The Joplin Globe
November 25, 2006 11:00 pm
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By Roger McKinney
rmckinney@joplinglobe.com
COLUMBUS, Kan. - The public may finally learn what happened on April 20 that prompted the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department to arrest five Riverton High School students and accuse them of compiling a hit list of students and school employees.
Coy New's trial this week should reveal evidence that so far has not been released to the public.
The trial is scheduled to begin Monday in Cherokee County District Court. A jury won't hear the evidence. Judge Robert Fleming on Wednesday denied a jury trial for New on what is now a misdemeanor charge of conspiracy to riot.
Fleming will hear the evidence in a bench trial. New's attorney, Robert Myers, appeared agitated as he left the courthouse Wednesday following Fleming's ruling.
Last week, 16-year-old Riverton High School student Caleb Byrd pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct. Fleming found him guilty and sentenced him to probation for the rest of the school year and 100 hours of community service. Another co-defendant, Andrew Jaeger, 15, the previous week pleaded no contest to the same reduced charge and was sentenced to probation for the rest of the school year, but did not receive any community service.
In August, co-defendants James Tillman, 16, and Robby Hunt, 17, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor conspiracy to riot. They were sentenced to probation until the end of the school year and 100 hours of community service.
"I think we can take some comfort that this wasn't as serious as it was presented months ago," Fleming said at the August hearing, adding that he had not read or heard any of the evidence.
On April 20, the day the five were arrested, Cherokee County Sheriff Steve Norman said the students had been making detailed plans since the beginning of the school year and were serious about carrying them out on that day. He said the students had compiled a "hit" list of students and school employees they planned to shoot.
"This could have been a very tragic day," Norman said on April 20, which was the seventh anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Presumably, such a hit list would be presented as evidence at the trial, if it exists. The students' defense attorneys have said they have seen nothing in the evidence that resembles a hit list.
Norman on April 20 said evidence investigators collected included information about a fascination with Hitler and Nazi Germany and the shooters in the Columbine tragedy. Norman called the literature found in searches of the students' lockers "very concerning and very dark."
Two days before the arrests, school officials became aware of a message on New's site on MySpace.com. A calendar item for April 20 between noon and 1 p.m. noted Hitler's birthday and encouraged readers to wear a bullet-proof vest and to share the message with everyone.
At a June 6 hearing in Parsons for James Tillman, Riverton High School Principal Todd Berry and assistant Principal Cory White testified their investigation of the message gave no indication of an underlying plot.
"We felt that we had handled the situation," Berry said at the hearing.
The school officials did not request help from the Sheriff's Department, but told a deputy who was visiting the school of the matter.
Berry and White also questioned Tillman, Jaeger, Byrd and another student who was not arrested, but not Hunt, who was arrested.
White and Berry said at the June hearing that on April 19, rumors were circulating in the school hallways. White said that was the day that student Michaela Ferneau talked to him. She said she talked to him after she had heard that Tillman and the other boys were angry with her because she thought they were blaming her for being questioned.
In New's court file on Wednesday were 22 praecipe for subpoena, or directions to issue subpoenas. They include those for Berry, White, Ferneau and Norman.
Ferneau on April 21 told the Globe that Tillman, her former boyfriend, had told her in January not to come to school on April 20 because there might be another Columbine. She said she didn't take him seriously. She said that on April 19 some students told her that she was an intended target and others had told her they had heard she was to be one of the shooters, so she took the information to White. She said when she got home from school, she sent an instant message over the Internet to a girlfriend in North Carolina. The girlfriend subsequently notified authorities in North Carolina, who, in turn, contacted the Cherokee County Sheriff's Department.
Ferneau later gave an interview to "Teen People" magazine, which characterized her actions as heroic.
The five students initially were charged by Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline with felony incitement to riot and felony criminal threat. Tillman also faced a charge of felony solicitation to commit first-degree murder. The attorney general's office initially sought to prosecute the juveniles as adults, but later dropped the motion, dropped the solicitation charge against Tillman, and turned the case back over to Cherokee County Attorney Michael Goodrich. Goodrich reduced the charges against the five to misdemeanor conspiracy to riot, saying that charge was what the evidence supported.
New's trial is scheduled to last a week, but may proceed more quickly with no jury involved.
Political issue
Democrat Paul Morrison made Phill Kline's handling of the case an issue in his successful run for attorney general. Morrison said Kline sought to be in the media spotlight and he overcharged the case. Kline said in an October interview with the Globe that it was a tough call because of the statements that had been made to the media about the defendants and the evidence, but the charges he filed were appropriate when he filed them, based on the evidence.
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