They Were Only First-Graders

It began as a playground scuffle.

It ended a day later, with a 6-year-old boy standing before classmate Kayla Rolland with a stolen handgun.

He fired. The shot bewildered a nation that thought it had witnessed the depths of schoolyard violence. And 6-year-old Kayla was dead.

The shooting Tuesday at Buell Elementary near Flint is the latest and, in many ways, most incomprehensible of the shootings that have plagued U.S. schools in recent years.

They were only first-graders, players in a deadly drama who spoke in the patter of children.

In the hours after Kayla’s death, her young classmates reconstructed the moments leading to the shot. They might have been describing any of thousands of spats that take place every day in grade schools. The accounts sometimes varied, except for the part about the gun.

“I ain’t your friend,” classmate Brandon Barnefske quoted the boy as saying before school Tuesday. Kayla’s death produced as much anger as dismay in the tiny school district, and across the country.

Speaking in West Palm Beach, Fla., President Bill Clinton cited the shooting in urging Congress to pass stringent handgun-control laws, including safety measures such as childproof locks.

“How did that child get that gun?” Clinton demanded. “Why could the child fire the gun? If we have the technology today to put in these child safety locks, why don’t we do it?”

The shooting stunned even gun control advocates immersed in the details of school violence. If a 6-year-old can get a gun, they said, the problem is worse than anyone thought.

“This just sickens me. It’s amazing that it keeps happening over and over again,” said Lori Mizzi-Spillane, the mother of two preschool girls and local coordinator for the Million Mom March, a national movement calling for stricter gun laws. “What is it going to take now for people to wake up? Next time, it may be your child.”

First-grader Cornell Harris, 6, had a reading class with Kayla.

“She was the best reader in the class, and she was real nice,” Cornell said. “I feel bad because she died.”

Deadly sequence of events

It was about 10 a.m. Tuesday when the 22 children in Kayla’s first-grade class began to line the outside hallway, police said.

The suspect was one of five children still inside the classroom. It was then that the boy pulled a .32-caliber handgun from his pants pocket, pointed it at one classmate and then whirled and fired at Kayla, striking her once in the neck, according to police and prosecutors, who based their account on interviews with students and Kayla’s teacher.

In the chaos that ensued after the shooting, authorities said, the boy bolted into the hallway and into the boys’ bathroom, where he stuffed the handgun into a trash can. When he emerged from the bathroom, a teacher and the school’s principal held him until police arrived.

Eric King, the Mount Morris po lice chief, said the boy denied pulling the trigger. Instead, the boy told detectives he had given the gun to another student at some point before the shooting.

Authorities don’t buy the story.

“The shooter had the gun at all times,” said Genesee County Prosecutor Arthur Busch.