Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER TWO} NICHOLAS

THE NAME VIRGINIA BEACH MAY CONJURE weathered cottages set among rippled dunes, but the city has far more in common with places like Ocean City, Maryland, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rental houses, motels, and seasonal apartments jam the Atlantic coastline. Tract developments stretch westward, spaced by mini-malls and shopping plazas of the kind anchored by discount hardware stores. The sprawl of concrete and plywood has erased the city’s borders, leaving a tightly entwined ganglion of six cities, the others being Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Newport News, and Hampton. Together they occupy a swath of metropolitan terrain larger in geographic expanse than Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore combined and share many of the same big-city problems, including widespread drug abuse, gang warfare, troubled schools, and the ever-increasing incidence of gunshot injury and death. Virginia Beach alone is home to 428 federally licensed gun dealers, 30 percent more than Baltimore even though Baltimore’s population is 60 percent larger.

Mapmakers, loath to tease apart the six cities, identify the area collectively as Hampton Roads, the name of the shipping channel that links the James River with Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond. The Roads, as local disc jockeys call the region, no doubt ranked high on the former Soviet Union’s list of American targets most worthy of nuclear obliteration. The region in and around Hampton Roads comprises a good chunk of America’s military-industrial complex, including Langley Air Force Base, Fort Eustis, the U.S. Naval Station at Norfolk, the Newport News shipyard, and the U.S. Naval Weapons Station on the York River. Virginia Beach, which occupies the eastern rim of Hampton Roads, is itself home to the Army’s Fort Story, the Camp Pendleton Naval Amphibious Base, and the Oceana Naval Air Station. Life here is textured by the roar of fighter planes and the thumping applause of giant helicopters. Where there is water, there are fighting ships, pale gray in the noon sun, spiky black in backlit silhouette.

The second most influential force here is the Baptist Church. Branches seem to sprout every few blocks or so in simple frame houses and soaring concrete towers. As in many cities now around the country and particularly in the South, the churches in Hampton Roads provide more than spiritual solace. They offer parents a sheltered alternative to the harsh and at times profoundly dangerous conditions that exist now in so many urban public schools. The Atlantic Shores Baptist Church in the Kempsville Road district of Virginia Beach, a suburban expanse of closely packed tract homes, is one of the largest churches in Hampton Roads, with four thousand official members and seventeen hundred who show up at church each Sunday. By the church’s own estimate it has the third-largest congregation in the Roads.

The church itself is a sturdy if austere structure, with a concrete spire that each evening casts a long swordlike shadow deep into the shopping plaza across the street. The church school, the Atlantic Shores Christian School, offers fully accredited elementary, middle, and high-school programs and draws many children of the faculty of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network University, located nearby on the Centerville Turnpike. The school consists of permanent and portable classrooms arrayed around a courtyard. As of December 16, 1988, it had five hundred students, of whom only twenty-three were black, and seemed as sheltered a place as one could possibly find. Shakedowns, beatings, gunplay, the stuff of a contemporary urban public-school education—all this occurred elsewhere. “As far as I know, we’d never even had a fistfight before,” said George Sweet, senior pastor of the church and president of the school.

Every school, of course, has its tensions and petty rivalries among students. Every school has its loners and outcasts who don’t fit the woof and weave of school culture. One such student at Atlantic Shores was Nicholas Elliot—to be exact, Nicholas Walden Herman Elliot—a lean, gangly boy who lived in Norfolk’s Campostella neighborhood. Campostella is a black community of neat, tree-lined streets separated from the bulk of Norfolk by the Elizabeth River. He lived with his mother in a small, green frame house in a block of similarly styled houses.

The fact Nicholas was black would by itself have kept him from readily blending in with the other students at Atlantic Shores, although school officials and students insist the school did its best to make its black students feel welcome. In Nicholas’s case, his color amplified a gulf that would have existed anyway. He had dyslexia, a learning disability that is difficult to diagnose yet terribly efficient at undermining the self-esteem of children, who must endure its constant interference in such basic functions as reading and writing. A Virginia Beach psychiatrist, Dr. Erwin D. Sax, examined Nicholas on May 5, 1989, and found he possessed “borderline to low-average” intelligence. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Duncan S. Wallace, would later testify that Nicholas had a mental age of twelve or thirteen and exhibited what he called a schizoid personality disorder: “A lack of feeling, a lack of sensitivity to other people…. It leads you to a very isolated, shy, withdrawn sort of life situation.”

Nicholas had no close friends, just glancing school-hall relationships. Race, according to Nicholas, had indeed proved a powerful dividing line. He told Det. Donald Adams, a Virginia Beach homicide investigator, how the other students would pick on him. “They called me racial names and were like racial to me, and they punched me and hit me.”

