| | Hear No evil
 On a warm spring's day in May 1998, Kip Kinkle, a fifteen-year-old boy from Springfield, Oregon, shot and killed both his father and his mother. The following day, he walked into his high school cafeteria and opened fire with a 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol, killing two of his fellow students and wounding twenty-five others. Less than two years later Kip Kinkle would be found guilty of his crimes and sentenced to over one hundred and eleven years in prison. The American legal system was able to impart justice, but it failed to successfully establish the exact motives behind Kip's murderous rampage. The debate is ongoing and experts agree that there was probably far more going on inside of Kip's young brain than what was revealed at the trial.
It must be established early on that, Kip, in many ways was a typical teenager. He enjoyed listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games. He had a reasonable number of friends, an older sibling, and seemingly supportive and loving parents. His interest in martial arts, knives, and guns, albeit potentially violent, was not considered particularly abnormal for an American teenager--the culture in which he lived promoted such things as "hobbies." What wasn't typical about Kip Kinkle was the secret he kept about the voice in his head; a voice that he tried so hard to hide from the world. The voice obviously disturbed Kip--he knew it wasn't supposed to be there. He also knew that if he told anyone about it, the embarrassment and potential ridicule could be overwhelming.
A year prior to his rampage, Kip's mother, due in part to his depression and antisocial behavior--Kip liked to set off explosives when he was angry--, had scheduled nine consultations with a child psychologist spread over six months. During these sessions Dr. Jeffrey Hicks did establish that Kip was depressed and had some anger management issues. Hicks worked with him in developing alternate ways of expressing himself and, as so often happens when the real answers can't be found, prescribed the antidepressant, fluoxetine (Prozac.) Due to either a lack of information, or simply poor diagnoses, Dr. Hicks was unable to detect the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia in Kip, who, for his part, did not mention the auditory hallucinations in his head. The medication evidently kept the voice at bay for a time, but in the end may have been a contributing factor to his final violent episode. Studies on the effect of Prozac and similar antidepressants are inconclusive in regards to how they react on specific forms of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. Contrary to the testimony of two other child psychologists, both of whom interviewed Kip after his arrest, Dr. Hicks maintained at the trial that Kip was not mentally ill.
Like every other teenager on the planet, Kip had some relationship issues. On the surface they appeared relatively "normal" problems: his girlfriend had recently ended their relationship, and he had an apparent distrust for adult authority--his father in particular. As normal as these relationship issues appeared to be, Kip was seemingly ill-equipped to deal with them in a "normal" manner. He often took to setting off explosives, or writing bizarre entries in his secret journal--writing of his loneliness, his self-hatred, rage, and apparent recognition that there was something terribly wrong with his brain. A part of him, however, clung to a realization that he did care for others. Even in his angered ramblings, written right after he murdered his parents, Kip confessed, "I love my mom and dad so much..." His note was a confused confession of guilt, and a heartfelt admission that he was the disappointment, and that it was he who had failed them. He wrote about the voice as well, and with the post-trial suspicion that Kip was already in the early stages of schizophrenia at the time of the shootings, it seems a pathetic irony that Kip was the only one who knew it.
Sociologists have already drawn some conclusions as to the effect of music with depressing lyrics, violent movies, and first-shooter video games, on teenagers and the antisocial behavior sometimes acted out. The general consensus is that violent forms of media, although not directly the cause of any such incidents, are unequivocally catalysts to the cause; the desensitization of youth to bloodshed and violence does little to uphold moral deterrents. However, in the case of Kip Kinkle, it can be argued that, with or without these outside suggestive forces, he was already on a fast track to some form of breakdown due to his mental illness, and his inability to convey the seriousness of it to his family and doctor.
Perhaps Kip knew all along what was in store for him. And had he been able to overcome his embarrassment, and the stigma that goes with being mentally ill, things could have maybe turned out differently. At his trial, Dr. Richard J. Konkol, a pediatric neurologist, showed to the court, computerized scans of Kip's brain and the defects in his frontal lobe that received reduced blood-flow and undoubtedly affected his emotional control and decision making process. Dr. Konkol added that, this condition, although serious, was not untreatable. This was the only hope that Kip Kinkle had ever been offered--and the only time during the entire trial that he lifted his head from the table. Somewhere in his brain Kip had always known that it wasn't really his father, or the music, or the guns, or the kids at school that had made him this way--but the voice in his head had deceived him into blaming everyone and everything except itself--schizophrenia.
Marty 
"The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
~ Albert Einstein 1879-1955 |
