Prison behavior a problem

29 pages of infractions in decade behind bars

By Cindy Kranz - The Cincinnati Enquirer

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

EDDYVILLE, Ky. - During his 10 years behind bars, Clay Shrout has been anything but a model prisoner.

Shrout, 27, has chalked up 29 pages of disciplinary actions in the four facilities where he has been incarcerated since 1995.

His possession of an L-shaped, 10-inch stainless steel bar and a plan to escape earned him a transfer in 1996 from the minimum security Kentucky Reformatory at LaGrange to the maximum security prison at Eddyville in southwestern Kentucky.

In 1997, guards there confiscated from him what appeared to be the makings of a knife, prison records show.

The latest disciplinary reports in his file are for failure to stand for the prisoner count - most recently on Aug. 25, 2002.

Shrout avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty, but mentally ill, for the May 26, 1994, murders of his parents and two sisters in their Florence home. Charges related to holding his trigonometry class hostage that day were dropped.

He was sentenced Oct. 14, 1994, as a 17-year-old juvenile to life without parole for 25 years each on four counts of murder. After his 18th birthday, he was resentenced and committed to the custody of the Kentucky Department of Corrections as an adult Feb. 24, 1995. While his health records are not public because of federal privacy laws, previous news reports indicated he had not sought mental health help while behind bars.

Shrout did not respond to a request for an Enquirer interview. He is eligible for parole in May 2019, but Jeff Martin, commander of the Criminal Investigations Division of the Boone County Police Department at the time of the incident, rates Shrout's chances for parole as "slim to none."

Blood in the School Yard

A young boy explodes and turns a classroom into a killing ground. Then it happens again. Then again. Then again. the killers are misfits, lonely and angry, their morbid fantasies fed by violent movies, videos and music. They have stripped away the last innocent veneer of American childhood.

By Lisa Popyk, Special to The Post

In small towns across America, the quiet, the meek, the mild-mannered are striking out with deadly, premeditated violence. A twisted view of reality tells them that killing is the best way to speak up.

The quiet youngsters next door have become today's school yard shooters - 13 of them in the last five years.

The unpredictable, unforgiving and senseless force of the crimes, and the youthful faces behind them, have scarred America's image of childhood innocence.

Yet experts in psychology, psychiatry and criminology say they're surprised that there have been just 13. More, they believe, are certain to follow.

''You can't have the kind of saturation of violence that we have today without it manifesting itself somewhere,'' said Dewey Cornell, director of the University of Virginia Youth Violence Project.

''It's like a virus spreading through a large population of people. Not everyone gets sick. Just the most vulnerable, and then with varying degrees of illness.''

The most vulnerable, he said, are today's children, particularly the lonely, disconnected, misfit child.

In each recent school yard slaying, the gunman was a young male, viewed by peers as weak and by himself as isolated, alone. He found an outlet in violence in movies, on television, on the internet, in his own life. Often he began collecting weapons, writing about violence, torturing animals. In his confused mind, the image of him with a gun and his tormentors cowering at his feet began to loom large. He experienced a power surge beyond understanding, says John Nicoletti of Colorado, an expert in police psychology who is writing a book on school yard violence.

''Once they've drawn first blood,'' Nicoletti said, ''you usually can't talk them down. They've reached the point of no return.''

Filled with rage, the child - almost always a boy - suppresses his emotions until he explodes in a bid to take control of his life and be heard. Girls in such situations develop control through eating disorders and turn their rage inward; boys explode in violence, experts say.

In 1994, Greater Cincinnati awoke to the problem when a Union, Ky., teen slaughtered his upper-middle-class family one morning. Clay Shrout (left), who felt neglected and outcast, stood outside a convenience store drinking juice after murdering his parents and two little sisters. ''You don't even know what I just did,'' he mumbled to passersby. He then headed to Ryle High School with his weapons cache.

For Luke Woodham, the bloody stabbing death of his mother and shooting of two students in 1997 was euphoric. He was still high on adrenaline, and smiling, when he gave police a videotaped confession 20 minutes after his arrest in Pearl, Miss. Filled with bravado and swagger, he said: ''I wanted attention, someone to notice me. I guess the world's going to remember me now.''

And the slight, quiet Andrew Wurst was suddenly in charge, empowered by a .25 caliber Raven, when he sauntered through a panic-stricken school dance in Edinboro, Penn., in April of this year.

He waved the firearm at his friends as they fled in fear and calmly walked up behind his cowering principal. The gun aimed at her forehead, he said: ''That's not going to save you.''

Nicoletti and others say violent images in the media equate murder with power. And it tells lonely, isolated children that they gain control and command attention by wielding a gun. They point to movies like ''Natural Born Killers,'' a 1994 thinly-veiled satire featuring two brutal serial killers who become international heroes. Several of the youngsters involved in recent school yard shootings named this movie in particular as an influencing force.

In the film, lead characters Mickey and Mallory vindicate a lifetime of injustice and abuse - and find true love - by slaying more than 50 people. Murder is equated with freedom. At one point, after making his first kill, a character says, ''I'm alive for the first time in my life.'' In the end, the killers walk free.

The controversial box-office hit is a sensational example, Cornell said, that does not stand alone.

Movies, photographs, video games and song lyrics that would have turned stomachs even five years ago, today don't raise an eyebrow.

