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 Nathaniel Brazill's Last Day of School Rolling Stone 852 - October 26, 2000 AS THE SUN ROSE out of the blue-green Atlantic on a muggy spring morning, Nathaniel Brazill woke up in love. He was thirteen years old, a seventh grader at Lake Worth Community Middle School in Lake Worth, Florida, and today - Friday, May 26th - was his last day of class before summer vacation. But as he rolled around in his little metal-frame bed, half-awake eyes staring up at the sheet rock ceiling, he was not thinking about all the fun he'd have at the video arcade, or the trip his family was planning to Disney World - he was thinking about Dinora. She was a classmate of his at Lake Worth Middle, a bubbly Honduran girl with braces and a ponytail. He had taped her picture on his computer monitor, scribbled silly poetry about her in his notebook and took Spanish lessons so he could talk to her in her native language. He even saved the folded-up notes she passed to him in class. He saw meaning and encouragement in the way she signed her name, with the little heart above the "i." The week before, on the way back from a class trip to Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, he and Dinora had kissed. Or at least that's what he says. She says no, he tried to kiss her, but she gently pushed him away. Nate says they kissed another time, too, but Dinora says she can't remember for sure. When Nate speaks of those kisses, his brown eyes go watery. Thirteen is a weird age - the tipping point between childhood and adolescence, a time of obsessions and fantasies, of experimentation and change. You could see the precarious balance between boy and man in Nate himself, a tall, gangly kid with the big hands and long arms of a man but the face of a child: no facial hair, curious brown eyes that reflected none of the brutality of the hard world he grew up in. He has broad shoulders and big feet, but still walks with a childlike awkwardness, and often wore his mother's gold hoop in his pierced left ear. He was a good student at school - bright, funny, a bit of a class clown. There was still lots of kid stuff in his bedroom: The Cat in the Hat in his closet, his VTech Power Pad Plus - a toy computer that his mother bought him - his kiddie fire truck. But he also had Tracy Chapman and Gerald Levert CDs, movies like Air Force One and Enemy of the State piled on top of his TV, a brand new Gateway desktop computer and a gun he kept hidden in his dresser. It was a little nickel-plated .25 Raven - so light it feels like a squirt gun - and, like Nate himself, looked too innocent to be dangerous. At about seven o'clock, Nate tumbled out of bed, brushed his teeth, tried to get ready for the day. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was his mother, Polly, calling from the retirement home where she worked as a nutrition specialist, making sure he was out of bed. He told her he was fine and that he'd make it to the bus stop on time. "You be good today," Polly said. "I will," he promised. Lake Worth is a rough-edged little town on Florida's Gold Coast, just a few miles south of the mansions and Bentleys of Palm Beach. If you look past the prostitutes who flag down cars on Lake Worth Avenue on Saturday nights, and the sunburned vagrants wandering down Dixie Highway, and the fact that the lagoon that surrounds the town is so polluted that, a few years ago, the mayor nearly died from an unexplained illness he contracted after going for a swim, you can see why the slogan of the town, cooked up by the local redevelopment agency, is "Old Florida Charm, New Florida Style." Lake Worth's once-deserted main street is lined with antique shops, as well as funky bars and seafood restaurants. Palm trees have been replanted, new sidewalk laid and quaint streetlights installed. But the soul of Lake Worth remains hot and harsh, a landscape of aging strip malls, immigrants and low-wage jobs. Nate's house is in the part of town known as Lake Osborne. It's been a mostly black community as long as anyone can remember - in the 1950s, in fact, a concrete wall was erected to separate it from the rest of the town (the wall still stands, although it's now decorated with flowers and drawings of Martin Luther King Jr.). It feels like the Old South, with pit bulls chained to car bumpers, and old black men sitting under palm trees, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Nate's family lives in the front of a triplex at the south end of H Street. Inside, the apartment is cluttered but homey. The front room is framed by a couple of couches and a big TV and stereo; on the wall are pictures of Nate when he was a small boy, and of him holding his two-year-old sister, Ebony. In the kitchen, a print of the Last Supper hangs above the kitchen table; on the countertops sit coffee mugs decorated with saints. Polly; Nate's stepfather, Marshall; and Ebony share one bedroom - Nate has the other. The Florida State Railroad passes a few yards from his window, which rattles when loads of limestone pass by. The Brazill family has deep roots in the area: Nate's paternal grandfather helped build the New Missionary Baptist Church, the spiritual center of Lake Worth's black community, and still lives across the street from it. Nate's father grew up there, his mother a few blocks over. Although their families knew each other very well, Nate Sr., who was twenty-nine when his son was born, and Polly, who was twenty-one, never married. "We were just friends," says Nate Sr., sitting on a couch in his father's house. "And then all of a sudden, along comes little Nate." Nate Sr. is a friendly, easygoing man who works as a letter carrier in Daytona Beach, a three-hour drive north from Lake Worth. His eyes tear up when he talks about his son - about how he saw his boy every other weekend when Nate was little, how he tried to keep in touch with him, but life got in the way. He moved to Daytona Beach when Nate was eight; he now