On May 21, 1998, 15-year-old freshman student Kipland Kinkel opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the cafeteria of Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, United States, killing 2 of his classmates and wounding 25 others.

[1] He had killed his parents at the family home the previous day, following his suspension pending an expulsion hearing after he admitted to school officials that he was keeping a stolen handgun in his locker.

Kinkel's was seen as more egregious than the earlier ones before since he had gone into a crowded internal space and indiscriminately opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle.

Faith and William concealed this from psychologists;[5] investigators hired by Kip's lawyers uncovered it, including one uncle who had stabbed a state trooper after a traffic stop in the late 1940s, believing the man had killed his brother during the war.

[1] When he returned to Oregon, he attended elementary school in the small community of Walterville, about 5 miles (8 km) east of Springfield.

Kip had an interest in firearms and explosives from an early age that grew in puberty; he began making bombs, mostly gasoline-based, and detonating them in a nearby quarry to assuage his anger.

[4] William initially wanted to discourage his son from violence, but later enrolled Kip in gun safety courses, buying him a 9mm Glock handgun and eventually a .22 caliber rifle at the age of 15.

Others characterized him as psychotic or schizoid, enjoying the music of rock bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, and Marilyn Manson.

[6][7][8] He constantly talked about committing acts of violence, telling friends that he wanted to join the U.S. Army after graduation to find out what it was like to kill someone.

Kinkel studied William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet in his English class and related with the protagonists and became enamored with the 1996 modernized film adaptation, which featured heavy use of firearms.

[4] Eventually, Kinkel began to have paranoid delusions, believing that the government had implanted a computer chip in his brain and that the Chinese were going to invade the West Coast.

He had gone to great lengths to hide any symptoms due to a fear of being labelled abnormal or "mentally retarded", being disliked by girls, or being institutionalized.

After the shooting, he told examining psychiatrists about how he would hear voices in his head since he had turned 12, which were so insistent that he considered self-harm to suppress them.

When the gun's owner discovered the theft, he reported it to the police and supplied the names of students he believed might have stolen the firearm; Kinkel was not one of them.

When he was checked for weapons, he reportedly stated: "Look, I'm gonna be square with you guys; the gun's in my locker."

Kinkel was released from police custody and driven home by his father, who told him he would be sent to military school if he did not improve his behavior.

[1] Throughout the next morning, Kinkel repeatedly played a recording of "Liebestod", the final dramatic aria from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, on the family's sound system.

[1] In a note Kinkel left on a coffee table in the living room, he described his motive for killing his parents thus: "I just got two felonies on my record.

He went to the cafeteria after turning down the hallway and, walking across it, fired the remaining 48 rounds from his rifle, wounding 24 students and killing 17-year-old Mikael Nickolauson.

[23] In custody, Kinkel retrieved a knife that was secured on his leg and attacked a police officer, begging to be fatally shot.

He received the Boy Scouts of America Honor Medal with Crossed Palms for his heroism on the day of the attack.

[21] It has a curved wall and a plaque with the names of the two students killed; plans to also include Kinkel's parents' were dropped after debate.

Thurston's current dean of students, a friend who had to call Kristin Kinkel to let her know what had happened, considers the shooting "our 9/11".

In June, President Bill Clinton spoke at the school, calling the shooting "a traumatic experience for all of America ... Everybody who has looked at you knows that this is a good community that they'd be proud to live in, and, therefore, it could happen anywhere.

"[4] At the police station, Kinkel lunged at Officer Al Warthen with his knife, screaming, "Shoot me, kill me!"

He did not resume the attempts when she had to leave the state to finish her undergraduate degree because he "didn't want her to have to fly right back [to Springfield] again.

William and Faith terminated the therapy because Kinkel was responding well to treatment and ceased to show symptoms of depression.

He worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he has helped develop the Parker Solar Probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and HelioSwarm.

"There’s no way his behavior was a choice", says his sister, who elaborates that she has never felt angry enough to need to forgive him since he was the only family member she had left after he killed their parents.

Case, who survived four shots Kinkel took at him, resists the desire to explain him but agrees that better mental-health treatment might have averted the shootings.