Letter from the Editor: A horrific day 25 years ago at Thurston High

There was a time, not so long ago, when the horror of a mass school shooting was an extraordinary, almost unheard-of event. That was the case 25 years ago when Kip Kinkel opened fire in Thurston High School’s cafeteria.

The Oregonian’s newsroom leaped into action. The anniversary of the May 21, 1998, shooting in Springfield reminds me of how much has changed and how much remains the same.

OregonLive was a tiny startup, barely a year old. The Oregonian was a print juggernaut. The Friday paper that would carry the news totaled more than 250 pages.

Reporters had rudimentary flip phones but not smartphones with computer capabilities that are common today. Google, now ubiquitous, launched later in 1998.

I had been named managing editor just weeks earlier. When I heard of the shooting, Quinton Smith was my first call.

“I was the assignment editor at The O, which meant getting to the office about 7-7:30,” he recalled. “I was driving into work from Damascus, where we lived, when you called me.”

One reporter on the way to an assignment in Salem heard the news and immediately changed course. Dana Tims, about to move to Portland but still living in Eugene, had just hit Interstate 5 and quickly turned around.

We sent waves of reporters and photographers on the two-hour drive to the Eugene area. Katy Muldoon recalls sharing a car with then Metro columnist Steve Duin.

“I dropped Steve at the school and I headed to the Kinkels’ neighborhood, an upscale, woodsy subdivision in the hills east of Springfield,” she said. “Reporters gathered in front of the family’s home as police swarmed the place. Suddenly, we were urgently asked to move way down the street. We later learned that the urgency was because police had found the house, where Kip Kinkel’s parents were found murdered, had been booby trapped — wired to explode.”

Automotive editor Jerry Boone was in the newsroom early so he went as well. “We broke about every speed limit there was on the way down. I forget who the photographer was, but his fingernails were probably a permanent part of the car’s dashboard by the time we got there,” he said.

“I remember the scene as being one of horrible confusion and crying kids,” Boone said. “We talked to a couple of them, but most of them were in shock.”

Kinkel, 15, mainly used a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle, killing two students and wounding 25 others. I shudder to think how many would have died had he used the powerful weapons today’s mass shooters tend to favor.

Newly minted regional editor Bridget Otto remembers running up the stairs to the fourth-floor newsroom with her to-go cup of coffee. She ran the coverage from Portland with crime team editor Susan Gage.

“There was no checking Twitter for minute-to-minute updates, let alone finding someone’s friends via Facebook,” Otto said. “You had to be there and get the news yourself.”

Gage underscored the limitations of 1998. “No shared documents or folders that people could work out of from multiple locations. No way to file a story from a phone or laptop; no ability to text quotes or information,” she said. “We took dictation over the phone. Reporters called in snippets of information, quotes from interviews they’d gathered, and we typed them into files so the writers in the newsroom could follow other leads and start assembling stories.”

Smith had long thought the newsroom struggled with major breaking news events when editors and reporters were far apart. “When you called that morning, I suggested that this would be a good time to send reporters and at least one editor and photo editor and set up a mobile newsroom,” he said. “You said, ‘Do it.’”

He arranged to rent a conference room and 10 hotel rooms at the Springfield Red Lion, near Thurston. The newsroom IT manager, John Hamlin, grabbed 10 desktop computers, yards of cable and other devices, put them in his truck and headed out.

When Smith got to the hotel, he asked for an open phone to the downtown Portland newsroom. It would run 24/7.

Maxine Bernstein had just joined The Oregonian staff, and that day happened to be her turn as general assignment breaking news reporter. She packed a small overnight bag and headed south.

“I drove straight to Thurston High and remember just a state of confusion…” she said. “Police were putting together a list of students or staff who were wounded and taken to the hospital — worried parents clamoring to learn if their child was safe or not, or at the hospital — and students trying to reunite with their parents who raced to the school upon learning of the shooting.”

She called in updates to the makeshift Red Lion newsroom. “I had a pager, a heavy gray cell phone and couplers with a mobile computer,” she said.

It wasn’t like today, Gage said, where every reporter has “a cell phone that could serve as their mobile computer with their own ability to take photos, videos, write stories, send them in, text information for follow-up.”

In another reminder of how things have changed in the last quarter-century, Smith remembers a conversation with Dick Johnston, assistant to the editor, a budget hawk who loved to wield his red “rejected” stamp on expense reports. About a month after the shooting, he called.

“Quinton, can I see you in my office for a minute?”

“This is not usually good news,” Smith said dryly.

He sat down and Johnston slid a phone bill from the Springfield Red Lion across the desk.

The total at the bottom? $32,000.

Smith’s first words were, “Oh, crap.” He was pretty sure he’d be paying it off $100 a month over the rest of his career. Then he asked if Publisher Fred Stickel had seen it.

“Yes,” said Johnston.

“What did he say?” Smith asked.

“‘Keep covering the news,’” Johnston replied.

Smith made a hasty exit.

For many of us, the Thurston shooting was the biggest story — by far — we’d ever covered. There was shock that day and in the days after. There were tears in the newsroom and secondary trauma from talking to survivors and grieving family members.

For reporter Muldoon, one of her strongest memories was an interview with an emergency room manager the next day.

“He found an empty exam room and closed the door. He sat on the exam table as I took the doctor’s stool,” she said. “He quietly started to answer questions about the chaotic, bloody emergency department scene the previous day. Students’ gunshot wounds were so gruesome he couldn’t bring himself to describe in detail exactly how bullets ravage flesh and organs, but explained that nothing is as devastating to a human body.”

Everyone in the hospital worked long past their regular hours, trying to save the wounded.

“Finally, he headed home,” Muldoon said. “He parked his car and, as he made his way up his front path, he heard a voice from above, asking if he was OK.

“It was his young son, perched in a tree limb. The boy told him, ‘I’m up here if you need me, Dad,’” she said. “Describing that small detail set off a flood of tears, first his, then mine.”

If the world is as it should be, that little boy would be around 30 now.

Columbine happened a year later. Then, a seemingly unending series of mass shootings, including three more in Oregon, up to the present.

The headlines from the next day’s newspaper foreshadow years of headlines to come: “Most adults missed warning signs.” “Search for roots of youth violence often futile.” And, “Lawmakers may revisit gun control.”