.

  The attack ended when Kinkel's rifle ran dry and he began to reload. Jacob Ryker, a student who had already been wounded, tackled him, and several other students joined in. Kinkel pulled the Glock from his belt and fired one shot, injuring Ryker a second time and hitting another student. Then he was disarmed. "Just kill me!" he shouted. A total of seven students took part in subduing him and holding him until police arrived.

  The pleading did not stop with the arrest. At the police station, Kinkel pulled a knife strapped to his leg and lunged at Officer Al Warthen, screaming, "Shoot me, kill me!" The officer drove him back with pepper spray. Kinkel later explained that he had hoped to trick the officer into shooting him. He had wanted to die after killing his parents but could not bring himself to do it.

  Nickolauson died at the scene. Walker died at the hospital, where he was kept on life support until his parents arrived. Ryker had a perforated lung, yet he made a full recovery. The Boy Scouts of America later awarded him its Honor Medal with Crossed Palms.

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• 6. A Town Answers

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  More than 200 counselors volunteered in Springfield after the shooting, and more than $400,000 in aid flowed into the Thurston Healing Fund. A scholarship for Thurston graduates was created in remembrance. The town also adopted a slogan, "Let it end here." In June, President Bill Clinton spoke at the school. He called the shooting "a traumatic experience for all of America" and told the community it was a good place to live. In his words, that was exactly why "it could happen anywhere."

  The story reached the whole country because of the timing. Since the previous October, four other school shootings had taken place around the United States. Mass shootings were no rarity, but they had seldom occurred at schools. The earlier school attacks had happened outside buildings or had involved pistols. Kinkel had walked into a crowded cafeteria with a semi-automatic rifle. Peter DeFazio, who lived near the school and represented the area in the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled: "Something like this was unimaginable at that point in time."

  A permanent memorial was dedicated at the school in 2003. It has a curved wall and a plaque listing the names of the two students who were killed. Plans to add the names of Kinkel's parents were dropped after debate. Many students from that day still live in Springfield. Thurston's current dean of students, who was a friend of the family and had to telephone Kristin Kinkel with the news, calls the shooting "our 9/11".

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• 7. Plea and Sentence

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  In jail, Kinkel was placed on suicide watch, and he tried to starve himself. He stopped once his sister, Kristin, began visiting. When she had to leave the state to finish her undergraduate degree, he did not start again. He told others he "didn't want her to have to fly right back" to Springfield.

  On the 24th of September 1999, three days before jury selection was due to begin, Kinkel pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder. That gave up any chance of being acquitted by reason of insanity. At sentencing, defense experts argued that he was mentally ill. Hicks countered that Kinkel had been in satisfactory mental health. He said he had seen the boy for nine sessions and treated him for major depression. William and Faith had ended the therapy, he said, because Kip responded well and no longer showed symptoms. On the 11th of November 1999, Kinkel was sentenced to more than 111 years in prison without the possibility of parole. He apologized to the court for the murders of his parents and for the shooting spree.

  The courts kept hearing from him for years. In June 2007, Kinkel asked for a new trial, arguing that his earlier attorneys should have gone to trial and used the insanity defense. Two psychiatrists testified that he had shown signs of paranoid schizophrenia at the time. A Marion County judge denied the request that August. In January 2011, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld that ruling. In federal court he argued that his plea should not have been accepted without a mental health evaluation. In state court he challenged his virtual life sentence, citing Miller v. Alabama.

  On the 11th of June 2007, as he neared his 25th birthday, the maximum age for holding a juvenile in Oregon, he was moved from the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn, where he earned his GED. His new home was the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem. He still seeks parole, though release is considered unlikely. DeFazio told The New Yorker in 2023 that there was still a long memory and a lot of victims.

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• 8. What Remained

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  Anthony W. Case was shot four times as he sheltered under a table. The wounds kept him from walking for a long stretch, and he did not return to school until the following year. At Kinkel's sentencing he said that he could not walk far without shoes, and he still has a slight limp. Nerve damage in his legs ended his hopes of playing college baseball. He turned instead to science, earning a physics degree at the University of Oregon in Eugene and a Ph.D. in astronomy at Boston University. At the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics he helped develop the Parker Solar Probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and HelioSwarm. He told The New Yorker that baseball would have left him less time to study.

  Inside prison, Kinkel is treated for paranoid schizophrenia and takes antipsychotic medication every day. He works as an electrician and takes college classes. In 2023 he asked how, at fifteen, so many things had come together that he could harm both people he loved and people he did not know. His sister Kristin says there is no way his behavior was a choice. She has never felt angry enough to need to forgive him, because he was the only family she had left. She adds that being his sister has complicated some of her romantic relationships when partners found out.

  Case refuses to explain Kinkel away, yet he agrees that better mental health treatment might have prevented the shootings. Asked whether Kinkel should ever be freed, he conceded it would not be an easy decision, but said "it wouldn't be a hard no."

  The name still carries weight. Between the 24th and the 27th of September 2024, a man in Eugene, Oregon, posted threatening videos online. In one he spoke of becoming "the next Kip Kinkel." He was arrested, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation found weapons in his house. On the 9th of April 2025 he received five years of probation. He was arrested again on the 21st of April for violating its terms.

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