A year after the Paducah shootings Ben Strong is still standing up for God. [see update below]
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When Ben Strong and Michael Carneal arrived at school on that Monday morning more than a year ago, both of them knew exactly what they wanted to do.
Ben wanted to pray with his friends. Michael wanted to shoot them.
And so at 7:37 a.m. on December 1, 1997, Ben and about 35 other students gathered - as they did every morning before the first bell rang - in the front lobby of Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky.
There they stood, huddled together, holding hands, singing songs and talking to God.
While they prayed, Michael, a 14-year-old freshman, stood nearby, calmly putting in ear plugs. As soon as the students said, "Amen," Michael pulled out a pistol and started shooting.
The first bullet hit Nicole Hadley, a 14-year-old freshman who was a popular basketball player. Nicole fell to the floor and later died.
Michael pulled the trigger about 10 more times, sending more students to the floor. Three girls died in the attack-Nicole, 15-year-old Kayce Steger, and 17-year-old Jessica James. Five other students were injured, including Missy Jenkins who is paralyzed from the chest down.
The whole time Michael was shooting, Ben kept yelling, "Mike, what are you doing? Put the gun down!" But Michael ignored him and kept firing.
Then the principal, Bill Bond, who heard the shots from his office, came running into the lobby. Michael took aim at the principal. But before he could pull the trigger, Ben stepped in front of Michael and demanded that he stop the shooting.
This time, Michael listened. He put the gun down, then slouched to the floor and told Ben, "I can't believe I did that." Soon, police arrived, arrested Michael, and took him away.
The principal says Ben is a hero. "I have no doubt that Ben saved my life," says Bond. "There was one bullet left in the gun, and I know it was meant for me."
REACTING RIGHT
When people say he's a hero, Ben says, "Not me. I was just reacting to what was happening."
Just reacting? That was no ordinary reaction. There aren't many people who could do what Ben did.
"That took courage," said the principal.
Courage may have been Ben's first reaction, but in the following days, his reactions were more typical: shock, grief, confusion, pain. But never did he get angry at God.
"I guess I never thought of it that way," says Ben, whose dad is pastor of Concord Assembly of God church. "You don't know why stuff like this happens, but it does. And you can't really do anything to change that. You can change how you react to it, but you can't change the past. And you need to remember that God is always in control."
Ben says the tragedy has made his faith stronger, that he's never doubted God's love, even for a second.
"God is the only one who got us through this," he says. "God's always there for us, no matter what happens. He's our ultimate hope, and we have to stay focused on him.
"If I wasn't a Christian, I don't know how I'd react to something like this. It would be easy to just go nuts. But when you have God in your life, something like this forces you to lean on him even more."
Especially when it came to forgiveness. Ben says he forgave Michael "immediately."
"I'm not saying I wasn't mad at him, because I was," Ben says. "But I knew that forgiveness was the right thing to do. You can't hang on to bitterness, because it'll ruin the rest of your life. I forgave Mike because that's what God wants us to do."
Ben's not the only student to have forgiven Michael. Many others have publicly stated their forgiveness. Within days of the shooting, some of them had put up a huge banner in the Heath hallways that read, "We forgive you, Mike!"
None of the students has spoken with Michael since the shooting, but several, including Ben, have visited the Carneal family to express their love and forgiveness. "We've got to remember Michael's family," Ben says. "They're hurting, too."
LASTING EFFECTS
A tragedy like the one that occurred in West Paducah can affect people in drastic ways.
It can tear them apart.
Or it can bring them closer together. Which is just what happened with the prayer group at Heath, says Ben.
"We've all leaned on each other, prayed for each other, talked about it a lot," he says. "We've needed each other's support to get through this."
Other students - including many non-believers - noticed the group's solidarity. And they wanted to be a part of it.
Before the shooting, about 35 people regularly attended the morning prayer sessions. By the end of the year, that number was up to at least 100, says Ben, who was the group's leader before graduating last spring.
"All kinds of kids started coming to the prayer group," says Ben. "Now, I don't want to say that everything is peachy, because it's not. There's still some underlying stuff that a lot of people are dealing with.
"But other kids are curious. They're seeing the hope that we have in God. They're saying, 'If there's that much hope in it, there has to be something in it for me, too.' Some kids were coming to the group and getting to know God for the first time."
That's the most important thing to Ben, an evangelist at heart. Since the tragedy, Ben has been asked to speak in churches around the country. At one church service in Ohio, about 200 students approached the altar after Ben spoke, deciding to follow Jesus. That thrills Ben to the core.
