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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Scottish Town Wracked By Senseless Slaughter Of Innocents

Louis J. Salome Cox News Service

It’s as if the River Allan, in a rush of unexplained wrath, swept over its banks and flooded families and friends with blood and tears, with shock and stunning disbelief.

No one was untouched. No one will ever forget.

For some reason, which probably will never be fully explained, a loner with a passion for guns snapped. Carrying a battery of four pistols, he walked into the town’s main elementary school on Wednesday morning and murdered 16 five-year-old children and one teacher before killing himself in Britain’s worst-ever shooting rampage.

It was the wrong crime in the wrong place victimizing the wrong people.

“We dropped our children off at 8:30 and we picked them up dead three hours later. How is that for you?” said Robert Bruce, 25, whose two schoolaged children escaped the carnage.

Grown men wept in bars and shouted at outsiders to get lost. Others tried to conceal their sorrow by swamping it with alcohol.

In the bars and homes of this town of 10,000, silence and grief competed with anger and disbelief as the people groped for ways to release their emotions. Those who didn’t shout, “Get out of here, leave us alone,” said it with their eyes or their grim silence.

Thomas Hamilton, 43 and jobless from neighboring Stirling, wounded 12 other fiveyear-olds, three critically, and two other teachers in the shooting spree before he blew apart his own secret insanity and left the grieving town to wonder why.

“This is a community in tears tonight,” said Maxwell Craig, a local clergyman.

Parents and grandparents waited for more than three hours outside the Dunblane Primary School to find out if their children had lived or died. The fortunate families rejoiced, then grieved for the dead and their families.

Dunblane is a quiet, close-knit cathedral town at the foot of the Scottish highlands. The River Allan runs through it.

“Our whole town is hurt. Maybe the worst thing is that we will never know why,” said Gary Richardson, 19. Richardson hugged his girlfriend, Laura Thomson, 16, in a doorway where they tried to banish the pain.

“It’s not really sunk in to everybody yet,” said Richardson. “You hope you’ll wake up in the morning and it’ll go away. But you know it won’t.”