THE AFTERMATH

Kristin Kinkel, the sister of a school shooter, is still reckoning with her brother’ crimes.

- JENNIFER GONNERMAN

On May 21, 1998, before places like Columbine and Newtown and Parkland had become part of the American vernacular, Kristin Kinkel received a phone call. At the time, she was twenty-one and a student at Hawaii Pacific University, in Honolulu. She had a scholarship for competitive cheerleading she was an expert tumbler and flyer and she lived with some of her teammates in a modest rental house they called Cheer Palace.

The phone call came early that morning from a friend from her home town Springfield, Oregon. He stammered something about having bad news and hung up. Soon afterward, another friend called and told her that there had been a shooting at Thurston High School, where Kristin had gone and where her brother, Kip, was in ninth grade. "Is Kip hurt?" she asked. She didn't get an answer. Then a third friend phoned and blurted out what nobody else wanted to say: Kip was the one who had opened fire at Thurston. As Kristin would later learn, he had killed two students and injured another twenty-five.

Someone told her to check the news; the story was dominating CNN. "I remember turning on the TV and seeing my house, the house I grew up in, from a helicopter view," Kristin recalled recently. Her parents had built the house twenty-five years earlier-an A-frame surrounded by Douglas firs. Now it was a crime scene. After the shooting at Thurston, the police had discovered two bodies inside her family's home-her brother had killed their parents, too.

The phone kept ringing. One of Kristin's childhood friends in Oregon had heard an early news report that mistakenly said three bodies had been found in the family's house-not two. The friend was terrified: Had Kristin been killed as well? "I ended up calling her roommates in Hawaii," the friend remembered. "And they were, like, 'She's here. She's fine. But she's not talking to anyone."