Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER FOUR} NICHOLAS

ON FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1988, NICHOLAS Elliot awoke feeling ill. He had an ear infection and was taking medication for it, but that did not account for his malaise. He had made big plans for the day, and suddenly those plans seemed too big. The anxiety sickened him. “I didn’t feel like going to school,” he told Detective Adams. “But I knew I would get in trouble if I didn’t, so I went…. I was just so sick.”

He planned to bring his gun to school for the express purpose of scaring Billy Cutter, his tormentor, and at last getting some respect. He had bought the gun two months before, a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic pistol capable of firing thirty-two rounds before requiring the shooter to reload. His mother did not know about his acquisition. Nicholas told Adams he had hidden the gun in a bird cage, but Adams believed he probably kept it in his attic.

“I was scared,” Nicholas told the detective, “because I didn’t know how I would feel with a gun at school.”

He packed his backpack and caught his usual bus. He attended the first of his classes. “I was looking for him from the beginning,” Nicholas said. “I wasn’t angry… I wanted to scare him, to make him see how much of a wimp he was in front of everyone.”

During Nicholas’s ride to school, the knowledge of what he carried in his backpack and what he could do with it deeply frightened him. “I was scared,” he said. “I was looking for Billy, but I also was scared.”

At one point, he considered abandoning his mission. He could not find the boy and was surprised at the fear he felt walking around school with a gun. “I was kind of thinking about just hiding the gun and getting it later on… take it home and just leave it.”

“Just forget the whole thing?” Adams prompted.

“Well, sort of, yeah, I mean, I wasn’t planning to shoot them.”

Briefly he had imagined an alternative means of getting back at Billy Cutter. “I was thinking about having someone do something to him. Well, like, you know, beat him up and teach him not to pick on people. Just do something to him, you know. I wanted to scare him. That’s what I really wanted to do.”