Killer To Be Portrayed As ‘Sick Kid’ Defense Claims Mental Illness, Family Problems Led Teen To Attack

What happened to Barry Loukaitis?

This week, defense attorneys will begin trying to explain to a King County jury how a quiet, shy boy - a ninth-grader who earned good grades and had never been in trouble - became a specter in bad-guy black who shot down four people.

Three died - classmates Manual Vela and Arnold Fritz, both 14, and algebra teacher Leona Caires - in Loukaitis’ classroom attack at Moses Lake’s Frontier Junior High on Feb. 2, 1996. Natalie Hintz, then 13, survived but still has not recovered full use of her right arm and hand.

Loukaitis, 14 at the time, is being tried as an adult and would face life imprisonment if convicted of three counts of aggravated first-degree murder, one count each of attempted murder and second-degree assault, and 16 counts of kidnapping. Prosecutors are seeking to add a “deadly-weapon enhancement” to each count, which would add five years to the penalty for each crime.

Now 16, he is pleading innocent by reason of insanity.

The trial was moved here because of concerns about extensive media coverage in Grant County, 130 miles east.

Lead attorney Mike Frost says Loukaitis suffers from bipolar affective disorder, also called manic-depressive illness. The disorder is a hereditary problem that afflicted five previous generations of his family.

The boy’s unrecognized illness and other factors - including the breakdown of his parents’ marriage - combined to cause a “psychotic, delusional state” in which Loukaitis was unable to realize the nature and quality of his acts, Frost said Friday after Grant County Prosecutor John Knodell rested the people’s case.

“There were a lot of elements,” Frost said. “Mental disease was part of it, and traumatic events that occurred” shortly before the attack.

Loukaitis was and still is a “sick kid,” he said, though the boy now takes lithium, a drug that is considered particularly helpful in dealing with the manic phase of his illness. Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary (1993) defines “manic” as a mood state “characterized by excessive energy, poor impulse control, psychosis … and decreased sleep.”

The defense case will mark the introduction of expert witnesses - from both sides - to testify about Loukaitis’ mental state at the time of the killings.

Knodell contends the teen knew exactly what he was doing, and several prosecution witnesses spoke of his calm and control after he burst into his fifth-period algebra class, raised a .30-30 deer rifle to his shoulder and shot the first three people in the row of desks nearest the door.

He then shot Caires, to his right at the front of the room, and withdrew to a corner by the door where a chest-high computer desk formed a sort of barricade.

Former Frontier teacher-coach Jon Lane the hero of the nightmare who heard the shots from his nearby classroom, intervened and finally subdued Loukaitis testified Friday that he thought the boy was “very aware” of what he was doing.

Under cross-examination by Frost, Lane confirmed that he told police officers on that terrible day something to the effect that Loukaitis “was one of those forgotten kids, and quite frankly it didn’t surprise me that he would snap.”

“My impression of Barry was that he didn’t show emotion, positive or negative. I don’t think that’s very healthy,” he testified.

Later, outside the court, he spoke of the choices that define a life.

“Barry made a choice, I believe - he surrounded himself with violence” in books and movies, Lane said.

Knodell has said Loukaitis modeled his classroom assault on a similar siege described in the Stephen King novella “Rage,” published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The first-person story is told from a mental institution by the assailant. A well-thumbed, coverless copy was found in Loukaitis’ bedroom among a collection of King’s best-selling horror novels.

The prosecutor says Loukaitis also was fascinated by the movie “Natural Born Killers,” about a young couple who become serial killers and folk heroes, escaping justice in the end. The boy saw the film at least eight times, Knodell says.

In a 1994 interview with The Associated Press, the film’s director, Oliver Stone, said the movie - which drew widespread criticism for graphic violence - “was intended as satire.”

“You kill 52 people, and you have a massive (jail) breakout, and everything is large and bigger than life; ultimately it’s meant as satire to make you think about the violence and Americans’ schizophrenic attraction to it,” Stone said.

“We condemn it, we moralize about it, yet at the same time we sort of are sleazily fascinated by it and watch more and more of it,” he said.

“Is the aggression beast in all of us? What is the role of love? Is love the engine of survival? These are some of the questions, I think, it hopefully raises,” Stone said.

Several of Loukaitis’ classmates have testified about his “dark, frightening” poems, stories and statements - especially in the months before the attack.

On Aug. 26, the second day of testimony, Dana Shamlian, 16, told the court that his poems in their honors English class were “about death and killing and stuff.”

She said she heard Loukaitis say that “all humans are animals, and it’s the natural instinct of an animal to kill.”