Lethal Passage Read Free Page A

was nice enough and He would have made it so they were nice to me and didn’t hit me, everything would be fine. That’s as simple as it is, or He could have just made them keep their hands to theirselves. That’s very simple.”
    His mother, during a later hearing, described Nicholas as a “very obedient, quiet child.” She and Nicholas had moved to Norfolk from California in 1983, so that she could care for her ailing mother. Nicholas’s father, Clarence, stayed behind.
    Nicholas had always done poorly in school.In California, he failed the first grade. “At that time,” Dr. Wallace testified, “he was tested in the California school system and started in learning disability classes, which continued until the time the family left California.” By the time Dr. Wallace saw him, in April and May of 1989, Nicholas was sixteen and in the tenth grade. Dr. Wallace’s examination, however, found Nicholas lagging far behind his fellow sophomores. “On the wide-range achievement testing, he was reading at about a seventh-grade level,” Dr. Wallace testified. “But his spelling I believe was at a second- or third-grade level, and his math about a fourth- or fifth-grade level.”
    On arriving in Norfolk, Mrs. Elliot enrolled Nicholas in Kempsville Elementary School, a public school, but in September 1987 transferred him fromthe public system to Atlantic Shores. Even though Atlantic Shores would cost an additional $240 a month—hard to afford on her salary as a public-school nurse in the city of Chesapeake—she felt the school would be well worth the cost. She told the court, “The public schools seem to have a lot of problems, and he was a child who needed special help, and I felt in a Christian environment he would get that help, and I was advised he would.”
    Atlantic Shores brought no miracles, however. School remained a chore for Nicholas. Once, he overheard a female teacher and a secretary discussing his poor progress. “She said something about getting help in English that I am not good in,” he told Detective Adams. “She said, ‘I can’t believe this. He started off with a third-grade book … and he can’t even do that.’ ”
    “Did it make you mad?” Adams asked.
    “I can’t believe she was talking about me. She didn’t have to tell the whole world.”
    Adams asked Nicholas if he had overheard anything else, from other teachers.
    “I’ve heard the secretary say that ‘he’s just the worst kid in school.’ I heard her say that.”
    Adams then asked Nicholas which teachers in particular seemed to dislike him. He named a few, but the list omitted Karen Farley, a popular teacher who taught typing and other business skills, and whose own two children, Lora and Will, were also enrolled in the school.
    When Adams asked Nicholas whether he got along with Mrs. Farley, Nicholas nodded yes.
    This was clearly evident in a videotape Mrs. Farley made of her typing class earlier in the school year. The camera captured her voice as she simultaneously filmed the class and reminded her students to type without looking at the keys. At one point, as the typewriters clatter away, she asks the few students present if any other students are likely to show up that morning. She learns that two students, Nicholas and a girl named Shirley, have simply stepped out of the room for a moment, Nicholas for a drink of water. “Oh, that’s right,” Mrs. Farley says. “I’ll have to get Nicholas. He’ll just die if I don’t get a picture of him.”
    And soon she does. Nicholas sits facing the camera, a big, endearing smile on his face. He is wearing a white polo shirt, a black jacket, and light pants. He is small boned, lean, well groomed, his hair trimmed close. In this image, in the bright sun that floods the classroom, he is just a boy. Nothing in the smile suggests the stress and anger he is supposed to have felt—although by the time this videotape was made, he had already acquired his gun. The smile is one of