ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, March 14, 1996               TAG: 9603150008
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-1  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: DUNBLANE, SCOTLAND
SOURCE: ROBERT SEELY ASSOCIATED PRESS 


16 KINDERGARTNERS AND TEACHER SLAIN EX-SCOUT LEADER KILLS SELF AFTER MASSACRE IN SCOTLAND

One child, sobbing, leaned heavily against a car door. Another, her eyes glazed, stumbled through the jostling crowd at the primary school gate.

In the main street nearby, a woman shrieked, ``Victoria! Victoria!''

Dunblane, a tranquil cathedral town at the foot of the Scottish Highlands, roiled in grief and horror Wednesday after a disgraced former Boy Scout leader armed with four pistols killed or wounded all but one of 29 kindergartners playing in the school gymnasium, and killed their teacher.

The slaughter of the innocents was over in moments.

The shock, devastation and sheer sense of stunned disbelief is just beginning to permeate this beautiful country town and this nation, which has strict gun control laws and very few multiple slayings.

``Just now, to most people, this is a nightmare,'' said school board member Gerry McDermott. ``But they will not wake up from it.''

Five-year-old Stewart Weir will never forget the man with the guns. The boy ran, escaped with only a bullet-grazed leg and was able to tell his dad about it.

``Stewart said he thought the gunman was shooting at him,'' Robert Weir said after comforting his son in the hospital. ``He got hit in the leg, so he took a run and just hid with another wee girl. It is lucky the man turned the gun on himself before he got the rest of the kids.''

Frantic parents tried to get into the school while police and ambulance workers inside confronted unspeakable horror.

``I can only describe what I saw ... as a medieval vision of hell,'' paramedic John McEwan told The Sun, a London tabloid. ``There were little bodies in piles, dotted around the room, and items of children's clothing like shoes and pumps around the floor.''

The final toll was 16 dead children, 12 wounded children and two dead adults, one of them the gunman.

Dunblane is the sort of place people almost never leave, a place whose 9,000 residents clearly care about each other. Just 35 miles northwest of Edinburgh, it straddles the River Allan in the spectacular Perthshire countryside leading into the highlands.

An ecclesiastical center since the seventh century, it has a cathedral, which, like the town's life, was described by Victorian social theorist John Ruskin as ``perfect in its simplicity.''

It also had Thomas Hamilton, 43, a reclusive individual who lived in a public housing project in Stirling, five miles away, and came to Dunblane to supervise a boys' athletic group.

Balding and bespectacled, Hamilton belonged to a local gun club and liked taking photographs. Beyond that, neighbors did not know much about Hamilton. Not, for example, that he was a Scout leader in Stirling in the early 1970s but was expelled for what the Boy Scouts Association called ``complaints about unstable and possibly improper behavior following a Scout camp.''

He kept up his involvement with young people, however, running boys' groups that met in municipal halls in Stirling, Dunblane and neighboring towns through the 1980s.

Some parents then expressed suspicions about his activities, and boys complained about his habit of photographing them once he'd made them assume strange poses, thrusting out their chests or executing gymnastic moves, usually after stripping off their shirts.

Always, Hamilton wanted to get back into the Scouts. Five days ago he wrote to Queen Elizabeth II, scouting's patron, reportedly to complain the Boy Scouts Association was sullying his reputation.

No one interviewed Wednesday remembered seeing Hamilton set off Wednesday along the two-lane motorway to Dunblane, or turn up Doune Road to the school, or wander onto the unguarded playground, through the unlocked front door, across the dining hall and into the gym.

In Dunblane, no one had ever thought of guarding a school.

At 9:30 a.m., teacher Gwen Mayor, 44, was supervising 29 lively youngsters as they ran around the gym and took turns scrambling up the climbing bars. That's the moment Hamilton appeared in the doorway - and opened fire on them all.

Elsewhere in the school, children heard a noise like firecrackers and jumped up from their desks and ran to windows to see what was going on.

Teachers ordered them under their desks. The principal dialed the police.

It was Britain's worst shooting since Michael Ryan, 27, also a loner and gun enthusiast, shot 16 people in the southern English market town of Hungerford on Aug. 19, 1987. He, too, killed himself.

Parents learned of the shootings quickly and rushed to the school. The lucky ones, sobbing with relief, hugged the older children who emerged. There was neither relief nor solace for those led to an adjacent building or the nearby Westlands Hotel to be told the worst possible news, that their daughters or sons were dead.

Shortly after the massacre, a group of teen-age boys walked around to the rear of the roped-off school and stared at bullet holes in the gym windows.

They recalled Hamilton as a strange man who made them feel uncomfortable.

``He used to walk me down from the boys' club and try to invite himself into my house. He seemed queer,'' said Jamie Milligan, 14.

On television, politicians' voices shook with emotion. The queen sent a message - ``I share the grief and horror of the whole country'' - as did Prime Minister John Major, from a summit on terrorism in Cairo, Egypt.

As darkness fell Wednesday, parents identified their slaughtered children in the town mortuary or at Stirling Royal Infirmary.

Scores of people drifted in ones, twos and threes toward the cathedral, where they knelt and prayed in silence.

On Hillside Avenue, Jean Shannon glanced toward the next-door yard and knew she'd never see young Kevin Hasell playing there again.

``He was a lovable wee thing, a typical wee boy,'' she said. ``I've been over to the house. They're bloody shocked. Like us all.''


LENGTH: Long  :  111 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. 1. Mothers wait for news of their children after a 

gunman opened fire at a school in Dunblane, Scotland. 2. A police

officer rubs his eyes after surveying the scene inside the school's

gym, where the victim's bodies lay, their "little bodies in piles."

color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY

by CNB