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| Meta Title | The killer who was a victim | US news | The Guardian |
| Meta Description | A dazed America is desperately seeking someone to blame after a six-year-old shot his classmate dead with his uncle's gun |
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| Boilerpipe Text | Who should take the rap? The authorities in Michigan are trying to work out the answer in a case which defies imagination but cannot defy the law. Who pays the price for the death of Kayla Rolland, aged six, who set off for school on Tuesday but never came back - shot dead by one of her classmates?
Her killer was also six. The pair had been 'acting pretty age-proportionate,' says his court-appointed lawyer, Douglas Theodriff. 'The little girl was spinning her hair, and the kids were just kind of slapping at each other.' The pair had quarrelled the previous day.
Then out came the gun, a .32 semi-automatic that blasted Kayla Rolland to - her parents inisist - paradise. The boy later told detectives that he only meant to scare her.
On Friday night, they buried little Kayla, laid out in a tiny white casket. She looked like a porcelain doll, dressed in a red shirt, a white bunny rabbit at her side. A thousand people packed the funeral home, wearing pink ribbons. Beside the embalmed body, her mother wept; her sister buried her face in her kneeling mother's left shoulder. A scary-looking man dressed in biker gear said: 'I will always love you'.
Kayla had been a shy girl, who prayed before eating school lunch. She kept herself to herself, and played with her Barbie doll during breaktime. She went to Sunday school. She played kickball, she had difficulty with spelling and said she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.
She spurned the shadowy world of drugs and violence around her, as did her mother and stepfather. Along with a brother, sister and three dogs, the family lived in a small house and survived on modest means. A neighbour, Don Mark aged 75, said that 'the whole family is real nice. There ain't nothing they wouldn't do for anybody'.
The authorities, meanwhile, began the process of law on Friday, by arresting the boy's uncle, with whom he lived - Jamelle Andrew James, aged 19. James kept the the gun underneath blankets in the bedroom of his home, and is charged with involuntary manslaughter, for having allowed his nephew access to the weapon. He was arrested on an outstanding warrant for receiving stolen property - another gun was also found, loaded and stolen.
In an apparent gesture of the seriousness of the arrest, James was held in lieu of $100,000 bail. Another man, whom the police decline to name, is reported to have turned himself in, saying that he had the handgun before the boy found it.
There are no plans to arrest the boy himself, said the Genesee County prosecutor Arthur Busch - he cannot be charged because of his age. Detectives, he said, were convinced the killer had 'no idea what he had done'. After his interview with detectives, the boy had 'sat there drawing pictures'.
Had he expressed remorse? 'As much as a six-year-old boy can. I think he realised he had dome something naughty, but not the enormity or gravity of what had actually occurred.'
Mr Busch added: 'We are not looking for scapegoats in this case. We are looking for justice for Kayla'.
Mr James's home, where the killer lived with his eight-year-old brother, begins in itself to describe the depravity and tragedy of the case, set as it is in a landscape of wretched, comfortless urban despair in boom-time Amer ica.
The house sits back from the street in a working class district of Mount Norris Township, just north of the auto-manufacturing centre of Flint. It is a community of 23,000, where more than 80 per cent of the children at the Theo Buell Elementary school qualify for the federally-funded school lunch programme - a euphemism to mean that they live below the poverty level.
Michael Moore, the film director, made a famous documentary about Flint's decline, with that of the auto-industry recession of the 1980s, and said on Friday: 'When you put abject poverty together with easy access to guns, you have a recipe for this kind of violence'.
The county prosecutor said that the boy's 'immersion into the drug culture by the adults who cared for him, and the violence that goes with it, combined to turn him into a young killer'.
The building in which he lived is bordered on one side by a mud driveway. Garbage bags are taped over the broken windows. In the front yard lies an empty vodka bottle beside a car without wheels propped on four breeze blocks.
A few months ago, neighbours watched the police arrive and take away two youths in handcuffs. These little boys were growing up in a crack den. They didn't even have a bed to sleep on. People were constantly coming and going, doing deals.
