Lethal Passage (13 page)

I would have liked to ask Sylvia and Wayne why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made—and the faxes and overnight letters I mailed—to their Atlanta headquarters. I asked Earl Taylor whether the Daniels were driven in their corporate antics by some kind of Second Amendment fundamentalism.

“
Shit no,” he said. “I think Wayne’s strictly in it for the money. That doesn’t make him a bad guy—he’s a sharp businessman. And Sylvia’s a sharp businesslady.”

Sylvia in particular makes an appealing character for America’s gun lovers—“those assholes” in the NRA, as Taylor put it. “Here’s a
woman who’s a manufacturer of a submachine gun. She brings lawsuits against the government all the time for mistreating us gun owners. She’s just a person they can identify with.”

In Towson, Colonel Supenski had me slip on pistol earmuffs and safety glasses, then handed back the Cobray, now fully loaded with a thirty-two-round clip. He invited me to fire away.

I fired slowly at first, trying to accustom myself to the trigger action and the roll of the weapon. The trigger action was uneven, but quick. I fired with abandon, trying to aim at a series of steel man-shaped targets named Pepper Poppers after their inventor. The targets are designed to fall backward when struck by a bullet. The cliff came alive as if a tribe of beetles had suddenly decided to decamp. I downed all four targets and then turned the gun on a loose piece of wood embedded in the earth behind them. Shards blew off in all directions. Shell casings rocketed past me, one striking the rim of my safety glasses and bouncing off my eyebrow. In a matter of seconds I’d used up all thirty-two rounds.

Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing this is, after all, just fun and games. I wanted to fire off another clip; hell, I wanted to “rock and roll,” the gun culture’s euphemism for firing a machine gun in full auto. This was fun. Remote destruction is a dynamite rush.

As I drove home, however, I was struck by the dissonance between the innocent clink of the Pepper Poppers and the deadly power of each bullet. What cost, this fun and games? Any one of those bits of lead invisibly traversing the space between me and the target would have been enough to blow a man’s brains out.

“
You put a gun like this in the hands of a juvenile,” Supenski testified at the civil trial that examined how Nicholas Elliot acquired his gun, “and you’ve got death waiting to happen.”

The judge struck this and most of Supenski’s testimony from the record as prejudicial and inflammatory.

“
Well, I should say so,” Supenski told me, nodding fiercely. “Damn right! It should have been inflammatory. A whole lot of people should have heard it and they should have been inflamed.”

At his office, Supenski placed two weapons on a conference table, one the Cobray M-11/9, the other the new Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter he carries each day, a beautifully machined weapon with a wood grip and three different safety mechanisms designed to prevent accidental shootings. “The gun industry, unlike any other, is allowed to run amok,” he said. “If you had industry regulations, or if you had safety regulations or product-liability regulations, you better believe they’d see the light, you’d see a lot more of those”—he pointed to the Smith & Wesson pistol—“and none of those. And you wouldn’t need the California assault-weapon ban, you wouldn’t need a New Jersey ban, a Maryland Saturday-night-special law. You wouldn’t need them because that kind of garbage would never be released into the mainstream.

“Could Nicholas Elliot have killed people with this?” Supenski said, touching his own pistol. “Yeah, he could have. That’s true. But he wasn’t drawn to that one. He was drawn to this one.” The Cobray lay on the table, dull and black. The only gleam came from the holes left where the previous owner had drilled out the serial numbers. “The sad part of it is, you look at what happened and you ask, is that something that with a little bit of foresight and a little less greed or maybe stupidity, or whatever the hell it was—is that something that could have been prevented? The answer, quite simply, is yes.”

He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “You know the part of that case that really bothered me—the clerk who sold the kid that goddamn gun. He was an ex-cop.”

CHAPTER SIX
N
ICHOLAS

N
ICHOLAS DID COME ACROSS
B
ILLY
C
UTTER
on Friday morning, and true to form Cutter again called him a name. Nicholas went into a bathroom and took his Cobray from his backpack. He left both there, however, and exited the room. What he did next is not entirely clear. According to his own statement, made to Det. Donald Adams, the lead homicide investigator, he wandered into the band room and, at one point, helped a man with the very apt name of Mike Lucky.

At some point between ten-twenty and ten twenty-two that morning, Nicholas walked into one of the trailers—the relocation modular units—that had been partitioned into classrooms. The room, called T108, was small, one of three classrooms built from a large trailer akin to those that serve as field offices at large construction sites. Each classroom had windows, its own door, and a stairway down to the central courtyard of the school. Other similarly divided trailers were positioned around the courtyard. Room T108 was occupied at that moment by a single individual, Sam Marino, who taught French and English at the school.

Nicholas, who that semester was taking Marino’s sixth-period French I class, asked Marino if he could help him practice dialogue. Nicholas offered to go to his locker and bring back a tape recorder he claimed to have brought with him that morning. It might help with the practice, he told Marino. Could he go and get it?

Marino said he would be glad to help, but not right then. He knew Nicholas was scheduled to be in the Bible class just getting
under way in the trailer across the courtyard, taught by M. Hutchinson Matteson—“Hutch”—a popular teacher and the church’s youth pastor. “I told Nicholas he should be getting to his other class,” Marino recalled. He told the boy to come back later.

