“Fifteen or twenty,” Joe says. “And there was a comment on there: ‘And all the other cool kids.’ Who knows what that means? That’s kind of open-ended, right? That’s kind of subjective.”
After Joe’s wife told Joe the news of the plot, via the chat box, Joe sought emergency leave. He says it was hard to leave Iraq.
“I had a sense of responsibility to my comrades,” he says. “You want to come home with your unit.”
Sometimes, during our interview, Joe sounds like a soldier making a report to his commanding officer. He says things like “My son stated to me . . .” and so on. But there are other occasions when he’s doing all he can to stop himself from breaking down. I think he thinks he can conceal his broken heart better than he actually can.
Jack was in custody when Joe returned from Iraq. The charge was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
“I really didn’t know how to react,” he says. “Part of me wanted to grab him and shake him and say, ‘What is your problem?’ And the other part wanted to hug him and say, ‘We’ll protect you from this.’”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I gave him a hug,” Joe says. “I said, ‘I love you,’ and then I said, ‘Sit down.’ I could tell he was kind of scared. I asked him, ‘Why would you do this?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Joe says he doesn’t know, either. It’s not like Jack’s a Goth, he says. Contrary to rumor, he’s no Goth. “He likes to fish,” says Joe. “He likes to go camping. He likes to make up his own jokes. The counselor is trying to figure out why they’d do this. These kids don’t fit the mold. He doesn’t come from a dysfunctional family. I mean, we have our dysfunctions, but he’s not abused. I don’t use drugs. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. I spend time with him. I coached baseball for him when he was younger.”
Joe pauses. “We have rules. He doesn’t dress Goth. He’s not allowed to dress Goth. He’s not allowed to have baggy pants that hang down. He’s not allowed to wear his hat cocked to the side and walk around looking like a little punk. We never let him have violent posters on his walls. He’s not allowed to play violent video games. He’s never been to the mall by himself. He doesn’t have any CDs, like rap CDs, with violent themes. That kind of stuff just doesn’t fit in with our lives.”
As Joe says this, I think about my eight-year-old son, Joel. I always let him wear his baseball cap cocked to one side. He has a Kill Bill poster on his wall. He listens to Eminem.
“My God,” I think in a panic. “If Jack was going to kill everyone in his school without all those violent influences, what the hell is Joel going to grow up to be? Or maybe it was the absence of all those violent influences that led Jack to want to commit mass murder. Or could it have been the town’s Christmas theme? The elf business?”
“I guess that theory is as good as any theory.” Joe shrugs. “The doctors and the counselors have no answers. I have no answers. The boy himself has no answers.”
Then there’s the other possibility: that Joe’s months away fighting in Iraq did something to his son’s psyche.
Joe sighs.
“Maybe,” he says.
North Pole has been hit hard by Iraq. At the end of September, two soldiers in full-dress uniform arrived at the home of one of Joe’s neighbors, Donna Thornton, to tell her that her twenty-four-year-old son, James, had recently died from cardiac arrest in Baghdad.
James had been at the middle school, a year or two ahead of Jessie.
And there have been others. Joseph Love-Fowler—who was twenty-two and in the same year as Jessie—was blown up by a roadside bomb in Balad in April. North Pole has a smallish military base, Fort Wainwright, on its borders. Fort Wainwright has so far lost twenty-six soldiers in Iraq.
Or maybe being thirteen, and being picked on, was reason enough. Everyone behaves irrationally when they reach thirteen. I suppose it is a statistical inevitability that some bullied thirteen-year-olds, somewhere, will be plotting a school shooting. (Although I don’t have much sympathy for the bullying motive. There were six ringleaders, and nine others with knowledge of the plot. That makes fifteen. So they can hardly call themselves bullied outcast loners. Fifteen is more friends than I ever had.)
Joe often wonders what might have happened had the guns reached the school. This is the only reason why the plot failed: The boy who was supposed to bring the guns didn’t turn up.
Apparently, Jack behaved perfectly normally over breakfast that Monday morning. He was joking around as usual, even though he believed that within a few hours he was to commit mass murder.
Joe looks around the cafeteria.
“His sister goes here,” he says. “I said to him, ‘Did you tell her, so she could get out when the shooting started?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘What if your sister heard the shooting, worried about you, ran to see what you were doing, and one of the kids shot her?’ And I could see from the look on his face that those thoughts had never crossed his mind. He said to me, ‘We were just going to shoot the bad kids.’ And I said, ‘Bullets don’t care who they hit or who they kill. They go through people. They tear flesh and they go through. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other side.’ He had not thought about that. It was not in his thought process.”
Then Joe mentions the ill-thought-out escape plan—how the kids were going to start new lives in Anchorage.
“To even think they were going to get out of the school without being killed by the police . . .” he says.
• • •
IN THE END, Jack got off lightly: two years’ probation, a five-thousand-word essay on the effects of school shootings across America, a hundred hours of community service, some anger-management therapy.
Joe says he’s pleased and relieved nobody has thrown a brick through their window.
“I don’t want people taking the law into their own hands,” he says, “because I have an obligation to protect my son and the rest of my family. So if they push, I’m going to have to push back. And if that happens, it’s not going to be pretty.”
But he’s sending his son back to school next year: “I told him, ‘You have to face this. You have to face the kids on that list.’”
Joe takes his son out running each morning. Back in April, Jack could barely run half a mile. Now he’s running a mile and a half.
Joe looks proud when he tells me this.
There’s a school for excluded children on the edge of North Pole. The kids who—for whatever reason—don’t fit into the middle school end up studying here. It’s quite possible that some of the plotters will join the school next April, when their year’s expulsion from the public school system is up. It seems a great place: small, bright, open-plan classrooms and lovely teachers, like Suze, who shows me around. Suze is another rare liberal in a town full of staunch Republicans. I notice that this is one of the very few buildings in town that hasn’t any Christmas decorations whatsoever.
“We’re a respite from Christmas, I guess,” Suze explains. “Our kids are all Christmassed out.”
Then I ask Suze a question I’ve been asking everyone this week. “Do you happen to know,” I ask, “where Kris Kringle is?”
• • •
BEFORE I ARRIVED IN TOWN, I kept hearing stories of an amazing North Pole resident who looks just like Santa and has changed his name by deed poll to Kris Kringle. I heard he was in permanent residence as the in-house Santa at the local Santa Claus House gift shop. But when I visited the place on Monday, I saw that his chair was empty. Since then, I’ve been asking everyone: Where is Kris Kringle?
Jeff Jacobson said he thought Kris Kringle had had some recent falling-out with Santa Claus House—“I think he was demanding more hot chocolate and cookies,” he said—and he is now a kind of roving Santa around town, surprising children in diners and so on with cries of “Ho! Ho! Ho!”