Kinkel, now 38, is serving a de facto life sentence at the Oregon State Correctional Institution. He spoke with the news site by phone for about 20 hours over 10 months. He said he felt guilty not just for what he did as a year-old suffering from then-undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, but the effect his crime has had on other juvenile offenders sentenced to life terms: His case has been held up by some of his victims and by others as a reason to oppose juvenile justice reform in the state.
While he has not previously given interviews because he did not want to further traumatize his victims, he said, he also began to feel that his silence was preventing those offenders from getting a second chance. From the archives: Remembering the victims of the May Thurston shooting.
For local stories that matter, subscribe today. I have responsibility for the harm that I caused when I was 15," Kinkel said. By , Black youth were In , Unlike Kinkel, many juvenile lifers grew up dealing with poverty, violence or abuse.
Even as the country locks up fewer kids overall, the racial disparity remains egregious: In , there were more than twice as many Black people serving juvenile life without parole sentences than white people. The systemic racism that created this disparity can also make it harder for adolescents of color to access resources once inside the system. Once Kinkel got to MacLaren, he was placed in an intensive treatment program for kids convicted of violent crimes, the product of an earlier era when the emphasis was on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
For kids like Kinkel, who were facing lifelong sentences, the treatment program could sometimes feel like a cruel joke. Staffers warned the boys they were likely to get raped in adult prison and used the threat of being transferred early as a fear tactic to keep them in line.
Still, it was the first time Kinkel received real treatment for his mental illness. It was a small gesture, but Sack gained his trust. Tremendous, tremendous shame for my criminal actions, that I feel intensely to this day. Those are always there, and those will never go away.
Over time, the delusions began to fade and the voices became less frequent and quieter. The sense of being under constant threat started to soften. At the same time, he began seeing several therapists, including one he still works with today. That shame, and the desire to understand how he could have done what he did, helped him eventually accept his diagnosis.
I hurt these people. I killed my own parents, who I absolutely loved and who loved me and were good people. I killed two boys who were completely innocent. It makes you a human being. As a result, his stability was treated as a priority, he said. Kinkel completed the violent offender treatment program and helped facilitate group conversations with younger participants. But Kinkel, along with many of his friends, had no hopes of being able to actually return to society.
And so it was a deep contradiction. Kinkel earned his college degree in global studies in May , just a few months before his 25th birthday, when he would age out of MacLaren. His sister came to the ceremony. But with his looming transfer to adult custody, it was hard to fully enjoy that day.
Like Kinkel, Engweiler had received a life sentence for a crime he committed when he was 15 years old, gone through treatment at MacLaren and was serving the rest of his sentence at OSCI. Bolstad wanted Engweiler to look out for Kinkel when he arrived. Some gangs wanted to beat him up; others talked about extorting him and selling his photo and autograph online to fans of school shooters. Engweiler was part of an informal group of about a dozen juvenile offenders, many of whom came up through MacLaren.
They looked out for one another and worked hard to create a positive community within a violent, dehumanizing environment. Cheadle, who was respected by leaders of the various gangs, tried to convince them to leave Kinkel alone, or at least agree to certain terms. How Kinkel responded would be a test. It was a delicate balance: He needed to learn how to take a punch and defend himself without escalating the violence.
And he would need to make it through his punishment for fighting back — another stint of solitary confinement. Kinkel arrived at the prison in the summer of Cheadle went to visit him in his cell on his first day under the guise of doing a repair as part of his job as an electrician. The guards had instructed Kinkel to stay in his cell to avoid getting beaten up.
But Cheadle knew that would be interpreted as a sign of cowardice that would only put Kinkel in more danger. Those who publicly aligned with Kinkel risked becoming a target of gang violence themselves.
He was playing basketball with Cheadle and was on his way from the drinking fountain when someone walked up and punched him in the back of the head. Cheadle kept a close watch over the fight, and when a corrections officer approached, he instructed Kinkel to drop to the ground and wait to be handcuffed.
