Tutu Careful

When principal Greg Cartwright appeared on NBC’s Today Show in December 1999, he brought good news: A student’s warning had thwarted a Columbine-style shoot-up plot in his rural, southeast Kansas high school, saving many lives, perhaps even Cartwright’s. Host Matt Lauer listened as Cartwright told how police acted quickly on the Labette High School student’s alert. “It was very close,” Cartwright said. “And again, I’m very, very thankful that student came forward.”

Lauer chimed in, “And our hat’s off to that student who came forward.”

The problem was, that student who came forward would soon declare there was no plot. The black clothing, the 9 mm handguns, the SKS assault rifle, the sawed-off shotgun, the .22-caliber rifles, the explosives — all were recanted to prosecutors, who had already charged five suspects with eight counts of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

Now nearly everyone with authority in Altamont, Kansas, and surrounding Labette County has been named a defendant in a $170 million lawsuit filed at the Bob Dole Federal Courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas.

The events leading to that lawsuit began on December 16, 1999, when Dwayne Heiskell and four other students — Aaron Spencer, Josh Traxson, Jestin McReynolds and Daniel Smith — sat in Smith’s room and discussed how they might commit a rampage through their school. They talked about shooting teachers. They considered how they might attach a snowplow to a derby car and drive it through the hallways. One of them said he would wear a tutu for the occasion.

But no one outside that room will ever know how serious they were. McReynolds claims he approached Heiskell the next day at school after overhearing him recruit another student to take part in the raid. Alarmed by Heiskell’s apparent sincerity, McReynolds says he threatened to tell school administrators.

Heiskell beat him to it. At 2:15 p.m., Heiskell sat in the principal’s office with his parents and police officers and described how McReynolds, Spencer, Traxson, Smith and another student, Bryan Vail, planned to take over the school the following Monday and execute at least eight predetermined people, including their principal.

By 3 p.m., school officials had contacted the Labette County sheriff, the Kansas Highway Patrol, the county prosecutor’s office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. In the wake of Columbine, no one thought they could be too careful.

Late that night, police arrived at the Smith house and began to search for weapons. They arrested Smith and Traxson, and they handcuffed Smith’s younger sister, Kendra, and her friend Mallory Sanders. Meanwhile, more than fifty officers from various police agencies conducted searches and arrested the other students Heiskell had named.

In the following days, Cartwright, prosecutor Robert Forer and Sheriff William Blundell each revealed details of the alleged plan to the media. They said dozens of guns were seized from each of the boys’ homes, in addition to documents bearing the expression “4:20.” That’s stoner’s code for a time of day to smoke pot, but investigators thought first of April 20, 1999 — the date Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered thirteen people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

By February 2000, the Altamont Five had spent time in the Southeast Kansas Juvenile Detention Center in Girard and in a county jail in Oswego. Doubts about the Altamont Five’s guilt arose back at Labette High. Some students wore armbands in support of the suspects.

Prosecutors and investigators proceeded with the case against the five students, though there was considerable reason to doubt Heiskell’s statement. It was no secret at school that Heiskell had personal problems stemming from his home life and that he took the medications Dexedrine and Risperdal to control personality disorders, according to the lawsuits. The month before the Altamont Five arrests, he was kicked out of principal Cartwright’s home, where he had been living, for drug and alcohol use and for violating curfew, the lawsuits say.

On January 19, 2000, Heiskell had a run-in with his ex-girlfriend, Mallory Sanders, at a school dance. Sanders confronted him and demanded that he tell police the truth. When prosecutors found out that Sanders had shoved Heiskell during their conversation, they charged her with intimidating a witness, a felony.

A few weeks later, Heiskell overdosed on drugs and alcohol and was rushed to a hospital by ambulance. He was listed under the name John Doe to prevent the incident from becoming public. Soon thereafter, Heiskell told prosecutors there had never been a massacre plot.

But Robert Forer was not ready to release the teen-age suspects. The prosecutor instead waited until April 2000 to drop the conspiracy charges; even then, he made no apologies for the way the suspects were treated. “I’m not trying to drum up sympathy for these kids because I don’t have any sympathy for them,” he told reporters. “What they did was just unquestionably unacceptable. Law enforcement doesn’t owe them an apology. They owe the community an apology.”

In April 2001, the five students, Mallory Sanders and their parents filed suit for $170 million. Each plaintiff seeks $10 million. The federal suit lists as defendants the city, county, school board, superintendent, principal, prosecutor, chief of police and three other law-enforcement officers.

Almost all the defendants argue that, right or wrong, they didn’t violate any of the students’ rights in responding to what was perceived as a credible threat. The defense won a small victory on March 22, 2002, when Judge Carlos Murguia dismissed three of the nine counts against a few of the defendants, including Principal Cartwright and Superintendent Dennis Wilson.

The lawsuit makes the harshest claims against the small town’s police chief, James Barber. Barber had it in for the boys and would often harass them as they traveled around town, the plaintiffs claim. They also accuse Barber of disparaging them to the Altamont City Council.

“After several years of being harassed by Barber, the five plaintiff boys had lost all respect for Barber,” the lawsuit says. “They began to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize government officials by the use of hand gestures and by making rude comments to Barber.”

They gave him the bird. The plaintiffs’ parents, on the other hand, sent letters of complaint to the city council and the ACLU.

They also make 14th Amendment claims that the school and local authorities denied them their liberties.

Neither the Altamont Five nor their parents have commented on the pending lawsuit other than to release statements in which they slam local authorities for staging a minimal investigation and denounce their treatment. “Anymore, we are becoming more like Nazi Germany than we are like the United States,” one such statement says.