The detective, a youthful-looking man of middle height with a mustache and an easy manner, tried hard to make Nicholas feel comfortable during his interrogation. He got him a Sprite to drink. He called his mother and had her join them—a mistake, as it happens, for her anger and sorrow would soon distort the interview and make it virtually impossible for the detective to get a clear sense of what had occurred an hour before. It would be the only detailed, publicly available statement Nicholas would make about what he had done.

The worst antagonist, according to Nicholas, was Billy Cutter. The name is my invention, although Billy’s true identity would not escape any student at Atlantic Shores. Billy was an abrasive white boy who seemed to vex everyone, not just Nicholas. The two shared many of the same classes. At times they seemed to be friends, at times the worst kind of enemies. “Like fire and ice,” as Rev. Mr. Sweet put it.

Billy would call Nicholas a nigger. Nicholas would call Billy a honky or white cracker. Half the time Billy would be the first to start calling names, according to Billy; half the time Nicholas would start. “The whole thing was a joke,” Billy testified later. He said Nicholas laughed about it. Billy added, “It was nothing I thought serious.”

But the relationship had a profoundly dark edge to it. At six foot one, 170 pounds, Billy was far taller and heavier than Nicholas. From time to time, at odd moments, Billy would shove and strike Nicholas. “There was some slapping,” Dr. Wallace testified at Nicholas’s sentencing hearing. “There was some sticking him with a probe in biology…. There was hitting in the stomach or in the belly area… repeated acts of this type.”

Dr. Wallace found that Nicholas had suppressed his anger and fear to the point where, that Friday morning, he experienced a “disassociative” episode. “He kept so much within him, like a pressure cooker,” Dr. Wallace said. “It built and built and then exploded, and that was the accumulation of all of the repressed and suppressed emotions.”

One week before Nicholas decided to go hunting for Billy, he and the other boy got into another war of words, this time during gym class. This time, however, Billy’s taunting seemed to wrench something loose inside Nicholas. The taunting and teasing may indeed have been a perverse game indulged in equally by both boys, but suddenly it became something far more sinister. As Nicholas left the class, he shouted to Billy, “I’m going to kill you.”

“I can’t take him picking on me,” Nicholas told Adams. He had been afraid, he said, that Billy Cutter “would end up killing me. He always threatened me…. Like he would hit me in the back of my neck.”

His mother interrupted, “You could have gone to the phone and called me at work.”

“If he would have broke my neck,” Nicholas said, “my life would have been over. He kicked me. He hit me in the back of the neck.”

“Not all people, bullies, can threaten you,” his mother said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But, Mom, he actually hit me and I don’t want my neck—if he would have broke my neck—”

“I’m trying to reason with you. You could have gone to the office and asked the people to call your mom. The other kids do. You could have called me.”

“You only use that for when you are sick, Mom,” Nicholas protested. “You can’t use it for being threatened. The teachers are supposed to handle it, but they don’t do anything.”

Nicholas seemed able to find solace consistently only in his pet birds, and in guns. Everyone at school knew of Nicholas’s passion for firearms. It served only to widen the gulf between him and his peers. At lunch while all the other boys were reading skateboard magazines, he’d thumb through Guns & Ammo. His locker was papered with glossy ads depicting powerful handguns. In conversation, according to a fellow student, Nicholas loved to discuss “which bullets had more firepower.” His classmates worried about Nicholas. One told a Norfolk newspaper, “All the kids said he was going to shoot someone.”

Even the guns became fodder for taunts from Billy Cutter, and from other students. “They were always making fun of me,” Nicholas told Adams. “They always said stuff: ‘You know so much about guns. You never even shot a gun in your life.’”

His mother worried most about her son on Fridays, the day, she believed, when passions kept in check all week were most prone to be released. “Nicholas,” she said. “Why would you take a gun today? You said that Billy hadn’t hit you since Wednesday, so why would you take a gun on Friday? I told you how Fridays are. You lay low on Friday, because everybody is upset.”

When she arrived at headquarters to meet Adams and her son, she was consumed with grief and guilt over Nicholas’s attack on the school.

“I will be up praying all night, all day tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to pray.”

Nicholas, trying to rein in the day and get things normal again, abruptly shifted the conversation to matters of daily routine.

“Are you going to work?” he asked.

“No. I don’t want to go to work.”

Genuinely perplexed, Nicholas asked, “Why not?”

“Because that’s what got me, trying to work and earn, to try to keep my head above water and losing you.”

“You can take my money out of the bank,” Nicholas offered.

