The Bath School Disaster

Events such as the Columbine High School shootings and the more recent incident at Virginia Tech have captured both media and public attention. Debate continues about whether we are in the midst of a school violence epidemic, or whether the proliferation of 24 hour news stations have created a media culture that highlights unusual cases and skews public perception of crime. The data itself indicate school violence has not been on the rise (leave it to the librarians, the masters of information, who keep us grounded):

SAVD [School-Associated Violent Death] data continue to indicate that individual violent events involving numerous homicides, such as the 1999 event that involved 15 deaths at Columbine High School in Colorado, are rare. Most school-associated student homicides continue to involve a single victim and a single offender.

Even in light of such comforting information, no one can argue that the rare cases have been horrific. Before the Virginia Tech shootings, in which 32 people were killed, the deadliest incidents of school violence included Columbine (13 deaths), and the "Texas Tower" shootings at the University of Texas (14 deaths).

No doubt most readers are familiar with these tragedies, but few may know about the deadliest incidence of school violence in the United States: the 1927 Bath School Disaster. Forty-five people were killed in this incident, most of whom were children aged 7 to 12.

Bath is a small community just north of Lansing, Michigan. It's a mixture of suburban and farming communities with a small recreational lake. It's a nice place to live--I know, because I live there. I can only imagine it was even smaller, and quieter, in 1927.

The bomber, Andrew Kehoe, was a School Board member in Bath Township and part-time handyman at the school. After his farm was foreclosed upon, he blamed the property tax used to build the school. Over several months (while doing his handyman work) he planted hundreds of pounds of dynamite throughout the school. On the morning of May 18, 1927, he killed his wife, set his farm on fire, and set off the dynamite under the school. He then drove to the school in his truck (loaded with dynamite and shrapnel), and detonated it amongst the rescuers. That explosion killed him and three others.

[The "Criminals are made, not born" sign at the top of this post was found attached to Kehoe's fence at the farm. You can see more pictures in this Lansing State Journal article.]

As bad as it was, the tragedy could have been much worse--500 pounds of dynamite under one wing of the school failed to detonate.

The Bath School Disaster differs from modern examples of school violence in that, (a) the offender was not a student at the school, which is common in recent incidents, and (b) explosives were used rather than guns. (Perhaps this incident should not even be considered "school violence," as it might more accurately be described as a terrorist event--or even a suicide bombing.) Still, it shares at least one similarity with modern-day school shootings, in that it was perpetrated by a distraught individual who sought to exact revenge for a personal loss by killing innocents en masse. Other aspects of the crime also feel sadly contemporary: a man devastated over financial ruin kills his wife then commits suicide, which recalls several recent events following this exact scenario. Also, the plotting of the Bath attack over an extended period of time echoes the Columbine killers' methodical preparations, while an explosives-laden truck was used in the Oklahoma City bombings as well.

While media accounts of recent school shootings may create the impression that these crimes are the product of contemporary ills (decaying family values, violent video games, what have you), the Bath School Disaster reminds us that, sadly, mass murders on school grounds are nothing new.