The boys' father, Cedric Owens, is in jail after a conviction for burglary - he had been paroled but violated the terms, and was picked up 11 days ago. Upon hearing of the shooting, Mr Owens said he had had a'a cold, sinking feeling, because he knew it was his son,' said Genessee County Sheriff, Robert Pickel.
The boy's mother, Tamara, had taken him and his brother to live in the drug-dealing nest after being evicted from her own home. She knew the house well, having gone there on several occasions to feed her own crack habit. A fortnight ago she moved on, dumping the boys on her brother, James.
But even before then, life had been hard for the children - the warning signs were plentiful. Tamara Owens was convicted in 1992 for abusing the killer's older brother. Tamara was herself involved in drugs for years.
The boy had been singled out at school as needing help, under a programme which is supposed to identify children with special prolems.
He had been assigned a social worker and undergone children's counselling. A memo quoted in the affidavit from the social work department had earmarked the boys as 'living in a dangerous environment' and being 'at imminent risk'.
As it turns out, the risk was to his classmates. The boy had found the weapon under his uncle's pile of blankets, tucked it into his trouser pocket and walked off to school. It was loaded with three bullets.
Police believe that he had shown the gun to his friends before pulling it out of his pocket shortly after 10am as his teacher, Alicia Judd, was lining up the class, single file, to go to the computer lab. He had pointed it at another boy, then suddenly whirled round, honed in on Kayla Rolland and opened fire. After hitting the little girl in the chest, the boy returned to his own desk, carefully put the gun away and reported to the school office.
In a bizarre counterpoint to the authorities' efforts to date, Kayla's father Ricky Rolland has retained Geoffrey Fieger as his attorney - the former candidate for governor of Michigan best known as lawyer for 'Dr Death', Jack Kevorkian, convicted for his role in a string of assisted suicides.
Mr Fieger also represented the parents of two children killed at the Columbine school shooting in Colorado, in pursuit of a civil law verdict of wrongful killing. In this case, Fieger said, he would also be targeting the authorities at the children's school - Theo Buell Elementary - whom he says were acting improperly in failing to safeguard the children's safety.
The school countered yesterday, superintendent Ira Rutherford saying that the 'events were an aberrration, highly, highy unusual'. Parents, however, have protested against lax security at the school.
The boy's father has said from prison that his son was once suspeded from school for fighting, and had stabbed a girl with a pencil - details which the school authorities would not confirm yesterday. Mr Owens had asked: "why do you do this?'. 'I hate them,' the boy had replied.
'I can only say that we were aware there were problems with him,' said superintendent Rutherford of Kayla's killer who now takes his place in the record books as America's youngest ever school killer. |
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This article is more than **25 years old**
# The killer who was a victim
This article is more than 25 years old
A dazed America is desperately seeking someone to blame after a six-year-old shot his classmate dead with his uncle's gun.
[Gun violence in America: special report](http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/usguns/0,2759,69862,00.html)
[Ed Vulliamy](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/edvulliamy)
Sun 5 Mar 2000 01.21 CET
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Who should take the rap? The authorities in Michigan are trying to work out the answer in a case which defies imagination but cannot defy the law. Who pays the price for the death of Kayla Rolland, aged six, who set off for school on Tuesday but never came back - shot dead by one of her classmates?
Her killer was also six. The pair had been 'acting pretty age-proportionate,' says his court-appointed lawyer, Douglas Theodriff. 'The little girl was spinning her hair, and the kids were just kind of slapping at each other.' The pair had quarrelled the previous day.
Then out came the gun, a .32 semi-automatic that blasted Kayla Rolland to - her parents inisist - paradise. The boy later told detectives that he only meant to scare her.
On Friday night, they buried little Kayla, laid out in a tiny white casket. She looked like a porcelain doll, dressed in a red shirt, a white bunny rabbit at her side. A thousand people packed the funeral home, wearing pink ribbons. Beside the embalmed body, her mother wept; her sister buried her face in her kneeling mother's left shoulder. A scary-looking man dressed in biker gear said: 'I will always love you'.
