Should parents of shooters be charged too?

The gunfire had BENTON, lasted less than 10 seconds, but now hidden behind locked doors all across the rural campus, teenagers wept and bled and prayed.

Police would soon swarm Marshall County High School’s hallways on that chilly morning in January, and though the exact number of students who had been shot remained unknown for hours, it didn’t take investigators long to find the boy they believed had pulled the trigger. His name was Gabriel Parker, a sophomore whose family lived near the banks of Kentucky Lake. Before word spread that two were dead and 14 were wounded, a detective headed south, in search of the answer to a question:

Where had Parker, who was 15, gotten the gun?

Beneath a wind chime topped with a metal cross, Parker’s stepfather, Justin Minyard, opened the front door of their modest frame house, and the detective told him what had just happened. The 26-year-old’s stepson, police alleged, had opened fire on hundreds of students gathered in Marshall’s commons with a Ruger 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Minyard, according to court records, acknowledged that he kept one firearm in the home, stored in his bedroom closet. He walked back and checked the shelf.

His gun, Minyard told the detective, was gone.

In the hours that followed, police say, Parker confessed to his interrogators that getting the weapon was easy. It hadn’t been secured with a lock or sealed in a safe or even hidden somewhere secret. The night before the shooting, Parker explained, he carried a laundry basket to his parents’ bedroom closet. He reached up to a shelf and grabbed the pistol, which was inside a case, then stuffed it beneath the clothes. Parker also took at least two magazines, along with the bullets he needed, leaving behind more than 400 rounds of ammunition that police would later seize. The next morning, he put the handgun in his bag and rode with his mom to the school of 1,400 students, where at 7:57 a.m., police said, he fired the first round.

Since 1999, the shooters in at least 145 acts of gun violence at primary and secondary schools have been under the age of 18, according to analysis by The Washington Post. Discussions about how to curb shootings at American schools have centered on arming teachers or improving mental health treatment, banning military-style rifles or strengthening background checks. But if kids as young as 6 did not have access to guns, The Post’s findings show, two-thirds of school shootings over the past two decades could not have happened.

While investigators don’t always determine — or publicly reveal — the weapons’ origins, The Post found 105 cases in which the source was identified. Of those, the guns were taken from a child’s home or those of relatives or friends 84 times. The Post discovered just four instances when the adult owners of the weapons were criminally punished because they failed to lock them up.

When Commonwealth Attorney Mark Blankenship took on the Parker prosecution, his focus was solely on ensuring that the teen would be tried as an adult, making him eligible to receive a life sentence. But the longer Blankenship thought about how Parker had gotten the weapon, the more it troubled him.

Parker wasn’t a hunter and didn’t hang out much with the high schoolers who were. The teen, a plump redhead who wore glasses, was quiet and shy. He had a small group of friends, mostly from Marshall’s marching band, in which he played the tuba. The teen couldn’t have persuaded another student, or anyone else, to give him a weapon without raising considerable suspicion, Blankenship concluded. To the prosecutor, that meant the only gun Parker could have used to ravage his high school was the one he took from his stepfather’s closet.

Like almost everyone he knows, Blankenship, 65, owns a firearm. It’s a shotgun his father passed down to him, and though he doesn’t keep shells for it and has never considered himself an enthusiast, he’s been around guns since birth. Blankenship also appreciates why someone would want to reach for a weapon quickly during a break-in, so he researched gun safes online, and what he found were more than a dozen devices for under $250 that had been designed to securely store pistols — just like Minyard’s — and be opened in less than three seconds.

“That’s when it really hit me,” Blankenship said, “that this was so easily preventable.”

Gun rights are revered in Marshall County, a community of 31,000 where three in four voters backed Donald Trump in 2016. Generations of cattle, corn and tobacco farmers throughout this nearly all-white swath of countryside have long viewed their rifles and shotguns much the same way they do their rakes and shovels: essential tools that, on their own, could do no harm. In fact, many people still find it more unseemly to drink a beer in public — Marshall was dry until 2015 — than to wield an AR-15 rifle in public (legal in almost all of Kentucky, thanks to its open-carry law).

Blankenship, in office since 2008, was on the verge of beginning his re-election campaign and knew that scrutinizing the pistol’s owner would be unpopular, but he just couldn’t shake how much trauma one gun in the hand of one 15-year-old had caused.

There were the teachers who had been covered in their own students’ blood, the officers whose kids were begging them not to go back to work, the paramedic who could no longer stand large crowds, the young siblings of high schoolers who imagined they would be shot next, the two couples who had outlived their children, and the teenagers — so many that Blankenship couldn’t fit everyone’s parents into his office — who had bullet holes in their arms and legs and chests and stomachs and faces.

So, about a week after the shooting, in a meeting with investigators, the prosecutor finally said it out loud: “I’m seriously thinking about going after the stepfather.”

Unlocked firearms

Every year, state lawmakers across the country propose bills to hold adults criminally liable for negligently storing guns where children can reach them, and every year, for various reasons, legislatures decide not to pass those bills.

Only 14 states and the District of Columbia have approved such laws, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, but even those statutes, researchers say, are often not enforced, are too limited or carry weak penalties, rendering them ineffective.

The issue drew national attention in May after a 17-year-old in Santa Fe, Texas, was accused of killing 10 people at his school with a handgun and a shotgun that belonged to his dad. Although the state has a negligent-storage law, the father could not be charged under it because Texas defines a child as 16 or younger.

Russ Hauge didn’t think he needed a special law when the former Washington state prosecutor took on what he called a case of “gross, gross negligence” in 2012. A third-grader, he said, had found a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun in the home of his mother’s boyfriend, Douglas Bauer, who kept firearms — loaded, unlocked and in some cases cocked — throughout the place. The boy, then 9 years old, put the weapon in his backpack and took it to school, where it accidentally fired, leaving a bullet lodged near the spine of an 8-year-old girl.