has three other kids by two other women. Nate continued to visit his fa-ther, but Nate Sr. admits, "We were not as close as I would have liked to have been." In the Lake Osborne community, absentee fathers are not unusual, and Polly did her best to make do on her own. She's a big, jolly woman with a bright voice and a proud, determinedly optimistic manner. When she was nine, her family moved to Lake Worth from South Car-olina, where her ancestors had been slaves in the 1800's. Today, she works full time at the retirement home, earning $22,500 a year. "I want Nate to grow up to be something," she says now, sitting on the couch in her apartment, photographs of her son all around her. She always stressed the importance of schoolwork to Nate: "Being a black kid in this world, you got to have education," she'd tell him. He was a shy, asthmatic child but a quick learner - "My little sponge," she says. He knew how to read long before other kids his age, and was using the computer at the Osborne Day Care Center by the time he was four. She had her worries about raising Nate in a place like Lake Worth. What she feared most was "the drug boys," and the flashy cars they drove, and how they might tempt her son into a life of easy money and cheap thrills. She didn't worry so much about guns. She knew that Nate was interested in them, but she thought it was just part of his general interest in the military. Ever since they saw Air Force One at the local theater, Nate was obsessed with joining the Secret Service when he grew up. "He used to walk around the house mimicking Harrison Ford, saying, 'Get off my plane!'" Polly recalls. She had no idea that, after she bought Nate a computer for Christmas last year, he spent hours trolling gun Web sites, comparing prices and specifications on semiautomatic rifles and handguns. Nate says he was looking at these sites simply as a way to prepare for his future career in the Secret Service. He certainly knew his mother's rules: "If I see a gun in my house," Polly would say, "all hell breaks loose, I guarantee you." Of all the men in Polly's life, Nate was the only one with a bright future, not to mention a peaceful disposition. Her first husband, Wainford Whitefield, a Jamaican-born construction worker, whom she married in 1992, when Nate was five, was a particularly rough character. One night, Polly called the police from a pay phone, telling the dispatcher that Whitefield had threatened her with a knife. When police arrived, he was gone, but her face was swollen from where he'd punched her. Another night, Whitefield pushed her onto the kitchen floor and hit her again. She finally received a restraining order against him, forbidding him to come in or near the house, and eventually divorced him in 1997. Polly denies that Whitefield ever hit Nate, or that he was even home when these battles occurred. Whatever happened, it's clear that Nate spent his formative years in an unstable, violence prone household. According to Mike Males, a criminologist and author of Kids and Guns: How Politicians, Experts, and the Media Fabricate Fear of Youth, the two biggest predictors of which kids will commit violent crimes are poverty and a history of living with domestic abuse. After she split with Whitefield, Polly's troubles with men continued. Last January, after an argument with her second husband, Marshall Powell, Polly had to call the police to stand by while he moved his personal belongings out of the house. They remained separated for about three months. Then, a few weeks before the murder, Marshall, who is a sanitation worker, moved back in. According to Polly, Marshall's relationship with Nate was "pretty good. One afternoon, while I was talking with Polly in their apartment, Marshall walked in unexpectedly. He is a hard, muscular man in his late thirties. I tried to ask him about Nate, but he just glared at me, shook his head and disappeared into Nate's bedroom. I heard an odd clanking sound coming from within. "He's lifting weights," Polly explained. At about 8:15 a.m. that Friday morning, his last day of school, Nate walked north on H Street, which runs between the railroad tracks and the Dixie Highway, a two-lane road that traverses the length of Florida. He walked by his friend Kervin's house and his friend Tiffany's house, his eyes gliding past the oily back lots of auto repair shops, the defeated-looking Haitian women sweeping the stoops in front of their tiny apartments, the stray dogs running across the open field behind the power station. Nate knew that today was probably the last time he was going to see Dinora for three months. She is the youngest of four daughters in a strict family -they do not allow boys to visit, call or even send notes. Nate knew that, if he was lucky, the only time he'd get to see her over the summer was if her parents let her go to a movie or the roller rink, and he "accidentally" ran into her there. He didn't know how he was go-ing to survive the summer without her. At the end of H Street, he walked into Walgreens and bought some inex-pensive flowers and a Hallmark card. It read, JUST FOR FUN, I MADE A LIST OF THE TOP HUNDRED THINGS I'D LIKE TO DO WITH YOU. And inside: 1. KISS AND HUG AND STUFF. 