Kayla had been a shy girl, who prayed before eating school lunch. She kept herself to herself, and played with her Barbie doll during breaktime. She went to Sunday school. She played kickball, she had difficulty with spelling and said she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.
She spurned the shadowy world of drugs and violence around her, as did her mother and stepfather. Along with a brother, sister and three dogs, the family lived in a small house and survived on modest means. A neighbour, Don Mark aged 75, said that 'the whole family is real nice. There ain't nothing they wouldn't do for anybody'.
The authorities, meanwhile, began the process of law on Friday, by arresting the boy's uncle, with whom he lived - Jamelle Andrew James, aged 19. James kept the the gun underneath blankets in the bedroom of his home, and is charged with involuntary manslaughter, for having allowed his nephew access to the weapon. He was arrested on an outstanding warrant for receiving stolen property - another gun was also found, loaded and stolen.
In an apparent gesture of the seriousness of the arrest, James was held in lieu of \$100,000 bail. Another man, whom the police decline to name, is reported to have turned himself in, saying that he had the handgun before the boy found it.
There are no plans to arrest the boy himself, said the Genesee County prosecutor Arthur Busch - he cannot be charged because of his age. Detectives, he said, were convinced the killer had 'no idea what he had done'. After his interview with detectives, the boy had 'sat there drawing pictures'.
Had he expressed remorse? 'As much as a six-year-old boy can. I think he realised he had dome something naughty, but not the enormity or gravity of what had actually occurred.'
Mr Busch added: 'We are not looking for scapegoats in this case. We are looking for justice for Kayla'.
Mr James's home, where the killer lived with his eight-year-old brother, begins in itself to describe the depravity and tragedy of the case, set as it is in a landscape of wretched, comfortless urban despair in boom-time Amer ica.
The house sits back from the street in a working class district of Mount Norris Township, just north of the auto-manufacturing centre of Flint. It is a community of 23,000, where more than 80 per cent of the children at the Theo Buell Elementary school qualify for the federally-funded school lunch programme - a euphemism to mean that they live below the poverty level.
Michael Moore, the film director, made a famous documentary about Flint's decline, with that of the auto-industry recession of the 1980s, and said on Friday: 'When you put abject poverty together with easy access to guns, you have a recipe for this kind of violence'.
The county prosecutor said that the boy's 'immersion into the drug culture by the adults who cared for him, and the violence that goes with it, combined to turn him into a young killer'.
The building in which he lived is bordered on one side by a mud driveway. Garbage bags are taped over the broken windows. In the front yard lies an empty vodka bottle beside a car without wheels propped on four breeze blocks.
A few months ago, neighbours watched the police arrive and take away two youths in handcuffs. These little boys were growing up in a crack den. They didn't even have a bed to sleep on. People were constantly coming and going, doing deals.
The boys' father, Cedric Owens, is in jail after a conviction for burglary - he had been paroled but violated the terms, and was picked up 11 days ago. Upon hearing of the shooting, Mr Owens said he had had a'a cold, sinking feeling, because he knew it was his son,' said Genessee County Sheriff, Robert Pickel.
The boy's mother, Tamara, had taken him and his brother to live in the drug-dealing nest after being evicted from her own home. She knew the house well, having gone there on several occasions to feed her own crack habit. A fortnight ago she moved on, dumping the boys on her brother, James.
But even before then, life had been hard for the children - the warning signs were plentiful. Tamara Owens was convicted in 1992 for abusing the killer's older brother. Tamara was herself involved in drugs for years.
The boy had been singled out at school as needing help, under a programme which is supposed to identify children with special prolems.
He had been assigned a social worker and undergone children's counselling. A memo quoted in the affidavit from the social work department had earmarked the boys as 'living in a dangerous environment' and being 'at imminent risk'.
As it turns out, the risk was to his classmates. The boy had found the weapon under his uncle's pile of blankets, tucked it into his trouser pocket and walked off to school. It was loaded with three bullets.