"People are getting saved," says Ben, who has known since he was 12 that he wants to be a preacher, just like his dad. "To see kids get saved, to encourage kids, that's what I like to see."
Ben has had a year to reflect on what happened that tragic morning last December. He says he's learned a lot of things in the wake of it all. And he wants to tell those things to others.
"Some of the kids at my school realized this thing was so close to them," says Ben. "They realized life is real, and life can sometimes end quicker than we thought it could."
As a result, Ben wants to get the word out about getting right with God.
"I want to tell people about Jesus," he says. "I've learned it's important to stand up for God no matter what happens. God's always there for you, no matter what.
"As Christians, we have to live our lives strong, and be faithful to God. He'll always be there with us."
Just as he was for the three girls who died. Ben says the others in the prayer group have been comforted by knowing that Nicole, Kayce, and Jessica are in heaven.
"It hurts to see them go," Ben says, "but to them, there was no better way. They were praying. As soon as they said, 'Amen,' they saw the face of God."
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Condensed from Campus Life (December 1998), © 1998 Christianity Today International.
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Holwick: After I preached this illustration in 2016, I googled Ben Strong to see how his life had turned out and found this article:
"When Grief Wanted a Hero, Truth Didn’t Get in the Way," by William Glaberson, New York Times, July 25, 2000; .
He was the teenage hero who turned a horrifying school shooting into a parable of good against evil. His name is Ben Strong, the gregarious son of a preacher, and he was said to have displayed remarkable courage when he disarmed Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old killer who opened fire on a prayer group at Heath High School here [Padukah, Kentucky] on Dec. 1, 1997.
In the days after the shooting, Mr. Strong, an appealing high school senior, was a regular on national television, where he was portrayed as a symbol of hope. His inspirational story of confronting the killer was repeated in newspapers across the country, including this one. Since then, he has been the subject of cover articles in magazines and has traveled the country preaching to young people. Now 20, and working at his father’s Assembly of God Church, he is often introduced as the hero of Heath High.
But as new information about the events that morning is starting to emerge because of a civil lawsuit, some people here are openly challenging the portrait of Mr. Strong as a hero who rushed up to a killer as he was firing and persuaded him to drop the gun he had used to kill three girls and injure five other students. In a brief interview recently, even Mr. Strong acknowledged for the first time to a reporter that the heroic picture of him might have been inaccurate.
“Sometimes,” he said in the interview, “people get the wrong idea.” In terse answers to questions, he agreed that he had not taken the gun away from Mr. Carneal, as he sometimes suggested after the shooting, and he agreed that he might not have influenced Mr. Carneal at all in his decision to stop shooting.
The Ben Strong story shows how chaos and panic can distort the accounts that witnesses give of the rampage killings that periodically horrify the country. It may show, too, how the stories of the killings are often shaped by the powerful desire of reporters and everyone else involved to find some good news, even signs of heroism, in horrible, inexplicable events.
A striking finding from a New York Times examination of rampage killings, published in April, is that long after the reporters depart, a different story of the events often emerges. Usually, the first accounts present inaccurate information about the killer, the crime, the victims or the roles of bystanders.
After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, for example, one student, Cassie Bernall, was widely described as having answered “yes” when one of the two killers asked her whether she believed in God. She was killed, it was said, for her faith.
After that account put her in the realm of martyrdom and inspired a best-selling book, some news accounts last year reported that the “yes” most likely came from another student, Valeen Schnurr, who survived.
At Heath High School, the press took its lead from Bill J. Bond, the principal at the time of the shooting. Mr. Bond was the first person to tell reporters that a prayerful senior who was a football player, Benjamin Scott Strong, had probably saved lives, including Mr. Bond’s.
“The whole world wants a hero,” Mr. Bond said in a recent interview. “It is natural to look for some goodness in a tragedy, and I probably contributed to it.”
In testimony filed in McCracken County Circuit Court here this spring, which has received little public notice, Mr. Strong said he had won praise for his bravery “because of what people said, how things were portrayed” after the shooting, not what really happened.
The families of the three murdered girls sued Mr. Strong, as well as school officials, and many other people here they said could have prevented the killings. In the deposition, Mr. Strong testified this winter that the killer had discarded the gun on his own. “He just got done, and he dropped it,” Mr. Strong said.
Mr. Carneal, who is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty but mentally ill to murder, also testified in the suit. When a lawyer asked whether Mr. Strong had stopped him from shooting he replied, “No sir.”
When Mr. Bond was told in a recent interview about Mr. Strong’s newly released testimony, he said information about Mr. Strong’s actions had come from Mr. Strong initially and had always been somewhat imprecise.