2. REPEAT 99 TIMES. On the bus to school that morning, Nate opened the card, and wrote this: Hey Dinora, This school year with you has been the best school year of my life. The letter I gave to Shacoby [a friend] then took back and made you get mad, the last part of it read, "I love Dinora. She is the sun the rain and the soil that flowers my soil [sic], I love her more than life itself." That is all true. I love you, and I think I am going to lose my mind. I love you, take care. Love, Nate As usual, Barry Grunow was in a rush that morning. He pulled on his size thirteen Nikes, a pair of black jeans and a T-shirt, and headed out the door. His wife, Pam, who was still half-asleep in bed with their nine-month-old daughter, Lee-Anne, hardly remembers him leaving. She remembers hearing Barry and their five-year-old son, Sam, talking in the other room, and Barry giving him his allowance, saying, "Here's your dollar, Sam." What she cannot remember, no matter how hard she tries, is whether he kissed her goodbye or not. That morning, Barry drove to school in his beat-up Mercury Cougar. It was a real junker - stereo ripped out of the dash, black paint faded by the hot Flori-da sun - but Barry was proud of it. He didn't care about fancy cars, expensive wine, luxury living. He cared about his family, his students, basketball, Bob Dylan and Jethro Tull - roughly in that order. He was thirty-five, six-five, 160 pounds, lean and fast and strong. He'd been born in Monroe, Michigan, the youngest of five kids. When he was about nine, his father, who worked as a cable splicer for the phone company, moved the family to Palm Beach County. That was fine with Barry, mostly because the sunny weather meant he could play basketball outside all year. He and his older brother Kurt played in a league up in Jupiter, a half-hour north. Often, when Barry had a kid in class who was having trouble at home or in school, he'd bring the student with him up to the game, even let him play on his adult team if he knew how to handle a ball. "Barry loved this house, and he loved this town," Pam says. "I don't think he ever imagined living anywhere else." He was a passionate gardener, and loved to sit on a secluded bench in his backyard, surrounded by native Florida flowers and trees he'd planted, and watch for hawks circling in the blue sky above. When visitors remarked on what a sad little town Lake Worth seemed to be - "Lake Worthless," some people called it - Barry would say, "You'll see, this will be a nice place someday." Lake Worth Community Middle School was about three miles from his house, out at the edge of a warehouse district. The school draws 1,500 kids from all over the area; students are a mix of thirty-six percent black, thirty-four percent Latino, twenty-seven per-cent white. It has all the usual problems of a public school in a working-class community: fights, uninvolved parents, the occasional knife in a backpack. The school had fifty-one incidents of criminal behavior reported in 1999, nearly twice as many as the nationwide aver-age of thirty-two. Last year, as part of a statewide initiative to spend an extra $20 million to make schools safer, Lake Worth Middle installed a new video system with sixteen security cameras aimed inside and outside the school. In Palm Beach County, a total of eight guns were found on elementary, middle and high school campuses last year - none at Lake Worth Middle. In one incident, however, one student threatened to kill another and left a 9mm casing near his desk. And the year before, an unloaded .38 Ruger was found in a fourteen-year-old student's locker. In both cases, school administrators took swift action: "We have a Zero-tolerance policy here about weapons of any kind, and the students know it," says Principal Bob Hatcher. None of this seemed to bother Barry. He didn't see kids as temporary psy-chopaths, or monsters-in-waiting, but as interesting and vulnerable human be-ings. He wanted his students to learn, but he also wanted them to have fun. When they studied Greek mythology, he had his students dress up as their favorite characters and put on skits. He kept boxes of old paperbacks on a shelf in the back of the classroom and en-couraged kids to take them home. He played old Bob Dylan and Jethro Tull albums on the boombox before and after class. He gave out sodas on Fridays. He hated giving tests as much as they hated taking them - so on test days, he sometimes wore a tie, which he hated. His students loved him. "Mr. Grunow," says Dinora, "was the coolest." That morning, Nate found Dinora in the hall before first period began. He gave her the flowers, the card. He was shy about it but, at the same time, proud of his assertiveness. She smiled, said thanks, gave him a hug. Nice, polite... but a little distant. In fact, she denies he was her boyfriend at all. "I just thought he was funny," she says now. She cer-tainly was not in love. "I don't think it's possible for a seventh grader to be in love," she says, quite maturely. A few months earlier, she had hung around with a different seventh-grade boy. That made Nate mad. So mad, in fact, that he threatened to commit suicide. His method, hilariously, was to swallow packs of gum. He'd chew big, huge wads of it, then swallow, then chew some more. It was funny and strange at the same time. That was typical Nate, says Dinora, who asked him to please stop. That morning, Dinora had the feeling Nate was taking things a little too seriously. So summer was coming - what was the big deal? If she didn't see him again until next fall, she'd live. The bell rang; they headed off to class, which was language arts with Mr. Grunow. Mr. Grunow was one of Nate's favorite teachers. He liked the way Mr. Grunow joked around in class, the way he was always teasing everyone. Nate was a good student with a perfect atten-dance record - more bookworm than jock - but he was not a wimp. "There are some tough kids here at Lake Worth, but no one wanted to mess with Nate," says Brett Packard, who taught social studies in the room next to Barry's. "They respected him in a quiet way." So did many of the teachers: A few days earlier, Barry had singled Nate out to be a peer mediator in the fall. Still, it would have been clear to anyone who paid close attention to Nate's behavior that he was going through a stressful time. Midway through the semester, his grades were all As and Bs; by the end of the year, his grade in Mr. Grunow's class had slipped to an F. There were also odd flashes of anger that didn't square with Nate's usual class-clown character. A few months earlier, for example, during Mr. Packard's geography class, Nate and another student got into an argument about a Fruitopia Nate was drinking. As punishment, Packard