Police believe that he had shown the gun to his friends before pulling it out of his pocket shortly after 10am as his teacher, Alicia Judd, was lining up the class, single file, to go to the computer lab. He had pointed it at another boy, then suddenly whirled round, honed in on Kayla Rolland and opened fire. After hitting the little girl in the chest, the boy returned to his own desk, carefully put the gun away and reported to the school office.
In a bizarre counterpoint to the authorities' efforts to date, Kayla's father Ricky Rolland has retained Geoffrey Fieger as his attorney - the former candidate for governor of Michigan best known as lawyer for 'Dr Death', Jack Kevorkian, convicted for his role in a string of assisted suicides.
Mr Fieger also represented the parents of two children killed at the Columbine school shooting in Colorado, in pursuit of a civil law verdict of wrongful killing. In this case, Fieger said, he would also be targeting the authorities at the children's school - Theo Buell Elementary - whom he says were acting improperly in failing to safeguard the children's safety.
The school countered yesterday, superintendent Ira Rutherford saying that the 'events were an aberrration, highly, highy unusual'. Parents, however, have protested against lax security at the school.
The boy's father has said from prison that his son was once suspeded from school for fighting, and had stabbed a girl with a pencil - details which the school authorities would not confirm yesterday. Mr Owens had asked: "why do you do this?'. 'I hate them,' the boy had replied.
'I can only say that we were aware there were problems with him,' said superintendent Rutherford of Kayla's killer who now takes his place in the record books as America's youngest ever school killer.
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| Readable Markdown | Who should take the rap? The authorities in Michigan are trying to work out the answer in a case which defies imagination but cannot defy the law. Who pays the price for the death of Kayla Rolland, aged six, who set off for school on Tuesday but never came back - shot dead by one of her classmates?
Her killer was also six. The pair had been 'acting pretty age-proportionate,' says his court-appointed lawyer, Douglas Theodriff. 'The little girl was spinning her hair, and the kids were just kind of slapping at each other.' The pair had quarrelled the previous day.
Then out came the gun, a .32 semi-automatic that blasted Kayla Rolland to - her parents inisist - paradise. The boy later told detectives that he only meant to scare her.
On Friday night, they buried little Kayla, laid out in a tiny white casket. She looked like a porcelain doll, dressed in a red shirt, a white bunny rabbit at her side. A thousand people packed the funeral home, wearing pink ribbons. Beside the embalmed body, her mother wept; her sister buried her face in her kneeling mother's left shoulder. A scary-looking man dressed in biker gear said: 'I will always love you'.
Kayla had been a shy girl, who prayed before eating school lunch. She kept herself to herself, and played with her Barbie doll during breaktime. She went to Sunday school. She played kickball, she had difficulty with spelling and said she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.
She spurned the shadowy world of drugs and violence around her, as did her mother and stepfather. Along with a brother, sister and three dogs, the family lived in a small house and survived on modest means. A neighbour, Don Mark aged 75, said that 'the whole family is real nice. There ain't nothing they wouldn't do for anybody'.
The authorities, meanwhile, began the process of law on Friday, by arresting the boy's uncle, with whom he lived - Jamelle Andrew James, aged 19. James kept the the gun underneath blankets in the bedroom of his home, and is charged with involuntary manslaughter, for having allowed his nephew access to the weapon. He was arrested on an outstanding warrant for receiving stolen property - another gun was also found, loaded and stolen.
In an apparent gesture of the seriousness of the arrest, James was held in lieu of \$100,000 bail. Another man, whom the police decline to name, is reported to have turned himself in, saying that he had the handgun before the boy found it.
There are no plans to arrest the boy himself, said the Genesee County prosecutor Arthur Busch - he cannot be charged because of his age. Detectives, he said, were convinced the killer had 'no idea what he had done'. After his interview with detectives, the boy had 'sat there drawing pictures'.
Had he expressed remorse? 'As much as a six-year-old boy can. I think he realised he had dome something naughty, but not the enormity or gravity of what had actually occurred.'
Mr Busch added: 'We are not looking for scapegoats in this case. We are looking for justice for Kayla'.
