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April 2005

Shooter
by Walter Dean Myers

POLICE LINE     DO NOT CROSS

It was referred to as “the incident last April.” The Harrison County School Safety Committee interviewed the surviving participants in the hopes of finding and deterring other “imminent or possible threats” to students at Madison High School. Seventeen-year-old Cameron Porter and eighteen-year-old Carla Evans were interviewed by various members of the committee. Both had been seniors last April.

Cameron had known Len Gray since they were in the third grade. As sophomores, they became friends. Cameron didn’t make the high school basketball team and was trying to deal with his father’s disappointment with him. Len, in his own way, was commiserating. When Cameron’s father “fixed it” so Cameron could play on the team, his team friends didn’t hang with him as they once did. Cameron eventually dropped the team and felt even more like an outsider. Like Len.

The camp outside of town wasn’t like a regular camp. It was just a place Mr. Gray and his friends, all white, went to shoot. Len and Cameron went to shoot there. Later Carla went. It had pop-up targets mostly bad guys from comic books or women with shopping bags. You weren’t suppose to shoot the women. Martin Luther King, Jr. holding a gun was one of the pop-up targets. Cameron who was black didn’t like it, but, like Len, he tried to laugh it off.

Len and Cameron started taking medication for depression. Just before Christmas they vandalized a Catholic church with a magic marker. GOD DOES NOT LIVE HERE Len wrote on the wall. Being a supportive friend, Cameron also wrote JESUS WOULDN’T EVEN RENT THIS SPACE on another wall. When they went to court, they told the judge they were depressed and that’s why they did it. As Len said, they were now “nutcases”. The charges were dropped in return for cleaning the church. A psychiatrist prescribed the medication. But Len, well, he started doubling his prescription by going to different pharmacies.

Then there was Brad Williams, a jock. Brad’s girlfriend started teasing Len about his hat. She slapped him in the face. Len slapped back. Brad said he would get even. That’s when the bullying, taunting, shoving, and name calling started. It went on for weeks. Teachers tended to look the other way, because the jocks could do what they wanted. Cameron and Len felt like outsiders.

Then came the incident in April.

This synopsis was written by a San José Public Library librarian

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