took the drink away from him. Nate was furious. "Give me back my drink," Nate demanded. When Packard refused, Nate said it again in a louder, more threatening voice. "I suddenly saw that Nate had a lot of anger in him," Packard recalls. Nate was steamed about the incident for weeks, Packard says. All that was forgotten now - or so it seemed. That morning, Grunow showed Ever After, a Cinderella remake starring Drew Barrymore, to his morning class. Nate hung out in the back of the class with Dinora, his friend Kervin and a couple of other kids. "He seemed totally normal to me," says Dinora. They signed yearbooks, talked about their summer plans, snapped pictures. No tension, no conflicts, no sharp words. In fact, when class was over, Nate asked Mr. Grunow to pose out on the lawn with a couple of other teachers for a photograph. Barry happily obliged. Charlie Fowler,who taught math to remedial students at Lake Worth Middle, felt uneasy all morning. The last day of school always arrives with a sense of foreboding for faculty - students know that grades are in; nobody can punish them in any way that counts. Earlier that year, while teaching in Grunow's classroom, Fowler had asked a girl to quit talking. She refused; he threatened her with detention. She glared at him and said, "That's what gets teachers capped on the last day of school." That unnerved him, but he tried to put it out of his mind. Threats like that, however, are one reason backpacks are banned at Lake Worth Middle during the final two weeks of the school year - you never know what some kid is going to try to bring to class during those last few days. Today, everything seemed to be going smoothly, prompting the then-assistant principal, Bob Hatcher, to announce to Fowler and others at lunch, "I can't believe how calm it is." That soon changed. Kevin Hinds, a guidance counselor at the school, was walking down the hall after lunch, when he spotted a bunch of students milling about. In the midst of this, he saw two kids - Nate and another seventh-grader, Michele Cordovez - throwing water balloons. Hinds tracked them down and summoned them to his office. Nate was not happy about this. A water-balloon fight seemed like inno-cent enough fun. Hell, he even knew a teacher who had brought some balloons to class to give to the kids, and everyone knew that there was a big water-balloon fight planned for after school. It didn't seem fair that he was singled out and others weren't. Hinds consulted with Bob Hatcher, who decided to suspend Nate and Cor-dovez for the rest of the day. Normally, Nate and Cordovez might have just been written up, but since it was the last day of school, and Hatcher was a little nervous about small incidents flaring up into bigger trouble, he thought it'd be better to just send them home. Before Hinds released Nate, he called Polly at work, asking her if she wanted to pick Nate up, or if he was free to walk home. Polly decided, well, if he got himself into trouble, let him walk home. Hinds wrote up suspension slips, then walked Nate and Cordovez out to the parking lot, telling them that they had to leave campus and not come back. Nate was obviously upset, but not so much that Hinds became alarmed. "There's a lot of kids who'd be cursing and screaming," Hinds later told police. "But they didn't do anything that would have gotten me suspicious." As he left school, Nate told Cordovez that he had a gun at home that his mother didn't know about, and that he was going to bring it to school and shoot Mr. Hinds. Cordovez didn't think he was serious about the gun; she "kinda laughed," but Nate kept saying he was going to shoot someone. She said, "You wouldn't do that, would you, Nate?" and he said, "Watch, I'm gonna be all over the news." Two days earlier, Nate had joked about a "hit list" with some of his friends. They all dismissed it as trash talk, just Nate being funny. According to a recent FBI report on school shootings, this kind of boasting is called "leakage," and is one of the most common signals of an impending violent act. "Even more than adults, kids tend to telegraph their actions ahead of time," says agent Mary Ellen O'Toole, the author of the report. Cordovez didn't give Nate's threats a second thought. A few blocks from the school, she and Nate went their separate ways. She gave him a hug and said, "Have a good summer." Nate said, "I love you," and she said, "I love you too," and then she headed home. Nate hitched a ride part of the way home from a pizza delivery man, bought a soda, then walked the final couple of blocks in the hot afternoon sun. Polly was usually home by 2P.M.; but she was working late that day, and wouldn't be home until four, and Nate didn't have a key. So he walked to his seventy-four-year-old grandmother's house about ten blocks away. When he got there, she noticed he was acting "puffy." "Nate, what's wrong with you?" she asked. "Nothin', Grandma. You got the house key?" He said he wanted her to go to school and talk to the counselor about the suspension, but her car was broken, so she couldn't. It didn't occur to him to ask her to call. To Nate, life was just getting bleaker by the minute. And then there was Dinora. How was he going to say goodbye to her if he couldn't go back to school? What was she going to think when she found out he was suspended for throwing water balloons? And what about his career: How could he ever get into college and become a Secret Service agent with this blemish on his record? Nate decided to go see if his aunt could help. She worked at a nursing home about a dozen blocks away. On the way, he ran into an older kid named Brandon Spann, who lived nearby. Spann is big, barrel-chested and very street. According to Spann, Nate asked him if he had a gun on him. When Spann said he didn't, Nate asked him if he had one at home. Again, Spann said no. When he asked Nate why, Nate said he was gonna "fuck up the teachers at school." Nate didn't look mad to Spann - in fact, Spann