Section B·Page 6
The University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, December 7, 1999
Nation
Middle school boy opens fire, wounds 4 before dropping gun
Oklahoma 13-year-old said he did not know why he shot classmates
The 13-year-old dropped the emptied, $9_{\mathrm{mm}}$ semiautomatic handgun as he was approached by science teacher Ronnie Holuby, who also serves as the safety officer at Fort Gibson Middle School, Superintendent Steve Wilmoth said. Holuby grabbed the boy's arms and pinned him against a brick wall.
The Associated Press
FORT GIBSON, Okla. — A seventh-grader walked up to a crowd of youngsters waiting for the morning bell Monday and allegedly opened fire with a gun, wounding four school-mates before a science teacher pinned him against a wall.
"He doesn't even know who it was he shot," sheriff's Deputy Terry Cragg said. "There was not a hate thing. I asked him why. He said, 'I don't know.'"
The small, slender boy was taken to court for a closed, 15-minute arraignment, walking
None of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening. A fifth youngster suffered bumps and bruises.
solemnly between two deputies and keeping his head down.
His name was not released. No details were released on the arraignment or on what charges the boy faces.
Gov. Frank Keating issued a statement saying that the shooting should serve as a call to arms to address what he called the root causes of what is happening to our families and young people. He later issued a revised statement, deleting a "call to arms" and substituting the phrase "wake-up call."
President Clinton told reporters in Washington that investigators from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were on the scene.
"Our prayers are with each of the children and their families." Clinton said.
Authorities said they were not aware of any previous trouble involving the boy and did not know who owned the gun. The youngster belonged to a teen Christian group and other school organizations, students said.
"He seemed like a really nice person," said Justine Hurst, a 13-year-old eighth-grader. "He had a lot of friends."
Kanjowah Bowley, another eighth-grader, said, "Some people say he's crazy, but he's really not. He comes from a really good family."
Students had gathered outside the middle school and were waiting to enter for the start of classes when the boy walked up at around 7:45 a.m. and started shooting, witnesses said.
School officials, given safety training following the Columbine High School massacre, rushed the students to the safety of the cafeteria.
The wounded students were taken to hospitals in nearby Muskogee and Tula.
A 12-year-old boy was in fair condition with a bullet wound in each arm, a 12-year-old girl was in fair condition with a cheek wound, a 13-year-old was treated for a wound to his forearm and another 13-year-old underwent surgery for a leg wound.
Police obtained search warrants to search school lockers. All of the district's 1,850 students were sent home for the day.
Mars probes likely are lost in space
The Associated Press
PASADENA, Calf. — Two tiny probes that rode aboard Mars Polar Lander, but separated before entry, appear to be lost forever as efforts to contact the larger spacecraft also continued without success.
Mission controllers, looking increasingly gloomy and exhausted after failing for three days to detect signs of life from any of the spacecraft, admitted late Sunday it is growing more likely that contact may never be made.
"Clearly, the team is getting more frustrated, certainly, and more tense about all of this," said Richard Cook, operations project manager for the Polar Lander.
If no signals are heard, it would be total loss for the entire, $330 million Mars '98 project, which consisted of Polar Lander, the Deep Space 2 microprobes and the Climate Orbiter, which burned up over the Red Planet in September.
The softball-sized microprobes were supposed to slam into the surface at 400 mph to test a new descent technique that did not use expensive parachutes or rockets to break the fall from space. If the test flight had been successful, future microprobe missions could be sent to cover a wider territory at less cost than current spacecraft.
The $29.6 million probes were to have emitted their first signals on
arrival Friday. Every two hours, the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor tried to detect any transmissions from the microprobes to no success.
The probes also had been programmed to transmit automatically once every five minutes if they did not receive commands from Global Surveyor after 29 and 32 hours. No signals were picked up during those opportunities either.
"If we haven't heard from them in the next 24 hours, we will have exhausted our opportunities to hear from them," said Sarah Gavit, the probes' project manager, early Sunday afternoon.
There was no signal from the microprobes by early afternoon yesterday, NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar said, but officials made no final declaration about the probes' fate.
Estimates of their trajectory based on the last data from the lander indicated during the weekend that they might have fallen into a crater, near a region of sand dunes. Both scenarios potentially are fatal.
The probes' batteries, which could barely power a Christmas tree light, also could have frozen in temperatures reaching minus 185 degrees Fahrenheit.
Meanwhile, the $165 million Polar Lander controllers attempted to find a signal for the third straight day Sunday. Several windows of opportunity came and
went during the weekend with no sign of life from the unmanned craft.
Mission managers worked on eliminating simple failure scenarios one by one. But they conceded that if, after trying all the obvious remedies, contact still has not been established by midweek, the explanations for the failure would become more complex, and the prospects of success would greatly diminish.
Sunday's first communications window — designed to use a second antenna — opened at 10:50 a.m. PST and closed 10 minutes later without any transmission from the surface of the Red Planet.
The lander, if working properly, was supposed to have switched radios to relay a signal through Global Surveyor, instead of transmitting directly to Earth. But the mapping spacecraft sent only its own data and none from the lander.
Lack of any signals since shortly before Friday's scheduled landing left mission officials with hope only that the lander survived the touchdown and, on its own, was taking steps to establish contact.
Mars Polar Lander could have gotten into trouble simply by setting down in difficult terrain.
"Landing on Mars is very hard—and it's the part where you're landing that's really hard," said Cook. "It doesn't take much to have problems."
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Distortion1
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DIstortion 2
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