The fight ended quickly, and Kinkel was sent to solitary confinement for one month — just as he had predicted. That was the last time he got in trouble in prison. When he emerged from the hole , his new friends were waiting to continue easing him into his new environment. Engweiler got him a job as a clerk at the library, a role that was relatively safe and would make him needed by others in the prison.
Transferring to adult prison meant losing his mental health care providers at MacLaren. That decision made sense to Kinkel, but once he settled in at OSCI, his new doctors were unwilling to return him to his regular dosages.
Over time, the medications caused Kinkel to gain about 50 pounds and experience constant exhaustion and tremors in his tongue. It took nearly five years for Kinkel to get his medications adjusted to a level where he could function — and part of it came down to luck. The corrections department decided it no longer wanted to pay for the medication he had been on, so he was switched to a cheaper, recently approved antipsychotic.
Around the same time, Kinkel was able to resume weekly sessions in the visiting room with another therapist he knew from MacLaren, the result of constant advocacy from his sister. But over time, the prison began allowing others in the prison to meet with mental health providers.
As Kinkel emerged from his over-medicated fog, Engweiler pushed him to challenge himself intellectually. They became close working their way through the literary classics that were available to them inside the prison: Emerson, Thoreau, Proust, Hemingway.
As Kinkel opened up about his mental illness, Engweiler introduced him to works by writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who had their own mental health struggles. Cheadle remembers how when he got his release date, some of his friends started pulling away. He encouraged me.
He was super loving and super proud that I was getting out. Kip supported me through those 60 days to make my transition easier. Kinkel sees himself as part of a chain of juvenile lifers, mostly serving sentences for homicides they committed as juveniles.
He benefited from the guidance of those who grew up in prison before him and now he tries to pay it forward to the young men coming in. Whenever a juvenile facing a long sentence arrives at OSCI, Kinkel and his friends are there waiting with a toothbrush, deodorant and a few commodities to ease their transition. There are limits to how much of a community Kinkel and his friends can actually create.
I think people feel a need to believe he was in order to reconcile what he did, but the sincere truth is that he was then and is now a good and accountable human being who suffers severely from a serious mental illness. Kinkel used to think there was something special about the group of people he grew up with in prison. Despite committing horrifying crimes as kids, they had grown into high-functioning, community-focused adults who were deeply remorseful about their pasts.
As he dove into the research on juveniles who offend, he learned that he and his friends were actually pretty typical. In the mids, as states were becoming increasingly punitive toward juvenile crime, the MacArthur Foundation began funding a group of social scientists, neuroscientists and legal experts to research the developmental differences between adolescents and adults.
Researchers concluded that individuals under the age of 16 lacked the maturity to make informed legal decisions in court. Moreover, they found that the vast majority of juveniles who commit crimes — even devastatingly harmful ones — grow out of antisocial activity as they become adults. In , the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles. In , it ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide offenses.
Two years later, the court prohibited mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles. The precedent set by the court also prompted many states to reexamine their harsh juvenile sentencing practices. In April, Maryland became the 25th state , in addition to Washington, D. In , there were 1, people serving life without parole, 6, serving life with parole, and 1, serving virtual life for crimes they committed while younger than 18, according to Ashley Nellis, a senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project.
Most of those people do not benefit from the Supreme Court rulings. Floyd Prozanski was elected to the Oregon state legislature in , during the same election cycle when voters passed Measure 11, the mandatory minimums initiative. Before that, he was deputy district attorney in the Lane County D. When Prozanski was a senior in high school, his older sister was fatally shot by her domestic partner after trying to end the relationship.
But Prozanski actually opposed Measure 11 from its inception because he believed it would give prosecutors an unfair upper hand. In , Prozanski formed a working group to examine the way kids are treated in the criminal justice system and identify opportunities for reform. Bobbin Singh, the executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, was part of that group, and he wanted policymakers to meet directly with the people affected by their decisions.
