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."
Esta historia es de la edición December 04, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición December 04, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.