by Rhonda McBride
Monday, Feb. 19, 2007
Bethel, Alaska - It was a time when school shootings were almost unheard of. Before Paducah, Jonesboro and Columbine, there was Bethel Regional High School.
It was 10 years ago today in Bethel, a remote community in Western Alaska, when a 16-year-old boy walked into the school's lobby with a gun and killed two people.
Evan Ramsey was one of the first, and many fear, not the last.
Ramsey now spends his life in an Arizona prison. It's a boring life, he says, and it's the price he must pay for one day of drama 10 years ago.
"Down here, the days blend into each other. Each day is sunny. My day-to-day life is fairly boring," said Ramsey.
Ramsey also says he does not want to talk about the day of the shooting.
By the time police got the gun away from him on that fateful day, it was too late.
Ron Edwards, the Bethel Regional High School principal, would soon die. Josh Palacios, who was two weeks shy of turning 16, was medevaced to Anchorage. But he too would not survive.
Evan Ramsey wounded two others on that day. They recovered.
But for many others that morning, there were other wounds, some that have yet to heal.
"He was walking down the halls and he was shooting this other guy. He was reloading and I ran out of the side door," said Erick Hodgins on Feb. 19, 2007.
Today, Hodgins admits that Ramsey's first shot went off about five feet behind his head.
As Palacios lay on the floor bleeding, Hodgins hid behind a planter. He escaped the bullets, but not the fallout.
"I remember sitting there behind that planter. And I wanted to go over there and make sure he was OK. I couldn't, because Evan kept walking around with that gun. I was just close to it, you know. You feel like afterwards, you could have done something," said Hodgins.
Hodgins feels a survivor's guilt, as well as a survivor's anger.
"I get kind of annoyed that it's ‘all Columbine.' We're not going for fame or anything like that. It's just that school shootings aren't just ‘all Columbine.' It's every community," he said.
The shootings at Columbine High School, just south of Denver, came two years later and was the tenth school shooting in the nation since Bethel's.
And while the Bethel tragedy is generally not mentioned in school shooting stories, there were lessons there that remain overlooked.
Hodgins posed a question that many other parents and school shooting survivors have asked: "Why are kids so angry?"
"Our culture is one of ignorance," he said. "Everyone wants to remain blissfully ignorant to the hard things."
Steve Poor, who was one of the first security guards hired by Bethel Regional High School after the shooting, won't ever be accused of being blissfully ignorant to what occurred there. He thinks about the shootings ever day, and his vigilance has paid off.
"Since the shooting, we've taken a gun away from a kid in the school," he said.
Today, the school is much better equipped to handle threats. Poor carries a radio and a cell phone on him at all times while working so that anyone can reach him at any time.
Teachers have cell phones, too.
Ten years ago, though, there were no phones in the classroom, and the word lockdown was unheard of.
"One of the first things I was told when I showed up in Bethel on the job site was about the shooting. ‘Oh, did you know?' said Shelli Frankowiak, a new teacher at Bethel Regional High.
Students too have heard the stories, and understand why the school has several drills a year. Just in case.
"We don't want to have another one of those tragedies," said Maj. Carl Bailey, the JROTC director for the high school. "That's my biggest fear is that we'll be the first repeat school. I get goose bumps just thinking about that."
Of all the students attending Bethel Regional High that year, Evan Ramsey was not a kid teachers would have imagined capable of such violence.
"I remember the little Ramsey boy. He was almost like a ghost, always by himself, and seemed soft spoken and mild," said Maj. Bailey.
Evan Ramsey was a haunted child.
His father, Don Ramsey, went to prison in October 1986, after storming the Anchorage Times newspaper with smoke bombs and gunfire.
His mother couldn't cope, and the Ramsey children went from foster home to foster home until they were finally adopted by Sue Hare, the Lower Kuskokwim School District superintendent.
Despite a more stable life, students zeroed in on Ramsey's vulnerabilities.
"I think he got teased because he was weird. He didn't fit in," said Hodgins.
Hodgins admitted he was one of many kids who teased Evan Ramsey, calling him "Screech" and claiming he resembled a goofy high school student on the former TV series "Saved By The Bell."
Like the misfit in this popular TV sitcom, Evan Ramsey was also thin and awkward. But beyond the nickname, there were other constant insults. And they hurt.
"For the same reasons that being called a homosexual when you're not, it would bother you being portrayed in a certain light that is false," said Ramsey.
Ramsey says no one teases him any more, and if they did, he would not care.
"What somebody else thinks about me doesn't matter. If I had been able to realize that early on, I probably wouldn't have committed my crime," he said.
During Ramsey's trial, the court heard how he had planned to commit suicide. In a letter to be read after his death he wrote: "Life sucks in its own way. So I killed a little. And killed myself."
Ramsey had planned the shootings with other boys. Together, they came up with a hit list, and told friends to come and watch.
By the time Reyne Athanas got to the lobby, Josh Palacios had already been shot. She saw Ramsey with the gun and tried to take it away.
"When he wanted to make a point, he would swing it straight-barrel at me," said Athanas.
This whole scene had an audience upstairs. Athanas explained that a balcony had overlooked the scene when Ramsey shot Palacios, and that many kids had looked down into the lobby area and observed it all. The balcony, though, has since been removed.
Some of the students said they didn't believe Ramsey would actually fire, while others said they didn't know what to expect.
On the day after the shooting, Melissa Campbell admitted to knowing about it before it happened.
"I came to school and one of my friends said, ‘Look. We've got to go up to the library.' And I asked her why. And she said, ‘Because something bad is going to happen,'" she said.
Today, teachers here hope there's enough awareness about school shootings that kids would warn them in time to avert tragedy.
Bethel Regional High School now has an anti-bullying policy, and tries to move quickly on complaints. But 10 years ago, Evan Ramsey said no one took him seriously.
"I would have to say the worst part of the whole experience was not so much being actually called names, teased and picked on, but was doing what my foster mom had told me: going to the principal, the dean of students and reporting it and nothing really being done," Ramsey said.
So Ramsey took action and lives with the consequences, which were inflicted upon an entire community.
"I wonder how the victims are doing and how they're getting along with life," said Ramsey. "And whether or not they've gotten over the things that I've done."
To the people of Bethel, Evan Ramsey says he's sorry both for his actions and the suffering he caused.
Ramsey was on of the first teens tried under the adult system in Alaska courts.
The two boys that helped Ramsey plan the shooting eventually saw their cases move through the juvenile court system. They have since been released.
Ramsey was sentenced to more than 200 years' prison time for the Bethel Regional High shootings, and he won't be eligible for parole until he is about 75 years old.
Bethel has marked the 10-year anniversary of the school shootings with a remembrance and candle-lighting ceremony in the high school lobby. For many here, it's an opportunity to rededicate themselves to promises made after the shooting, which included working toward making the community a better place for children.
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