just thought he was playing around. Nate kept walking, and Spann thought nothing more of it. When Nate got to the nursing home where his aunt worked, she was not there. This was not cool. The sun beat down on him, his anger rising. He figured his mother had to be home by now, so he went back to the house. When he arrived, she still wasn't home. He let himself in, turned on the TV, might have just sat there and vegged out for a while, but as soon as he hit the clicker, the TV flickered on and off. . . something was wrong with it. That was it. He went into his bedroom and got his gun, shoved it in his right front pants pocket and took off on his bike. He pedaled over to his aunt's house, hoping she would come with him to talk to Mr. Hinds and put this whole mess straight. Again, no one was home. He knocked on the window, waited for ten minutes. No one showed up. Finally, tired of waiting for an adult to help him, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He jumped back on his bike and pedaled over to school in the afternoon heat. The unarticulated rage that was rising in Nate - the kind of rage that leads to sudden violence - has been of increasing interest to researchers. Some of the most interesting work has been done by Dr. Bruce Perry, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Taking a cue from the psycholog-ical after-effects of combat observed in Vietnam veterans, Perry has explored how living in a violent and stressful world literally alters the chemistry of a child's brain. Kids who have been exposed to a lot of domestic violence, Perry has found, grow up with overdeveloped "fight or flight" circuitry, predisposing them to more impulsive, reactive emotions. "These kids' fear-response systems are so hyperaroused that the rational part of their brains are functionally impaired," says Perry. "All it takes is a minor event, sometimes even just direct eye contact, to set them off." Nate had found the gun a few days earlier when he was staying with Elmore McCray, his godmother's father, in nearby Boynton Beach, while his mother was away for the weekend. One afternoon, he was digging around McCray's bedroom looking for an old phone - he wanted to use it to play a joke on his godmother - when he pulled open a bureau drawer and discovered a Santa Claus cookie tin. Curious, he opened it, and found a gun. It was five inches long, with a stubby barrel, made by a firearms company called Raven Arms, one of five Ring of Fire companies in the Los Ange-les area that specialized in manufacturing inexpensive handguns (Raven Arms went out of business in 1991, only to rise again as Phoenix Arms). The Raven consistently ranks among the top three guns confiscated by police departments around the country in connection with crimes. It is particularly popular with kids, because it's cheap and easy to con-ceal. "These guns are too inaccurate and badly made to be good for anything but shooting another human being at extremely close range," says Nancy Hwa, a spokesperson for Handgun Control Inc., which has long pushed for a ban on Raven-type junk guns. When Nate found the Raven, he reacted like many thirteen-year-olds would have: He grabbed it. "It was kinda cool," he says. Nate didn't know much about how to use a gun - he'd shot a .22 rifle at some tree stumps a few times up in South Carolina, but that was it. "At thirteen, kids are interested in experimentation, in doing things that make them symbolically an adult," explains Dr. Alvin Poussaint, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Guns are associated with adulthood. They want to know what a gun feels like - is it a toy, or is it not a toy?" Nate loaded it like he'd seen them do on cop shows. Then he clicked on the safety, stashed it in his clothes bag. When his mother brought him home the next day, he immediately hid it in his bureau drawer. Of course, it didn't stay in his drawer for long. The next day, he came home after school, slipped it in his pocket and showed his friend Kervin, who lived down the street. Kervin told Tiffany, another seventh-grader who was hanging out with them that afternoon. Nate showed her the butt of the gun, taking care not to remove it from his pocket. "Does your mom know you got it?" Tiffany asked. "No." "Where do you keep it?" "In my bedroom." "Would you kill somebody, Nate?" "Not unless I had to," he told her. That afternoon, Barry Grunow screened a movie called Killing Mr. Griffin to his last class. It was a 1997 made-for-TV movie, based on a classic juvenile potboiler by Lois Duncan about a group of students who acci-dentally kill their English teacher, then try to cover up the crime. The film ended about twenty minutes be-fore class was over. While they waited for the final bell to ring, Barry and his students signed yearbooks and talked about their summer plans and cranked music on the boombox. Then, at the door, Barry saw an unexpected face: Nate Brazill. He had no idea that Nate had been suspended, that there was any trouble whatsoever. He presumed Nate had somehow been re-leased early and had come to discuss something with him. This is how Nate remembers the conversation: "I walked up to the door, and Mr. Grunow says, 'Hey, Nate.' "I say, 'I want to see Dinora and Vonae.' "He says, 'Come on in.' "I say, I'd like to see them in private, here in the hallway, please.' "He says, 'I can't let you do that.' At that moment, Nate's eyes connect-ed with Dinora's. She was standing right next to Barry. She was watching Nate. Then, Nate says, "Mr. Grunow pushed me away from the door." Nate says it was a gentle push, a friendly push. The push triggered something in the seventh grader, something that sent Nate into a kind of hyperemotional state. "What we can expect children to have access to during these states of arousal," says Dr. Perry, "is their 'catalog' of previous experiences - many of which are characterized by unpredictability, threat, pain, assault. They will react accordingly." In other words, when