Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER THIRTEEN} NICHOLAS

TWO DIFFERENT TEACHERS TOLD LORA FARLEY that her mother, Karen, was either tending to a wounded teacher or comforting a teacher who had been chased. Both scenarios seemed plausible to her. That’s the kind of woman her mother was, always giving and always getting involved. “I was like, ‘Well, that sounds right too. I can see her doing both of them, but I don’t know how she could do it at the same time.’”

Soon afterward, a teacher asked Will and Lora to come out into the hall.

“And one of my teachers was standing there and she was staring off… like out into where all the trailers were. She like gave me a hug and then they said, ‘Take them back in the auditorium.’

“So we went back in the auditorium, and then about ten or twenty minutes later, they came and got us and they took us into Pastor Sweet’s office, and my pastor was there.” (The Farleys were members of a different church but sent their kids to Atlantic Shores.) “They never said that, you know, your mom has been shot or your mom is dead. They just—my pastor was crying, and then, I mean, we just sort of knew what had happened.”

Sweet was at the hospital waiting as Sam Marino underwent emergency surgery. One of his assistants telephoned him there. “George, you need to get back here right away.”

“Why?”

“They found Karen Farley and she’s dead.”

“She came at you?” Det. Donald Adams asked Nicholas as their conversation proceeded.

Nicholas nodded.

“Did she say something to you about the gun?”

“She did say something, but I didn’t really hear her.”

“Then what did you do? You didn’t want her to take the gun, so what did you do?”

“It went off again.”

“Do you know how many times?”

“Once, I think. I’m pretty sure once.”

Adams spent the next few moments trying to pin Nicholas down on exactly what had occurred and in what order. Periodically his mother inserted questions and urged Nicholas to tell the truth.

“I know I went in there and she wanted the gun,” Nicholas said. “… She was saying something, but I didn’t hear her. She was coming at me and the gun went off.”

Mrs. Elliot asked impatiently, “You didn’t hear what she was saying?”

“I’m not deaf,” Nicholas said.

But he could not remember.

Bill Farley learned of his wife’s death about two o’clock that afternoon from his pastor, who arrived accompanied by a female police officer. The Virginia Beach police had not found Mrs. Farley until ninety minutes after the shootings when the head count determined she alone was missing. A teacher saw her through the window in her trailer, but could not reach her because the door was locked. One of the Virginia Beach officers rushed over and broke the glass with his baton.

“It was unbelievable,” Farley said, recalling his reaction. “Nobody gets shot at a Christian school. It’s in a church building. Come on, get real. People don’t get killed in church.”

Detective Adams believes Karen Farley may have walked in on Nicholas as he was preparing his weapon before his return to the trailer where he encountered Sam Marino and Susan Allen. When police found her, she was still wearing her winter coat. The first bullet had struck her forearm before entering her torso, suggesting to investigators that she had raised her hand either to ask for the gun or to plead for her life, or perhaps merely in another of those magical efforts to defend against the bullet.

Nicholas fired twice, investigators found.

The first shot knocked her down. Next, they deduced, Nicholas walked over to her body and shot her again, firing downward at point-blank range—“execution style,” as the local press put it. The bullet passed through her body and lodged in the trailer floor. The formal cause of death as stated by the state medical examiner was “gunshot wounds of trunk perforating heart. Internal hemorrhage.”

The gun contained a half-empty magazine, one of the six fully loaded thirty-two-round magazines that Nicholas had brought with him to school. “It’s the only magazine of all the six that misfires,” Adams said with a touch of awe. “If he’d gotten one more round off, it would have stopped misfiring and he could have done whatever he wanted at that school.”

The next night, Lora and a friend, Jennifer Cook, picked out what Lora’s mother would wear for her funeral. They also wrapped Christmas presents that Mrs. Farley had hidden in a closet. Months later, in March 1989, Lora and Will would find yet another cache of presents salted away ever so secretly.