''Maybe,'' Cornell said, ''what we're seeing is an indication that our saturation of violence is reaching a tipping point. And early adolescents are like the miner's canaries, the first to succumb to the poisoned air.

''That doesn't mean they're not responsible, morally or legally. But we shouldn't be surprised that they're being affected by it.''

At least two of the nation's recent school gunmen said they were inspired by violence on television and in literature.

Fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis claims his shooting spree in Moses Lake, Wash., in 1996 was inspired by Pearl Jam's music video ''Jeremy,'' the movies ''Natural Born Killers'' and ''The Basketball Diaries,'' and the book ''Rage.''

All had killing as a central theme; three included a classroom mass murder.

''Jeremy'' is based on the real life story of a Texas teen who in 1991 killed himself in front of his class. But the video, named Video of the Year in 1993, depicts a lonely teen who kills all his classmates after enduring taunts. Police found a copy of the video in Loukaitis' bedroom.

Loukaitis also repeatedly watched ''Natural Born Killers.'' He often quoted from the movie and told friends he thought it would be ''fun to go on a killing spree.''

Police also found in Loukaitis' bedroom a collection of Stephen King's books, including a well-worn copy of ''Rage,'' in which a troubled boy kills his algebra teacher and takes the class hostage.

King has since apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published.

On February 2, 1996, following weeks of discussion, Loukaitis acted out his fantasy. Dressed all in black, with boots and a long overcoat to conceal the rifle at his side - just as Leonardo DiCaprio did during a dream sequence in ''The Basketball Diaries'' - he sauntered into his fifth-period algebra class and opened fire.

With three people dead, a fourth critically wounded and nearly two dozen other students crying around him, Loukaitis smiled and said: ''This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?''

His key target was a classmate who days earlier had called him a fag.

Less than a year later, bright, quiet Michael Carneal also said that he was inspired by ''The Basketball Dairies'' to murder three classmates in Paducah, Ky.

A year after seeing the movie, Carneal was still telling friends he, too, was ''planning something big.''

On December 12, 1997, he packed up an arsenal of stolen guns and headed to Heath High School, (shown at right) where the small, bespectacled freshman unpacked a .22-caliber handgun, inserted two earplugs and began shooting. Eight students fell, three were killed.

Kip Kinkel, who killed four people including his parents in Springfield, Ore., was so obsessed with excessively violent programming that his parents told friends they had to disconnect their cable TV.

''Violence is so pervasive in our culture, I don't think any child escapes it,'' said Charles Patrick Ewing, a clinical and forensic psychologist at the State University of New York and author of the book ''Kids Who Kill,'' (Lexington Books, $5.99 paperback.)

''More children think about (committing acts of violence) than don't,'' Ewing said. ''For every one who acts on it, 99 others think about it.''

Today, it's easier than ever before for children to act out those violent fantasies. Easier, experts said, because of three key factors: the consequences aren't clear, no one is listening and dangerous information is only a keyboard away.

''One of the key factors is that all children and most adolescents do not understand the finality of death,'' said Scott Poland, chairman of the National Emergency Disaster Team for the National Association of School Psychologists.

It's a difficult concept for any youngster, but one made even more complicated by the proliferation of quick and apparently painless death depicted on TV, in the movies and on music videos. No one suffers and no one gets punished, said Marjorie Creswell of the National School Safety Center.

Consider the following from the National Television Violence Study, which reflect three years of research:

85 percent of all programming shown on the three premium cable channels and 44 percent of programming on broadcast networks includes violent acts;

73 percent of perpetrators go unpunished in these programs;

47 percent fail to depict the harm to victims and 58 percent show no pain.

Video games almost never show the consequences. And the running joke of the wildly-popular cable cartoon ''South Park'' is a child dying in a different way every week. Kip Kinkel sat down to watch it after murdering his parents in the next room.

Yet people have become so accustomed to talk of blood and gore, hate and killing, that few take a child's preoccupation with the macabre seriously, Ewing said.

''Children do things for shock value. The problem is, that we have a much greater tolerance for deviance, so it's tough to shock or alarm us,'' Ewing said.

''Plus, we're so into giving people their own space that the boundaries of normalcy for adolescence have become pretty broad. And honestly, that's B.S. A child talking about building bombs, abusing animals and killing people is not normal.''

In each of the recent school shootings, the youth involved talked about his plans before hand. Most wrote dark, morbid and death-filled papers for school assignments. Several admitted to or bragged about abusing animals and wanting to feel the sensation of taking a life.

Making that mix even more volatile is that today's children have greater access than ever before to materials and information that can readily turn a violent fantasy into reality, Ewing said. Through the Internet they quickly can learn about bomb making, hand guns, ritualistic killings, the occult and groups ready to foster violent ideas.

''It's a whole new, secret world that they can get lost in,'' Nicoletti said.

Most of the school yard shooters had downloaded violence-related materials and stock piled weapons shortly before their killing sprees.

Shrout, Kinkel, Woodham and Carneal all used computers to learn about bomb building, guns and violence. Their computers served as their links to a place that their parents most likely would not have approved of, or allowed them to enter.

''Juvenile killers don't just wake up one day and become juvenile killers,'' Ewing said. ''Homicide, like most behavior, is learned.''