Barry pushed him, Nate may have had a flashback to another man pushing him or his mother, and the explosive anger he felt at that previous incident may have come rushing back. At that moment, Nate pulled the gun out, in full view of Dinora, her friend Vonae and a half dozen other students, and the video camera at the end of the hall. Nate says he was shaking, that he was afraid he was going to drop it. He cocked the pistol. Barry said, "Nate, put the gun away," maybe thinking the gun - it was so small, so innocent-looking -was just a toy. They were eye to eye, five feet apart, when Nate pulled the trigger. The bullet struck Barry just to the right of the bridge of his nose, exploded into his brain and did not exit. Barry crumpled to the floor. There was a long moment of silence, then several students heard Nate say, "Oh, shit." He stood there, staring at Grunow's convulsing body, seeming to take stock of what he had done. Then he ran. In the next classroom, Brett Packard heard a "pop." He looked at his students, many of whom were suddenly silent and scared-looking. They knew the sound of gunfire, even if he didn't. Packard said, "Hang on; let me see what that was." He poked his head out the door and saw Barry lying on the floor, his feet propping open the door to his classroom. His immediate reaction was that this was some kind of end-of-the-school-year prank. He stepped into the hallway and thought, "Hey, Barry, come on." As he moved closer, he saw a small pool of blood around Barry's head, but no marks on his face. He expected Barry to jump up at him at any moment. With kids gathered around in a moment of eerie calm, he knelt down beside his friend. Barry was unconscious, his heart beating wildly, a slight smile on his face. Packard put his handkerchief over Barry's mouth and nose, thinking it would somehow staunch the bleeding, and started screaming for someone to call 911. Students began fleeing out the back doors of the class-room, shrieking hysterically. As he waited for help to arrive, Packard watched blood pour out of Barry's nose and mouth, pooling around them. Then his friend's face turned as blue as the schoolroom floor. Emergency-service crews were there within minutes, but it was too late. John James, a math teacher, was just coming out of his classroom to see what had happened as Nate took off down the hall. Nate pointed the gun at him, said "Don't mess with me, Mr. James," and then dashed off through an open classroom, out the back door, through the rear parking lot and over a fence into someone's backyard. A few hours later, he would tell the police that he had planned to jump into a nearby pond and drown himself. He hopped a few more fences, finally making it to the railroad tracks. He ran along them for about a quarter mile, then crossed under an I-95 overpass onto a deserted street. Nate saw a police car racing toward him. Instead of run-ning away from it, he stepped out into the middle of the street, fell to his knees, and put his hands on top of his head. Officer Michael Mahoney stopped the car. He frequently walked a foot beat in Nate's neighborhood, and rec-ognized him immediately. "Nate, what are you doing?" "Did you hear about the shooting?" Nate asked. "Yeah, I'm on my way - "It was me; I did it." Mahoney was incredulous. He couldn't imagine Nate shooting any-one. He cautiously approached, grabbed Nate's wrists. Where's the gun?" "In my pocket," Nate said. Officer Mahoney fished it out, walked Nate over to the patrol car. "What would make you do such a stupid thing, Nate?" "I don't know," Nate said. As he'd say to another police officer a few minutes later, 'I just snapped." Pam sat on the couch in the TV room, mending clothes. She'd just put Sam down for his afternoon nap. "All of a sudden, I felt extremely tired," she recalls. She walked into the bedroom to lie down. Her head was buzzing. She lay there, overwhelmed with anxiety, and couldn't sleep. At some point, the phone rang. It was her father. "Have you heard the news?" He told her a teacher had been shot at Lake Worth Middle, but they hadn't released the name yet. "It's not Barry," she reassured him. She was certain of it. When Nate pulled the trigger, Palm Beach County State Attorney Bar-ry Krischer was in his office on the second floor of the criminal-justice building. It's a surprisingly small office, with civic awards on the wall, and a view fac-ing the revitalized downtown. Krischer is a compact, tough man; he looks like a cop, and talks fast and forcefully, with a certain moral fervor. He's fifty-seven, suntanned, with glasses and silvery hair that's exceedingly well-groomed. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family near Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, and remains committed to his faith, suspending all work and travel from sun-down on Friday to sundown on Saturday. His wife is a schoolteacher, and he has two grown children - one's in law school, the other's a computer engineer. He's a lifelong Democrat - or what passes for a Democrat in this region: tough on crime, pro-death penalty, unwilling to speak out in support of gun control beyond a modest endorsement of trigger locks. In style, he is a crusader, not a thinker; a man who masks his crafty political instincts in the guise of a zealot. Despite the high-profile nature of the killing, from Krischer's point of view it was, as he would later say, "a no-brainer." Within forty-eight hours, Krischer had decided that he was going to ask the grand jury to indict the thirteen-year old as an adult and charge him with first-degree murder - a charge that carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole (federal law prohibits a prosecutor from seeking the death penalty for juveniles under sixteen). According to Krischer, the Florida law left him with little option: Under the state statutes, if he charged Nate as a juvenile, Krischer claims, the most Nate could get is thirty-six months in a juvenile detention center. "That is