The story of one of America's first school shooters, a brilliant loner, and what he has become in the 23 years since. It's also a story of what we. have become.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN,
Times Senior Correspondent

Illustrations by Times artist
ROSSIE NEWSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 11, 2001

They were there to watch Roger Needham enter a plea. But first they had to hear some disturbing things.

"While I in no way forgive my enemies, I will refrain from killing them for the moment. A few days ago I brought dad's .38 special to school, with the direct intention of murder. Luckily it took nearly two hours for me to walk home and back to get the gun so consequently I cooled off. But I still carry a knife. . . ."

The words, read by prosecutors, came from Needham's black clothbound diary. It was titled "My Struggle" -- after Hitler's Mein Kampf. Police found it in his room, in a box that held parts for a model of a Russian tank.

There was more.

"I almost abandoned Hitler last night -- out of being pushed too far by my classmates," Needham had written on Feb. 20, two days before the shootings. "I almost went to school without my Nazi party pin on my jacket. But luckily again I had a burst of courage and never again will I think about abandoning mein fuhrer and Nazism."

While prosecutors presented their case, 15-year-old Tony Jones watched Needham, dressed in jeans and a striped polo shirt, gazing around the courtroom as if soaking it all in. Needham would have seen William and Marion Draher, whose son he had slain. And the Jones family, whose middle child, Kevin, he had almost killed.

Just being in the courtroom made Tony Jones so nervous he shook. He was proud of how his brother, with typical ramrod posture, strode past Needham, took the witness stand and calmly recounted what had happened.

Kevin Jones was followed by two other witnesses, a fellow student and Aldo Martinez, the teacher to whom Needham had surrendered.

"I am expecting to wake up from a dream any time. I can't believe I did it," Needham had told Martinez as they walked to the school office. Needham had not shed a tear or shown any remorse.

Nor did he show any emotion in court, the Lansing State Journal reported. He conferred with his lawyer, but he never looked at or spoke to his father. His mother was not present.

To the charge of first-degree murder in the killing of Bill Draher, Needham pleaded no contest. Prosecutors dropped the second charge, assault with a deadly weapon, for shooting at Kevin Jones.

Throughout it all, Tony Jones found himself more and more impressed by the Drahers, who sat through the hearing with the same remarkable grace and composure others had noticed.

Three months earlier, as she waited at the hospital while neurosurgeons tried to save her son, Mrs. Draher had told a school psychologist about the strange feeling she had had all that week.

She had been afraid something bad would happen. She had talked about other family tragedies: their younger son, Mike, who nearly lost an eye in an accident; their daughter's husband, who died of a heart attack. Even when word came that Bill was dead, she took the news with surprising calm.

Now, devastated by their most recent loss, the Drahers still managed to show empathy for the boy who had murdered their son.

"I hope the period of time the lad has to spend in an institution will help him to become a person better able to handle his problems," William Draher, a mechanic, said as they left the courtroom.

"It has been like a dream. I think the dream is over now."

The judge ordered Roger Needham to undergo psychiatric treatment in a secure facility. The problem was finding a place.

Two days after the hearing, prosecutor McLellan said he doubted that there was anywhere in Michigan that could handle a teenage killer who is "terribly dangerous to both society and himself." The state's juvenile facilities were designed to be secure, or therapeutic, but not both.

As McLellan and others discovered, the lack of suitable facilities was not confined to Michigan. Social workers contacted 33 juvenile homes across the nation, from Edgemeade in Maryland to Mineral Wells in Texas, and not one would take him.

In October 1978 -- eight months after the shootings, a month before his 16th birthday -- Needham was still in the county juvenile home, still getting only limited treatment. Time was slipping away.

Finally, to no one's satisfaction, the search ended just 60 miles from where it began. Concluding that something had to be done and that Michigan was the only place to do it, Judge Owens ordered Needham sent to Green Oaks, the maximum security wing of the W.J. Maxey Boys Training School near Ann Arbor.

Green Oaks was for the baddest of the bad. It was secure, yes, but offered only minimal psychiatric care.

"It's an absolute tragedy the state of Michigan has to throw up its hands and say, "We don't have anything appropriate to assist this young man,' " Needham's lawyer complained in court.

But Green Oaks would be a turning point in Roger Needham's life.

The center hired a University of Michigan psychiatrist to meet with him several hours a week. And some of Green Oaks' staff, struck by his exceptional intelligence, took a special interest.

Scraggly hair, unbecoming glasses, clothes hanging off his tall, skinny frame -- what a mess, reading teacher Lee Craft thought the first time he saw Needham. For several months, he sneered "yeah" or "why?" and acted superior with the mostly African-American staff.

Teach me if you can, he seemed to be challenging them. Show me something I don't know.

Lee Craft

Ken Willis

He tried to get other kids in trouble, talking to them during quiet times, goading them into fights. For that, he was locked in his room.

He tried to get out of the exercises everyone was required to do before breakfast.

But wrestling and weightlifting helped bulk up his frame and seemed to give him a better feeling about himself. With better grooming, he turned out to be a good-looking kid.

He burned through all of Green Oaks' books, so Lee Craft starting bringing in extras from home. He had never dealt with a kid as smart as Needham; it was hard keeping up with him during their long discussions about philosophy and literature and life.

Needham never became what the staff considered warm. But he loosened up enough to occasionally crack "a little funny," as youth specialist Ken Willis put it.

Needham also proved to be a good tutor, especially in mathematics. He stopped taunting other kids: He had finally found a constructive way to use his superior intellect in dealing with people his age.

Craft wasn't surprised that Needham was starting to turn around. Most kids did, if for no other reason than that the staff was helping them develop the first positive relationships they had ever had.

To Willis, it was a matter of reaching the "scared little kid" inside every youthful offender, no matter how tough the exterior.

"I don't care what they've done," Willis would say, "when you appeal to that scared little kid, they come to their knees."