“I just try to think about the good times that we had together,” Farley told me as we spoke in the living room of his home. “I miss her, I wish she was still around.” He had remarried, but clearly the pain remained acute. He is a gravel-voiced man of the old school, but as he described his life after Karen’s death, his voice broke. “She was a person I spent almost twenty years of my life with. She was the mother of my children. We all have to go on and make the best of it, but it’s really hard. We were real close. We didn’t have any friends, like lots of people have friends—you know, where they have ‘Bob and Carol’ over all the time. We didn’t have anybody like that. We were each other’s best friends. I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

The more Farley learned about the gun and the way Nicholas had acquired it, the angrier he became.

Soon after Nicholas Elliot’s arrest, the state of Virginia formally charged him with one count of murder, four counts of attempted murder, and fourteen other related offenses. Three months later, in April 1989, Nicholas’s mother filed a $1 million lawsuit against Atlantic Shores Christian School, alleging the school should have known about the harassment aimed at her son, and had failed to monitor his emotional adjustment, thereby contributing to what the lawsuit describes as the “mental breakdown” that prompted Nicholas’s shooting spree. She later withdrew the suit.

On October 31, 1989, during a court hearing, Nicholas pleaded guilty to killing Karen Farley and to thirteen of the remaining charges. In return for his plea, the state agreed to drop the five least serious charges. During the hearing the prosecutor detailed the evidence against him. Nicholas sat at the defense table with his fingers in his ears.

On December 12, almost one year to the day since the shootings, Nicholas attended his sentencing hearing. The defense presented three character witnesses, including his mother and his barber, Jimmy Edney, who lived just across the street from Nicholas. Edney testified that he had known Nicholas ever since the boy had moved onto the block. He described how Nicholas had done his grocery shopping and tended his lawn after he had returned home from a stay in the hospital. “I wasn’t able to handle it,” Edney said. “… I never had any trouble out of him. He always correspond to me very well.”

Judge Alan E. Rosenblatt found the testimony unconvincing. “These were offenses that were deliberately and cold-bloodedly thought out by Nicholas Elliot,” he told the court. “If the gun had not jammed, there’s no question in my mind I’d be presiding over a mass murderer.” He described Nicholas as a “time bomb” that had finally exploded. “In this court’s opinion,” he said, “he’s a time bomb that could go off again.”

He asked Nicholas if he had anything to say before he pronounced sentence.

Softly, almost too quietly to be heard, Nicholas said, “I’m sorry for what I did.”

“I’m sure you are, Mr. Elliot. But it’s too little, too late.”

He sentenced Nicholas as an adult to life in prison for the murder of Karen Farley. He added another 114 years for the remaining felony charges, then suspended fifty of them. Even at this, however, Nicholas would be eligible for parole fifteen years later, in 2004. He was assigned to the Southampton Correctional Center in Capron, Virginia.

His mother held a Bible throughout the hearing. “My child did not get justice,” she said afterward. “He’s just a child.”

Curtis Williams too had been convicted and sentenced. His trial, in March 1989, brought out details of how Nicholas Elliot had acquired his gun that William Farley had not known. One afternoon, after reading fragments of testimony in a local newspaper, Farley decided to explore the possibility of suing both Guns Unlimited and S.W. Daniel. “Number one, I just wanted to get the attention of the gun shop, to say, ‘hey, you all have done something wrong. And just because ATF didn’t do anything to you doesn’t mean it was right, it just means you did it and got away with it.’”

He himself kept a handgun for home-defense; Karen Farley too had practiced with it. But the Cobray was different, Farley said. “There’s just no reason for that kind of weapon to be sold in the United States. If you need something like that to protect your home, you better move.”

He approached Randy Singer, a young Norfolk attorney whose wife taught part-time at Atlantic Shores and whose children were enrolled at the school. Singer and his family had been returning from a trip to Disney World when they learned of the shootings from a news report on the car radio. “One thing that struck me about Bill,” Singer said, “was that he was looking for something good to come out of this tragedy.”

