Suspect, Regarded as a Braggart, Was Known to Hunt in Foothills With His Family

By TERRY McDERMOTT

May 22, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — Kipland P. Kinkel, a slight, 15-year-old high school freshman with a liking for tough music and big talk, apparently fulfilled the worst of his friends’ fears Thursday in a shooting rampage that claimed at least three lives.

Until he allegedly opened fire in the Thurston High School cafeteria before first period, Kinkel was regarded as a braggart but not much worse. He lived with his parents, Bill and Faith, in a modern, three-story, wooden A-frame house southeast of here.

Two bodies found by police in the house are presumed to be his parents’.

Their home sits on a leafy, carefully landscaped lot on a hill above the McKenzie River--a locally prized trout and salmon stream. Kinkel fished the river with his father and friends and hunted deer in the Cascade foothills, just minutes away to the east.

Many of those who live nearby are retired, attracted to the quiet beauty of the forested hills. Housing is too scattered to form what would normally be called a neighborhood, but the area is close enough that word raced through it with astonishing speed Thursday morning after the shooting spree at Thurston High.

“The news went around the world in 10 minutes,” one woman said.

Neighbors immediately set to work making sandwiches to be sent into town. They didn’t even ask for whom. Somebody called somebody and arranged it all, said resident Betsy Shedd. “The phone was ringing off the hook.”

Shedd is a newcomer who said she had never lived in a neighborhood that felt so close and safe. “People are good people here.”

Another neighbor, referring to recent similar events in the South, most recently in Jonesboro, Ark., said: “You always assumed that was there and this is here. And it couldn’t happen here.”

The hills and the forests are the prime reason Springfield exists at all. Lane County for decades was one of the biggest timber-producing counties in the nation. Springfield provided the pulp, plywood and lumber mills for many of those logs. The mills, or remnants of them, are everywhere in town. Some sit within a block of Main Street, in the heart of the city of 51,000.

The blue-collar neighborhoods where the mill workers lived contrasted sharply with the upper-middle-class precincts of Eugene--home to the University of Oregon, which sits just across the Willamette River.

In the old days, Springfield and Eugene didn’t intersect much. College boys from Eugene who somehow wandered off their beaten paths into the tougher bars of Springfield could get rude welcomes.

That has changed somewhat in recent years as the timber industry declined and new high-tech companies led an economic revival. Sony and Hyundai, among others, built plants in Springfield.

The median income lags significantly below national averages but is improving, according to statistics gathered by the state. The population has grown almost 14% just since the 1990 census.

Thurston High serves the east end of Springfield, where much of the recent growth has occurred. As a result, the school population is in flux. While families like the Kinkels sent their children all the way through the local elementary and middle schools that feed Thurston High, classmates came from all over the West.

New subdivisions and strip malls with video stores and groceries have sprouted here and there, making the place look like much of the rest of America.

That everyday quality was evident even in local reactions to the killings. Parents and friends flocked to Thurston High. Some, including students from archrival Springfield High, brought flowers. They built a tiny memorial outside the school fence. But high school students barely into puberty talked about the day’s events in the flat, practiced monotones of disaster veterans. Kids said again and again: “This could happen anywhere.”

And of course it has. But Thursday, it happened here.