Mr James's home, where the killer lived with his eight-year-old brother, begins in itself to describe the depravity and tragedy of the case, set as it is in a landscape of wretched, comfortless urban despair in boom-time Amer ica.
The house sits back from the street in a working class district of Mount Norris Township, just north of the auto-manufacturing centre of Flint. It is a community of 23,000, where more than 80 per cent of the children at the Theo Buell Elementary school qualify for the federally-funded school lunch programme - a euphemism to mean that they live below the poverty level.
Michael Moore, the film director, made a famous documentary about Flint's decline, with that of the auto-industry recession of the 1980s, and said on Friday: 'When you put abject poverty together with easy access to guns, you have a recipe for this kind of violence'.
The county prosecutor said that the boy's 'immersion into the drug culture by the adults who cared for him, and the violence that goes with it, combined to turn him into a young killer'.
The building in which he lived is bordered on one side by a mud driveway. Garbage bags are taped over the broken windows. In the front yard lies an empty vodka bottle beside a car without wheels propped on four breeze blocks.
A few months ago, neighbours watched the police arrive and take away two youths in handcuffs. These little boys were growing up in a crack den. They didn't even have a bed to sleep on. People were constantly coming and going, doing deals.
The boys' father, Cedric Owens, is in jail after a conviction for burglary - he had been paroled but violated the terms, and was picked up 11 days ago. Upon hearing of the shooting, Mr Owens said he had had a'a cold, sinking feeling, because he knew it was his son,' said Genessee County Sheriff, Robert Pickel.
The boy's mother, Tamara, had taken him and his brother to live in the drug-dealing nest after being evicted from her own home. She knew the house well, having gone there on several occasions to feed her own crack habit. A fortnight ago she moved on, dumping the boys on her brother, James.
But even before then, life had been hard for the children - the warning signs were plentiful. Tamara Owens was convicted in 1992 for abusing the killer's older brother. Tamara was herself involved in drugs for years.
The boy had been singled out at school as needing help, under a programme which is supposed to identify children with special prolems.
He had been assigned a social worker and undergone children's counselling. A memo quoted in the affidavit from the social work department had earmarked the boys as 'living in a dangerous environment' and being 'at imminent risk'.
As it turns out, the risk was to his classmates. The boy had found the weapon under his uncle's pile of blankets, tucked it into his trouser pocket and walked off to school. It was loaded with three bullets.
Police believe that he had shown the gun to his friends before pulling it out of his pocket shortly after 10am as his teacher, Alicia Judd, was lining up the class, single file, to go to the computer lab. He had pointed it at another boy, then suddenly whirled round, honed in on Kayla Rolland and opened fire. After hitting the little girl in the chest, the boy returned to his own desk, carefully put the gun away and reported to the school office.
In a bizarre counterpoint to the authorities' efforts to date, Kayla's father Ricky Rolland has retained Geoffrey Fieger as his attorney - the former candidate for governor of Michigan best known as lawyer for 'Dr Death', Jack Kevorkian, convicted for his role in a string of assisted suicides.
Mr Fieger also represented the parents of two children killed at the Columbine school shooting in Colorado, in pursuit of a civil law verdict of wrongful killing. In this case, Fieger said, he would also be targeting the authorities at the children's school - Theo Buell Elementary - whom he says were acting improperly in failing to safeguard the children's safety.
The school countered yesterday, superintendent Ira Rutherford saying that the 'events were an aberrration, highly, highy unusual'. Parents, however, have protested against lax security at the school.
The boy's father has said from prison that his son was once suspeded from school for fighting, and had stabbed a girl with a pencil - details which the school authorities would not confirm yesterday. Mr Owens had asked: "why do you do this?'. 'I hate them,' the boy had replied.
'I can only say that we were aware there were problems with him,' said superintendent Rutherford of Kayla's killer who now takes his place in the record books as America's youngest ever school killer. |
| Shard | 99 (laksa) |
| Root Hash | 4161074618625082499 |
| Unparsed URL | com,theguardian!www,/world/2000/mar/05/usgunviolence.usa s443 |