“Gaining the world,” his mother cried, “and losing my soul—”

“It’s not losing me,” Nicholas pleaded. “It’s just people picking on me. That’s all it is. If God would have just stopped them—if I was nice enough and He would have made it so they were nice to me and didn’t hit me, everything would be fine. That’s as simple as it is, or He could have just made them keep their hands to theirselves. That’s very simple.”

His mother, during a later hearing, described Nicholas as a “very obedient, quiet child.” She and Nicholas had moved to Norfolk from California in 1983, so that she could care for her ailing mother. Nicholas’s father, Clarence, stayed behind.

Nicholas had always done poorly in school. In California, he failed the first grade. “At that time,” Dr. Wallace testified, “he was tested in the California school system and started in learning disability classes, which continued until the time the family left California.” By the time Dr. Wallace saw him, in April and May of 1989, Nicholas was sixteen and in the tenth grade. Dr. Wallace’s examination, however, found Nicholas lagging far behind his fellow sophomores. “On the wide-range achievement testing, he was reading at about a seventh-grade level,” Dr. Wallace testified. “But his spelling I believe was at a second- or third-grade level, and his math about a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”

On arriving in Norfolk, Mrs. Elliot enrolled Nicholas in Kempsville Elementary School, a public school, but in September 1987 transferred him from the public system to Atlantic Shores. Even though Atlantic Shores would cost an additional $240 a month—hard to afford on her salary as a public-school nurse in the city of Chesapeake—she felt the school would be well worth the cost. She told the court, “The public schools seem to have a lot of problems, and he was a child who needed special help, and I felt in a Christian environment he would get that help, and I was advised he would.”

Atlantic Shores brought no miracles, however. School remained a chore for Nicholas. Once, he overheard a female teacher and a secretary discussing his poor progress. “She said something about getting help in English that I am not good in,” he told Detective Adams. “She said, ‘I can’t believe this. He started off with a third-grade book… and he can’t even do that.’”

“Did it make you mad?” Adams asked.

“I can’t believe she was talking about me. She didn’t have to tell the whole world.”

Adams asked Nicholas if he had overheard anything else, from other teachers.

“I’ve heard the secretary say that ‘he’s just the worst kid in school.’ I heard her say that.”

Adams then asked Nicholas which teachers in particular seemed to dislike him. He named a few, but the list omitted Karen Farley, a popular teacher who taught typing and other business skills, and whose own two children, Lora and Will, were also enrolled in the school.

When Adams asked Nicholas whether he got along with Mrs. Farley, Nicholas nodded yes.

This was clearly evident in a videotape Mrs. Farley made of her typing class earlier in the school year. The camera captured her voice as she simultaneously filmed the class and reminded her students to type without looking at the keys. At one point, as the typewriters clatter away, she asks the few students present if any other students are likely to show up that morning. She learns that two students, Nicholas and a girl named Shirley, have simply stepped out of the room for a moment, Nicholas for a drink of water. “Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Farley says. “I’ll have to get Nicholas. He’ll just die if I don’t get a picture of him.”

And soon she does. Nicholas sits facing the camera, a big, endearing smile on his face. He is wearing a white polo shirt, a black jacket, and light pants. He is small boned, lean, well groomed, his hair trimmed close. In this image, in the bright sun that floods the classroom, he is just a boy. Nothing in the smile suggests the stress and anger he is supposed to have felt—although by the time this videotape was made, he had already acquired his gun. The smile is one of brilliant delight.

Nicholas did not hate Karen Farley. It is doubtful anyone could have. She spoke in a soft, measured way, with a Tidewater pace and cadence. She was devoted to the school. The morning of December 16, 1988, she returned a check the school had given her as payment for the extra time she had put into helping produce the school yearbook. She told Rev. Mr. Sweet the school needed the money more than she.

She had begun her teaching career in 1970 at Booker T. Washington High School, an all-black school then on the verge of being integrated. The school had decided to integrate the faculty first, then the student body. She stayed for three years until the strains and dangers of teaching there and of trying to motivate a group of disinterested city kids wore her down. She resigned to become a first-grade teacher at the Faith Christian School, operated by Faith Baptist Church in Chesapeake. She left after one semester to have her first baby, Lora. A boy, Will, followed.

Mrs. Farley stayed home with her children until 1978, when she returned to Faith. She continued teaching there until the school closed in 1987, at which point she joined the teaching staff at Atlantic Shores. A colleague from the Faith Christian School, Bonnie Lovelace, recalled a night when she and Mrs. Farley found themselves still at work long after everyone else had gone home.

“Do you think anyone knows we’re here?” Mrs. Farley asked.

Probably not, her friend answered.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Farley said. “Someday we’ll make headlines.”