a sentence that is morally inappropriate for the crime Nathaniel Brazill committed," Krischer says. It was the hysteria over juvenile crime in America in the mid-Nineties that brought prosecutors like Krischer to power. During his first run for state at-torney in 1992, Krischer promised to bring seasoned prosecutors into the juvenile division and crack down on teenage crime. In doing so, Krischer was echoing the rhetoric of the day. In the early 1990s, the crack epidemic, along with projec-tions about the rising juvenile population in America, led high-profile criminolo-gists like Princeton professor John Dilulio to predict a "swelling legion of godless, valueless, fatherless kids" - he called them "superpredators" - who would soon drive crime in America to an all-time high. Random murders, such as the killing of a British tourist at a rest stop near Tallahassee by a teenager, seemed to constitute a grave threat to Florida's $31 billion tourist industry. In 1994, the state legislature passed the Juvenile Justice Act, essentially giving prosecutors, not judges, the right to make de-cisions about whether to indict a kid as a juvenile or as an adult. The Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, which had always handled juvenile crime, was abolished, and the tougher-sounding Department of Juvenile Justice created. Today, Florida prosecutes al-most as many kids in adult courts as ev-ery other state in the country combined. "As a state, we have given up on trying to rehabilitate kids," says Miami-Dade Assistant Public Defender Stephen Harper. "The impulse is to just throw them in jail and forget about them." As it turned out, the crime wave of superpredators never materialized. Nationwide violent crime has plummeted to the lowest level since the Justice De-partment's Bureau of Justice Statistics started keeping records twenty-seven years ago. And if cracking down on kids really had a big impact on crime, you'd think the state of Florida would be one of the safest places in the country. In fact, it leads the nation in juve-nile violent crime, with a rate seventy-two percent higher than the U.S. average. Even more telling, the state's violent crime rate for juveniles is also going in the opposite direction from the rest of America; 14,103 Florida youths were arrested for violent felonies in 1998-99, up from 9,107 in 1990-91. To explain this, tough-on-crime Florida Republicans like Rep. Bill McCollum argue that Florida, tough as it is on kids, isn't tough enough. But critics say that cracking down on kids has the opposite effect - that it is creating criminals. One respected and often-cited study of recidivism in Florida found that thirty percent of the teenagers pros-ecuted as adults were rearrested within two years; for those who had gone through the juvenile courts, the rate was just nineteen percent. The kids who were prosecuted as adults were also more likely to be arrested for more serious offenses. Opponents of adult sen-tencing for juveniles argue that it's not even clear that the death penalty works as a deterrent - much less the threat of longer prison sentences - and that these policies are driven by politicians pan-dering to the fears of older voters, and by a desire for revenge. "The adult sentencing of juveniles has nothing to do with advice from psychologists," says Harvard's Poussaint. They are driven by public rage at these crimes. Kids who are prosecuted as adults also face the possibility of being imprisoned with adults - currently, more than 100 juveniles are serving time in Florida's adult prisons. If Nate is convicted of first-degree murder, it's very possible that he will end up in an adult prison. According to the Justice Policy Institute in Washing-ton, D.C., children in adult prisons are five times more likely to be raped than adults and fifty percent more likely to be attacked. In a recent story in the Miami Herald, Tronneal Mangum, who committed murder at age fourteen and was personally prosecuted by Krischer, described what it was like sharing a cell with a fellow inmate whom he described as "a large, strong man ... he could overpower me." Was he ever raped or attacked? "Let's just say I did what he told me," Mangum told the Herald. On a jungle-hot afternoon in August, Pam Grunow is nursing eleven-month-old Lee-Anne. In the other room, Sam is watching the Discovery Channel. The house is small, quiet; ceiling fans spinning. On an end table beside the sofa is a copy of How to Go On Living After Someone You Love Dies. Nearby is a picture of Barry taken just two days be-fore he was murdered. Two thousand mourners attended Barry's funeral services, and every day Pam gets letters from people expressing their condolences. She says when Sam is a little older, they will scatter his dad's ashes to-gether at Barry's favorite spots. Even though Barry has been gone almost three months, Pam and Sam still talk to him every morning. They tell him about their day, ask his advice on various household matters. Sometimes, Pam believes he answers by sending signs. Sam has just started kindergarten, and takes one of his fa-ther's T-shirts to school with him every day in a secret compartment in his backpack. Though they are not church-goers, Sam has asked his mother why Jesus Christ can return from the dead but his daddy cannot. Whenever Pam talks about the fact that by the time Sam is a teenager he will have little or no memory of his father, she cries. "No one can understand the hole this tragedy has torn in this family," says Barry's brother Kurt, whose face is still a mask of shock and pain three months later. "I am not vengeful, I'm really not," Pam says. She talks about some of the good things she hopes will come from her husband's death, including in-creased school security, attentive parenting and more responsible gun ownership. But when it comes to justice for Nate, she's at a loss. You can feel the scales balancing within her - on one side, her deep and understandable desire for