Just as Nicholas left the trailer, another teacher, Susan Allen, walked in. Her next period was free, and she customarily came to T108 to take a break, grade papers, and prepare for her next classes. She and Marino chatted a bit as Marino gathered his books under his arm and braced himself for the bitterly cold walk to his next class. Allen was now sitting at the desk; Marino was standing with his back to the door.

He felt the frigid blast of outside air, then heard something thud to the floor. The impact undoubtedly was caused when Nicholas let his backpack fall from his grasp. Marino did not turn around, however. He and Allen continued talking for another thirty seconds, maybe another minute. “
All of a sudden,” Marino said, “I heard a real, real loud noise.”

He whirled toward the sound. “
At first I thought it was like an M80—like a big, big firecracker—real loud. I didn’t know what it was, and so I turned around and looked.”

He saw Nicholas and saw too that he was holding something. There was nothing unusual about his appearance or his expression, Marino later testified. Nicholas was, as always, “Mr. Serious,” Marino said. Although Nicholas often walked around with a smile, he somehow managed at the same time to seem very sober and earnest. “He wanted to show me something,” Marino said. “He was intent on showing me something.”

Nicholas held what appeared to be a toy. It was black and sharply angled. Whatever it was, it had the shape of a gun, but the idea it might be a real firearm had not settled in Marino’s mind. “
In a situation like that, I’m a very positive individual,” Marino said. “You want to think it’s not what you really thought you saw or heard.”

He believed it might be one of those hyperrealistic water guns that had become so popular. Or a very loud cap gun. Nicholas, wearing
his usual Mr. Serious expression, pointed the thing at Marino.

“
I’ve got something to show you,” he said. “I have this really neat toy.”

Susan Allen, watching from her desk, remembered thinking her own children had never had a toy like that. She too thought it might be a cap gun, or maybe a water pistol—“one of those big, long water guns; so I really didn’t panic.”

She told Nicholas, “We don’t have toys like that in school. Right now put it up. Better give it to Mr. Marino.”

“No, no,” Nicholas said, “I’ve got to show you. It’s really neat.”

Sam Marino was angry. He did not like being startled that way. Whatever Nicholas had, it did not belong in school. “
What is it?” Marino snapped. “A cap gun? A pop gun?”

“You’ll see what I’ve got,” Nicholas said.

Marino moved toward Nicholas, still unaware the toy was in fact a real gun. He demanded Nicholas hand it over.

Nicholas backed away.

“No,” Nicholas said again. “I’ve got to show you. It’s really neat. It works really great.”

As Marino advanced, Nicholas retreated, until he had backed to the far end of the little classroom. Marino now stood roughly three feet away from the boy.

“
Give it to me
,” Marino commanded.

“Nicholas,” Allen said from behind. “That’s enough. Give it to Mr. Marino.”

Nicholas seemed to relent. “
Here it is.”

Allen thought the incident was now over, that Nicholas really did mean to hand the toy to Marino.

But Nicholas stepped back and coolly took aim.

Victims of gunplay hold up articles of all kinds in their last moments in the magical belief that even a sheet of paper might save them.

Marino held up his French I textbook.

CHAPTER SEVEN
T
HE
P
URCHASE

T
O BE A GUN DEALER IN
America is to occupy a strange and dangerous outpost on the moral frontier. Every storefront gun dealer winds up at some point in his career selling weapons to killers, drug addicts, psychos, and felons; likewise, every storefront dealer can expect to be visited by ATF agents and other lawmen tracking weapons from their use in crime to their origins in the gun-distribution network. One must be a cool customer to stay in business knowing that the products one sells are likely to be used to kill adults and children or to serve as a terrorist tool in countless other robberies, rapes, and violent assaults. Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem. Guns used in crime are commonly thought to have originated in some mythic inner-city black market. Such markets do exist, of course, but they are kept well supplied by the licensed gun-distribution network, where responsibility is defined as whatever the law allows.

And the law, as written, allows much.

Guns Unlimited, of Carrollton, Virginia, demonstrates the kind of position every legitimate gun shop must eventually find itself in. Guns Unlimited considered itself a “good” dealer. Indeed, in the
view of Mike Dick, the general manager of the company and the son of its founder, Guns Unlimited was not just a sterling corporate citizen but also a de facto deputy of ATF and a vital bulwark in the fight against crime and civil-rights abuse.

Nonetheless, Guns Unlimited sold Nicholas Elliot a Cobray M-11/9 under circumstances that led, early in 1992, to a jury verdict against the dealer on civil charges that its sale of the gun to Nicholas was negligent. The suit was filed by the husband of the teacher Nicholas killed.

Federal law bars anyone under twenty-one from buying a handgun, but Nicholas acquired his with ease through a “straw-man” purchase three months before the shootings, when he was fifteen years old. Straw-man purchases, in which a qualified buyer buys a handgun for an unqualified person, are the primary means by which America’s bad guys acquire their weapons, and one the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms cannot hope to put an end to, given the implicit and explicit restraints on its law-enforcement activities.