“I asked him what he did,” Mr. Bond said, “and he said, ‘I told him to lay the gun down,’ and I took that at face value.”
With scores of reporters pressing around the school the afternoon of the shooting, Mr. Bond said, the story of Mr. Strong’s actions may have been exaggerated and “it probably developed a life of its own.”
Mr. Strong helped the story along. Within hours of the shooting, he was giving interviews and standing by as reporters described him as the leader of the prayer group, a title he no longer claims.
His descriptions of the shooting varied in the early interviews. But in some accounts he suggested there had been a tug of war over the gun. “And then I went for him and I grabbed him, you know,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” the day after the shootings, “and he put down the gun and everything.”
Sometimes, he simply stood by or denied he was a hero, which some of his new admirers took as humility. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” a week after the killings, Mr. Strong listened silently while another guest, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, called Mr. Strong a “major hero” and repeated the widespread story. Mr. Falwell described how Mr. Strong “literally walked right up to the young man in the face of a firing gun and said, ‘Give me the gun.’ “
In Mr. Strong’s deposition, on Jan. 20, a transcript shows, the lawyer for the victims’ families, Mike Breen of Bowling Green, Ky., read him a Time magazine article published the week after the shooting.
Time, which had interviewed Mr. Strong, said that Mr. Strong “turned his eyes” on the killer “and, forcefully said, ‘Put down the gun.’” In his deposition, Mr. Strong said he could not guarantee that he had actually said any of that out loud. “Now the forcefully part,” he added, “that was written by them.”
Mr. Strong was questioned under oath by the lawyer for the victims’ families, partly because they had sued him. Mr. Strong has always acknowledged that Mr. Carneal warned him not to come to the prayer group that Monday because something was going to happen.
But Mr. Strong has denied that he had any reason to suspect that Mr. Carneal would commit murder. The judge dismissed the case against Mr. Strong and most of the other defendants.
It is clear from the deposition testimony that Mr. Strong did eventually go to Mr. Carneal while some other students ran away. He might have reached Mr. Carneal the same time as Mr. Bond.
Mr. Carneal, according to the testimony, had by then stopped shooting, discarded his gun and was slumping to the ground, perhaps in tears. It is undisputed that when Mr. Strong and Mr. Bond arrived, Mr. Carneal was distraught and asked Mr. Strong to “kill me, please kill me.”
Mr. Carneal said in his testimony that Mr. Strong did speak as he approached. He quoted Mr. Strong as saying: “What are you shooting people for?” Then, Mr. Carneal said, Mr. Strong groaned, gritted his teeth and took Mr. Carneal by the shoulders and shook him.
Mr. Strong ended two brief interviews recently by saying that he was not comfortable talking about the subject any longer. But he was accepting of the idea that the story of what happened the day of the shooting might be different from the one that is widely known. “Truth is truth,” he said very quietly. “That’s a good thing.”
In his deposition, Mr. Strong suggested that he wanted to be brave. But in shock, he said, “Your body doesn’t function like it normally does.”
After the first days, the story of Mr. Strong as a hero might have been beyond his ability to control it. In large ways and small, the story was being used by other people who wanted a hero in a tragedy, including the news media. But in West Paducah, the families of the murdered girls seethed as they said they believed Mr. Strong was profiting from their daughters’ deaths.
“I think he’s got some problems, some reason he has to think of himself as a hero,” said Joe James, whose daughter Jessica was killed in the shooting. The parents of the three girls who were killed all said they were infuriated by a Web site, bstrong.com, which advertised a CD with a song by professional artists titled “BStrong” and included remarks from Mr. Strong. In the recent interview, Mr. Strong said he had not received any proceeds from the sale of the CD. The producers of the CD have said it was a fund-raising effort for the victims’ families.
Whatever part Mr. Strong played in perpetuating his story, his public image has quietly divided people here. To some, he remains a young man who, no matter what, represents positive values in stark contrast to those of the killer.
But some here say the Ben Strong story has overshadowed the tragedy itself and they are bitter about him. In May, about 30 students from a parochial school near here, Christian Fellowship School, traveled to an intramural event at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.
In a large meeting for all the high school students, a speaker told the assembled crowd that teenagers today should be more like Ben Strong, the student who confronted the killer in Paducah, said Cathy Davis, a parent from here who was with the group as a chaperone.
Quietly, the group from here rose and left the room, said some who were there. “Some of the kids were terribly offended,” Mrs. Davis said, “because they know Ben Strong is not the hero he was played up to be.”