He started out by inviting a group of lawmakers to visit the prison and get to know some of the men who grew up inside. Those who agreed to come were assured their participation would be kept confidential. She helped the incarcerated participants prepare to discuss their identities and their roles in their communities. In prison, people often introduce themselves by disclosing the crime they committed or the length of their sentence; Seloover encouraged participants to introduce themselves by their current community roles and jobs, not just the harm they caused as youth.
The incarcerated men did everything they could to make their guests feel safe and comfortable. They provided cookies and coffee they purchased with their own money from the commissary. On Oct. The discomfort hung in the air as they made their way around the circle introducing themselves. Nearly everyone in the room already knew who Kinkel was.
Some participants in subsequent meetings would later admit they thought about walking out when they first spotted him, choosing to stay only out of polite obligation.
After introductions, the group moved into two concentric circles, with the incarcerated people in the outer circle and the visitors on the inside. Each person sat facing someone from the other circle and answered prepared questions. Throughout the day, participants moved into different groups and discussed increasingly weighty questions. By the end of the four-hour facilitated discussion, some participants were in tears. Prozanski was one of the lawmakers who came to that meeting, where he met Kinkel for the first time.
The two men spoke briefly that day. Sherrie Sprenger, a Republican state representative at the time, came to the meeting, too. A former deputy sheriff, Sprenger had spent the previous two decades thinking of Kinkel as a monster.
She remembers the day of the shooting — how it made her scared for her own young son. And made it hard for this young mom to want to send her kids to a public school, where other kids might kill people, too. But she spoke with Kinkel and asked him tough questions.
She found him to be respectful and remorseful. You killed her parents. They spoke about sentencing reform for juveniles, but Kinkel never advocated for his own release, Sprenger said. Previous Next. June 12, PM. Associated Press. Surviving the Trauma of a School Shooting. More US Stories. The Day in Photos. November 11, All About America. John Crumbley, who described Kinkel as being remorseful about the rock-throwing incident. Kinkel was eventually sentenced to 32 hours of community service.
Despite his visits with Hicks, which told of Kinkel's improvement, he was suspended for two days on April 23 for assaulting a student after Kinkel was shoved by him. On April 29, he was suspended again, for three days, after throwing a pencil at another student.
On June 2, Hicks recommended the use of antidepressants, and Kinkel was soon put onto Prozac , which seemed to work. On June 27, Kinkel was allowed to purchase a gun and bought a 9mm Glock 19 semiautomatic pistol. The purchase was made without Dr. Hicks knowledge. Initially, Bill didn't allow for guns to be in the house but changed his mind in order to allow Kinkel to take some gun-safety lessons. On July 30, his emotional improvement allowed for the discontinuation of counseling.
During the summer, Kinkel purchased a. When the summer ended, he entered Thurston High School, where he excelled academically and was even invited for the freshman football team. On September 30, Bill purchased a. He also purchased a hunting knife. At this point, he had begun hanging out with a tougher group of students and played with explosives, excusing the latter as means to vent out his anger. During Kinkel's time in high school, a string of school shootings occurred. First, on October 1, year-old Luke Woodham stabbed and bludgeoned his mother to death, then used a Marlin Model This was followed by another school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky, on December 1, when year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on a group of praying students at Heath High School, killing three and injuring five, before surrendering to authorities.
He used a. Finally, on March 24, , Westside Middle School students Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden lured the entire school population out with a fire alarm before opening fire on them with two semiautomatic rifles, a bolt-action rifle, and four handguns, killing four students and one teacher, also injuring nine other students and one other teacher. Both were then arrested by police.
Kinkel and a friend watched news coverage of the massacre, both commenting that it was "pretty cool". Sometime during May, he and several other friends "toilet-papered" a house using rolls of toilet paper in order to beat a school record. Though they accomplished their goal, the group was caught. On May 19, Kinkel arranged for the purchase of a stolen.
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