Singer told Farley that he too had begun to think there might be grounds for a lawsuit. Farley hired him. In August 1989, Singer filed a negligence and product-liability lawsuit in Virginia state court charging Guns Unlimited with negligence in selling the gun to Nicholas, and charging S.W. Daniel with having indiscriminately marketed an unreasonably dangerous gun, one whose risks far exceeded its utilitarian value. The suit was one of an increasing number of such actions brought in courthouses around the country, including one filed by the family of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, the murdered costar of “My Sister Sam,” against the dealer who sold the murder weapon. The Schaeffer case was settled before trial, however. Farley did not want an out-of-court settlement. “Bill was in this case for the principle of the thing from day one,” Singer said. “His feeling has always been that if this case can make gun dealers follow the spirit and letter of the law, then all the better.”

The lawsuit progressed slowly. The first judge assigned to the case became ill, and soon died. The usual paper combat of motions, cross-motions, and discovery proceedings dragged on for nearly two years. The case finally went to trial in January 1992. In his opening remarks, carefully tailored to avoid alienating a jury from the heart of Second Amendment country, Singer said, “This is not a case about gun control. The plaintiff is not here today asking you to adopt some new statute or legislation. This is a case about existing laws.”

He presented testimony from Lora and Will Farley, Curtis Williams, James Dick, ATF special agent Raymond Rowley, and others, including Col. Leonard Supenski, the Baltimore County police firearms expert. Supenski testified that in the hands of a juvenile, a gun like the Cobray was “death waiting to happen.”

Judge John K. Moore struck his testimony from the record, calling it inflammatory and prejudicial.

At one point, Beverly Cook, principal of the Atlantic Shores Christian School, took the stand to describe the impact of the shootings on the Farley family. Karen Farley, she said, had been the force that held the family together. It was Cook’s daughter, Jennifer, who spent the second evening after the shooting with Lora wrapping the presents and choosing Karen Farley’s funeral garb. The scene was so wrenching, Cook said, obviously fighting tears, that she was concerned for her own daughter’s mental health, how the trauma would affect her. At one point Cook herself visited the Farley home. “I left physically ill. It wasn’t the same home. It was darker, or I may have perceived it that way. Lora was boiling hot dogs while I helped Will with his schoolwork. It wasn’t alive like it had been. I just thought, this is one night, it’s tearing me up. They have to face this every night.”

On Valentine’s Day she called Bill Farley to check on him before going out to celebrate with her own husband. He was home by himself.

“I feel like Bill was just on automatic pilot for those months afterward,” Cook said. “He’d tell me he was fine, but I never felt that he was.”

Things got tougher still for the Farleys.

Bill Farley lost his job, found another, and lost that one too. “Within a six-month period,” he told me with a rueful laugh, “I lost two jobs and a wife.”

He told the court, “I really couldn’t imagine my children having a better mother than she was.”

The jury ruled in Farley’s favor, which in itself constituted something of a landmark in the history of firearms legislation, but the jury awarded the family only $105,000. “I was real happy that we won,” Farley said, “there was no question about that. The main thing we were interested in was winning. I was disappointed in the award, and there’s no question about that either. I have no idea what they were thinking about, with the numbers they came up with. I just have no idea what they had on their minds.”

Still, he said, he accomplished his goal. “I definitely got the attention of the gun store. But we didn’t get their attention as well as we had hoped. I gave it my best shot. I felt something needed to be done. We did all we could do.”

In one respect, however, the suit had failed entirely.

Long before the trial Judge Moore cut S.W. Daniel free of the case. In an order sustaining arguments made by S.W. Daniel’s attorneys, Moore wrote that reigning legal theories concerning negligence and product liability dictated that the “plaintiff must first show ‘goods were unreasonably dangerous for [the] use to which they would ordinarily be put or for some other reasonably foreseeable purpose.’”

One way to establish unreasonable danger would have been to prove that the gun was defective. But Farley, the judge wrote, had not made any such allegation. And even if he had, he might have had difficulty persuading the court a defect existed.

“Unfortunately,” Judge Moore wrote, “the weapon worked.”