Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER ELEVEN} NICHOLAS

WHEN NICHOLAS ELLIOT LOADED HIS COBRAY before beginning his shooting spree, he selected one of the six clips he had crammed into his backpack. Each clip was long, slender, and gray, with a powerful spring that forced the stacked cartridges upward after the topmost round was fired and stripped away. The clips, also known as magazines or, in gunspeak, simply “mags,” were designed to inject bullets into the Cobray’s receiver much the way a kid’s Pez dispenser keeps presenting new blocks of candy.

To a cynic, God may have seemed suspiciously absent from Atlantic Shores that morning. The faithful, however, believe that God did indeed intercede, at the point where Nicholas chose that first clip. Forensic investigators later test-fired Nicholas’s gun repeatedly, inserting each of the six magazines. All worked perfectly, except that first one. It misfed cartridges to the gun, but only to a point about halfway down the magazine, the fifteen-round point, where it began feeding bullets correctly. By the time Nicholas broke into Hutch Matteson’s class, he had emptied it of roughly fourteen cartridges, many of them ejected unfired as Nicholas cleared jam after jam.

Cutter was splayed on the floor some three or four feet in front of the rest of the students. He watched in terror as Nicholas aimed the gun in his direction. “It looked like he was pulling the trigger,” Cutter recalled. “I wasn’t sure. And then he was messing with the clip.”

The gun had jammed yet again, and now Nicholas stood before Cutter striking and jiggling the clip, trying to get the weapon to work properly.

Still fumbling with the gun, Nicholas took a step backward. He glanced over his left shoulder.

Hutch Matteson charged him, covering the dozen or so feet at a dead run. Nicholas, busy trying to clear the jam, looked startled. He stared directly at Matteson and in that instant managed to get the gun to work.

“I was probably three to four feet away from him as that shot went off,” Matteson recalled. “There was a tremendous ringing in my ear.”

Matteson closed his eyes, then opened them again and continued his charge. He grabbed Nicholas by the shirt and threw him headfirst into an adjacent wall. Nicholas fell, his gun thudding to the floor. Matteson threw his body onto Nicholas and shoved the Cobray aside.

“I don’t have the gun,” Nicholas cried. “I give up.”

Matteson struck him in the head. He stretched Nicholas’s arms out on the floor, grabbed his wrists, and held him pinned under his weight.

“What in the world would make you want to do anything like this?” Matteson screamed.

“They hate me. They make fun of me. They hit me.”

“Who hit you?”

Nicholas named Billy Cutter.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Matteson said.

As Matteson held Nicholas pinned to the floor, waiting for help, he heard Nicholas list the names of other people he had planned to shoot that morning.

Rev. George Sweet, senior pastor at Atlantic Shores and president of the school, was sitting in his office when he heard someone cry, “He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun.” Suddenly there was a lot of commotion, a lot of shouting in the outer office and in the hall. It took him a few moments to make out the words and to appreciate that something grave had occurred. Until then he had been contemplating nothing more momentous than the staff Christmas party set for that night.

Someone led him to Hutch Matteson’s trailer, where he saw Nicholas pinned to the floor. He then crossed to Sam Marino’s trailer and found him lying, literally, in a pool of blood. “He looked at me,” Sweet recalled, “and he said, ‘I’m going to die.’”

The two began praying together.

Police and medical help arrived quickly. An ambulance took Sam Marino to the hospital. Sweet followed in his car.

Marino’s wounds were serious, but Sweet knew things could have been so much worse. At least no one had been killed. But just to make sure everyone else was indeed all right, the faculty at Atlantic Shores gathered staff and students together in the church auditorium to conduct a head count. Many students still had not realized a shooting had occurred, including Will and Lora Farley, whose mother, Karen, was the school’s business teacher.

“I was like wondering where my mom was,” Lora recalled a long while later as she sat facing a courtroom that had suddenly gone dead quiet. “We weren’t really concerned or anything, but when I first entered the auditorium, this girl said to me—me and my friends were laughing and stuff because we didn’t really think anything was going on—and this girl said to me, ‘Someone has been shot,’ but it wasn’t my mom. It was another teacher, and I was like—I couldn’t understand. I was like, ‘Somebody has been shot at school?’

“We prayed and stuff that everything would be all right, and then we just like left it up to the Lord. We just sat there really being quiet and stuff. I asked Will—I said, ‘Have you seen Mom?’

“And he said, ‘No.’”