The prosecutor knew that he could charge Bauer with reckless endangerment, he said, but a misdemeanor wouldn’t strip the man of his right to own a gun, so Hauge charged him with third-degree assault, a felony.

Hauge believed Bauer’s actions perfectly fit the definition of “criminal negligence” that “causes bodily harm to another person by means of a weapon.” The state Supreme Court, however, disagreed, deciding that the law was too vague to sustain the charge.

Hauge, who left office in 2014, said he owns several firearms and is a firm supporter of the Second Amendment, but he just as strongly believes that every state in America should require gun owners to secure their weapons.

Instead, thousands of children have used unlocked pistols, shotguns and rifles to kill themselves or accidentally shoot others. And they have wielded them again and again to target classmates.

In 2000, a 13-year-old boy in Florida found what he thought was a cookie tin in his grandfather’s bedroom that instead held a .25-caliber handgun and several rounds of ammunition. The teen loaded the weapon and killed a teacher at school. The grandfather was never charged.

In 2003, a 15-year-old boy in Minnesota opened a dresser drawer in which his father stored nearly a dozen guns and picked out a .22-caliber pistol that he’d fired before at a shooting range. He used it to kill two classmates at school. The father — a sheriff’s deputy — was never charged.

Both states had already passed laws that require adults to keep their guns away from kids, but each statute includes significant caveats that limit prosecutors’ ability to use it.

In fact, none of the four successful prosecutions identified by The Post resulted from charges related to negligent-storage laws. The harshest penalty among those cases was a 29-month term behind bars for involuntary manslaughter. In that instance, a man in Michigan had used a shoe box to store his .32-caliber semiautomatic handgun, which a 6-year-old visitor found and took to school, then fatally shot a first-grade classmate.

To effect real change, Hauge argues, adults must face felonies.

“We’re looking at a class of crimes where deterrence might actually work,” he said. “If there was a clear law that says felony punishment will ensue if you don’t handle your weapons safely, I think we could get some people’s attention.”

Paralyzed at age 15

Missy Jenkins Smith has been trying to get people’s attention for two decades. On the morning of Dec. 1, 1997, Jenkins Smith had just finished a prayer circle at Heath High — 30 miles northwest of Marshall — when she watched a schoolmate get shot in the head. A moment later, a round struck her in the chest.

In all, three people died and five were wounded. At the age of 15, Jenkins Smith was paralyzed from the chest down. She later learned that the shooter, then 14, had stolen the .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol from the garage of a neighbor, who’d left the gun outside his safe.

Jenkins Smith, now a school counselor, has written two books about her experience and emphasizes in speeches that no campus is immune from attack. Like Hauge, she has no issue with guns; her husband, a hunter, owns several. But when she heard how authorities say Parker had gotten his weapon, she realized how little had changed in Kentucky over the past 21 years.

The owner of the pistol that left her in a wheelchair was never charged. Instead, police said, he got his gun back.

Hannah Dysinger was already waiting for her best friend when the girl arrived at Marshall High on the morning of Jan. 23.

“You look so cute,” Hannah told Bailey Holt, who was wearing jeans, trendy dark-rimmed glasses and, as she did almost every day, a pair of Converse sneakers.

Hannah and Bailey, both 15, occupied their usual spot near one entrance in Marshall’s commons, a wide, open room with a two-story-high ceiling where hundreds of teens gathered each day before classes. Hannah liked the way her makeup looked, so she insisted Bailey take a photo with her new iphone X. Hannah grinned for the camera, revealing her braces as she held up a Mcdonald’s frappe.

It was spirit week at Marshall, and each day had a certain theme, so as the commons swelled before first period, many students were sporting red, white and blue for that Tuesday’s motif: America. Then came the first gunshot. Hannah looked into Bailey’s eyes for what felt like a long time, but wasn’t, because then Hannah heard another shot and another and another. She turned and ran for the door, fleeing across the parking lot toward the school’s football field as dozens of other panicked students stampeded alongside her.

Hannah’s phone rang. It was her boyfriend, who had been with them inside.

“Where are you?” she asked, and as he told her he was safe, Hannah felt something warm and wet inside her black Timberland shirt. She looked down, then she saw it. There was a bullet hole in her chest.

“I’m bleeding!” she shrieked. “I’m bleeding!”

The commons had gone quiet by the time Superintendent Trent Lovett, 52, arrived minutes after the shooting. He’d also attended Marshall, the county’s only public high school, which opened in 1974.

He already knew his daughter, a freshman, was safe in the tech center. But two other teenagers, a boy and a girl who’d been shot, were sprawled on the floor in front of Lovett, and across the room was another teen with a wound to his stomach. A nurse who taught health education was running triage with school staff.

“Where’s the shooter?” Lovett asked.

“We don’t know,” someone replied, so the superintendent pulled an aluminum bat from a nearby baseball bag and set off down a hallway, guiding terrified students to safety before he returned to the commons.

Lovett stared out over the speckled tile, littered with deserted backpacks and abandoned plastic cups. Eight columns bordered the room’s center, each inscribed in bright orange letters with virtues the educators tried to instill in students: “PATIENCE” and “FAIRNESS,” “RESPECT” and “CARING.”

Now, amid streaks of their blood, dozens of the teens’ phones rang and blinked and vibrated all over the floor. One was next to Preston Cope, a lanky sophomore who played second base on the junior-varsity baseball team. He had been shot in the head.

“Dad,” read the caller ID.