Michael Carneal Wiki
Michael Carneal Biography
Who is Michael Carneal ?
Michael Carneal opened fire on his fellow students during a prayer meeting before school in 1997, school shootings were not yet part of the national consciousness. The carnage that left three students dead and five more injured at Heath High School near Paducah, Kentucky, ended when Carneal put down his gun and the principal escorted him to the school office, a scene that today seems unimaginable.
Also stretching today’s imagination: Carneal’s life sentence guaranteed a chance at parole after 25 years, the maximum sentence allowed at the time given his age.
A quarter-century later, Carneal is 39 and has a parole hearing next week that comes at a very different time in American life: post-Sandy Hook, post-Uvalde. Today, police officers and metal detectors are an accepted presence in many schools, and even kindergarten children are trained to prepare for active shooters.
“Twenty-five years seemed so long, so far away,” Missy Jenkins Smith recalls thinking at the time of sentencing. Jenkins Smith was 15 years old when Carneal, someone she considered a friend, shot her. Her bullet left her paralyzed and she uses a wheelchair to get around. Over the years, she has counted down the time until Carneal is eligible for parole.
“I would think, ‘It’s been 10 years. How many more years? At the 20-year anniversary memorial, I thought, ‘It’s coming up.’”
Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied school violence, said public opinion about school shootings and juvenile punishment has changed a lot in the last 25 years. In the 1980s and 1990s, Astor provided therapy to children who had committed very serious crimes, including murder, but were rehabilitated and not incarcerated.
“Today everyone would be locked up,” he said. “But most went on to do good things.”
Jenkins Smith knows firsthand that troubled kids can be helped. She worked for years as a counselor for at-risk youth, where her wheelchair served as a stark visual reminder of what violence can do, she said.
Shooting
“I was sent children threatening school shootings, terrorist threats,” she said. Some are already adults. “It is great to see what they have achieved and how their lives have changed. They have learned from their bad decisions.”
But that doesn’t mean I think Carneal should be released. On the one hand, she worries that he is not equipped to handle life outside of prison and may still harm others. She also doesn’t think it’s right for him to go free when the people he hurt are still hurting.
“Let him have a chance at 39. People get married at 39. They have kids,” she said. “It is not correct that he has the possibility of having a normal life that those three girls that he killed will never have.”
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Nicole Hadley, 14, Jessica James, 17, and Kayce Steger, 15, were killed in the shooting.
Astor said that when it comes to the worst crimes, like many people, he wrestles with the question of at what age children should be held strictly accountable for their actions. As a class exercise, he has his students consider the appropriate punishment for a perpetrator at different ages. Should a 16-year-old be treated the same as a 12-year-old? Should a 12-year-old be treated the same as a 40-year-old?
Without any national consensus, you end up with a patchwork of laws and policies that sometimes result in very different punishments for nearly identical crimes, she said.
Death
The Heath High School shooting took place on December 1, 1997, the Monday after Thanksgiving break. Less than four months later, 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson shot dead four classmates and a teacher at Westside High School near Jonesboro, Arkansas. Nine other children and one adult were injured. The couple was tried as minors and released when they turned 21.
Two decades later, in 2018, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. At the same time Carneal’s possible release is being considered, a Florida jury decides whether to sentence Cruz to death.
Jenkins Smith has tried for years to understand why Carneal opened fire on his fellow students that day. He was in the marching band with Carneal and, before the shooting, “I loved being around him because he made a boring day fun,” he said.
She met Carneal in prison in 2007 and had a long conversation with him. He apologized to her and she said that he had forgiven him.
“A lot of people think that exempts him from the consequences, but I don’t think so,” she said.
Carneal’s parole hearing is scheduled to begin Monday with testimony from those injured in the shooting and close family members of those killed. Jenkins Smith said she knows of only one victim who supports some form of supervised release for Carneal, less confinement than prison but no unrestricted release. On Tuesday, Carneal will present his case from the Kentucky State Reformatory in La Grange. If the board rules against release, it can decide how long Carneal must wait before his next parole opportunity.
The parole hearing will be held via video conference, but Jenkins Smith said he will set up his camera to show his full body so the parole board can see his wheelchair. It will be, he said, “a reminder that everyone who experienced that shock 25 years ago will still face it for the rest of their lives.”
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