Nate to be punished severely, on the other, her understanding that the per-son who killed her husband is still a thirteen-year-old boy. "I do not want him" - she cannot bring herself to say his name - "out there where he can hurt other people. I do not have sympathy for him. He chose evil. I hope he knows that, and has to live with it every day for the rest of his life." Darrell Evans, a Palm Beach County paramedic and firefighter, who was best friends with Barry since they were both ten years old, has less balanced feelings. "Originally, I just wanted him dead," Evans says, his voice breaking. "Now I realize that was a pretty selfish response. I want Nate to be jailed, to be abused, to be in tears, until Barry's daughter Lee-Anne grows up and says he can get out. And when he gets out, I will kill him with my bare hands." To visit Nate in the Palm Beach County jail, you have to cross a high pedestrian walkway over a canal. The walkway is fenced with chain link and barbed wire. Then you enter a set of glass doors, pass through a metal detec-tor and enter another set of glass doors, where you must show ID and sign in with a corrections officer, who looks up your name in an online database. Then, presuming you have no outstanding warrants or felony arrests, he gives you a visitor's pass and buzzes you through another thicker, more secure set of glass-and-steel doors. You show your pass to another guard, this one sealed off in a high-security control booth. He buzzes you through yet another set of doors, and finally you reach the eleva-tors. On the twelfth floor, there is still another guard, and another set of metal and Plexiglas doors, and then finally you enter a kind of central lobby area. Everything is very clean and hard - concrete floors, stainless-steel tables, reinforced Plexiglas windows. To the left there is a small recreation area, with a basketball hoop and half-court; to the right is another guard station that is completely sealed in heavy glass. In-side, it looks like the flight deck of a 747, with lots of lights and knobs and levers. There are fifty-five kids in two cell blocks on this floor. All of them are awaiting trial on violent crimes: Besides Nate, there are two other juvenile killers. I pass one visitor's room, and notice two ridiculously beautiful wom-en sitting very close to a young white kid in red prison overalls. Robert Udell, Nate's attorney, rolls his eyes. We enter a small room next to the guard station with a steel table bolted to the floor. The chairs are plastic; one wall is glass, so the guard can see in. There is noth-ing else in the room. Nate enters. He is wearing red cover-alls with a gray sweatshirt underneath, and red rubber flip-flops. He is taller than I expected, and his shoulders are broader - this is not a fragile little child. But his face is smooth, his manner def-erential. I understand why Udell wants to try the case quickly: Nate the boy is fading fast, replaced by Nate the young man. We shake hands, and begin to talk. First, we discuss life in prison. Nate tells me the other inmates aren't bothering him, that he gets breakfast at 4:30 a.m.., that he is allowed exactly four books in his cell - at the moment, he's reading the Bible, a military thriller called War of the Wing Men and a couple of other adventure tales that feature guns and heroes. I ask him if he still wants to be a Secret Service agent, and he nods. As we talk, it's clear that Nate has no idea that his life as he previously imagined it is over. Then we talk about killing Mr. Grunow. We run through the entire day, from the moment he woke up un-til the moment he pulled the trigger. I find him to be upsettingly naive and straightforward. He admits he was an-gry at being suspended, but claims he was angry only at himself, not Mr. Hinds, who suspended him. When I ask him why he told Michele Cordovez that he was going to go back to school and shoot Mr. Hinds, his face goes blank and he says, "I don't know." When I ask him what he was thinking when he took the gun back to school, he says, "I don't know." When I ask him if he intended to hurt anyone, he shakes his head no. "I just wanted to say good-bye to Dinora," he says. "Did you return to school to shoot Mr. Grunow?" "No." "Did you have any reason to want to shoot Mr. Grunow?" "No. I liked Mr. Grunow. He was a good teacher. A friend." "Why did you shoot him?" "I don't know." "Did you intend to shoot him?" "No." "What were you thinking when you held the gun in your hand?" "I just wanted to see Dinora." "Why did you take the gun out?" "I don't know. He pushed me." "Did he hurt you? Did he push you hard?" "No. It was a friendly push." I reached across the table and pushed his shoulder. A friendly tap, really, just a suggestion to please move. "Yeah, like that." "Did he seem angry at you?" "No. He was smiling. He wasn't angry at all." "But you shot him." "Yes." "Why?" "I don't know." His eyes glistened. "Did your stepfather ever hit you, Nate?" "No." "Never?" "No." "Has anyone ever hit you?" "No." "You've never, ever been hit?" "No, not really." By the time my visit with Nate was over, I was pretty sure that he didn't know why he killed Mr. Grunow, and that he would probably never know, and that he was being held accountable for it nevertheless. Which is as it should be. The horror of Nate's crime is not mitigated by his lack of conscious understanding. Now, Nate's future will be decided by the Florida courts. Robert Udell says that life without parole is out of the question, and if Barry Krischer insists on pushing for it, he vows to take the case to trial this fall. A plea bargain to a lesser charge is possible, but whatever happens, it's unlikely that Nate will be out of prison before he's a middle-age man. I ask Nate, "If you could speak to Pam Grunow right now, what would you say to her?" He looks at the floor for a moment, then back at me. He seems childlike, ashamed. "I'm sorry," he says. |
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