Word: hamilton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...five- and six-year-old first-graders and their teacher died Wednesday when a failed youth leader named Thomas Hamilton, 43, barged into the school and emptied four handguns into them as they screamed and cowered in the gymnasium. Two other teachers and 12 children were wounded, three critically, before Hamilton put one of the guns to his head and blew part of it away. Nobody can know just what monsters of the psyche drove the strange moonfaced man's mind to crack at that moment, or why he chose the gentlest, most innocent of the school's 729 pupils...
...authorities can only put together the sequence of events that led to the evil of Dunblane. The start might be traced back as far as 1974, when Boy Scout officials dismissed Hamilton, then 21, for "inappropriate behavior" as leader of a local troop, and to subsequent incidents involving his attempts to organize boys' sports clubs in the area. Or it might have arisen from his fascination with handguns, which he obtained as long as 20 years ago and owned legally despite strict British laws. But whatever its origins, the culmination came at around 9 a.m. Wednesday when Hamilton left...
...started shooting in the playground, then down a corridor as he made his way to the gymnasium. Firing from a corner of the room, Hamilton hit teacher Gwenne Mayor as she tried to shield the 29 children she had taken there for phys ed. She died on the spot. Then he moved around the room, methodically shooting the screaming children, chasing some as they ran and pumping at least one and sometimes three or more bullets into the little bodies. Then he retreated to a corner away from the carnage and fired the final bullet into his own brain...
...accounts Hamilton was odd. The woman he always believed was his sister was, in reality, his mother. His father, Thomas Watt, 65, abandoned the family when Hamilton was 18 months old. He never took interest in him again until he learned, with shock, of the killings. "I can't live with this," Watt said. "I brought this monster into the world." It was a world that proved difficult for a man whose compelling life interest appeared to be youth leadership--but who was regarded in town as a pedophile. His attempts to organize boys' clubs ended when parents withdrew their...
...seem to think a monstrous effect must arise from a monstrous cause. But not much evidence turned up to make the eruption plausible. An isolated, unwholesome smudge of a life: Thomas Hamilton, unmarried, 43, a thwarted scoutmaster with an obsessive interest in guns and a habit of photographing very young boys naked from the waist up. It seemed a familiar but dislocated story, the kind usually set in dreary rooming houses across the Atlantic--narratives pieced together after the grisly, ground-breaking crimes that are an American genre...