Lawrence King Murder Trial: Defense Blames 15-Year Old Victim and His Deviant Mascara

When 15-year-old Larry King was murdered in February of 2008, it seemed like a perfect nightmare of teenage violence in the 21st century. It was another school shooting, the specter returned from the 90s, and it was revealed later to be an apparent case of anti-gay bullying. Depending on how you look at things, the Larry King murder may not have been part of the school shooting narrative so much as it was the beginning of the “epidemic” which would later be said to have led to the deaths of Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, and others. The fact that it occurred the day before Valentine’s Day, and that some reports cited King’s giving one of his bullies a valentine as the provocation for his murder, was an especially cruel detail. The fact that “Lawrence had started wearing mascara, lipstick and jewelry to school, prompting a group of male students to bully him,” and identified as gay at the age of 15 caused his killing to be labeled a hate crime by the next week.

Larry — technically Lawrence — was initially said to be improving in hospital care immediately after the shooting, and it was hoped he would recover. But soon he lost consciousness, and then his life, leaving behind only questions for the hundreds of mourners who came to his funeral and built makeshift memorials outside the school. Over the next few weeks, a picture came into focus that seemed to confirm that Larry’s sexual orientation and/or gender presentation were at the root of his bullying and eventually his murder. Activists used the moment to remind the world that homophobia can lead to tragedy while Larry’s family sued his school district for not enforcing the dress code and prohibiting him from wearing feminine clothing and makeup to school.

After the stage of collective shock and grief, however, the nation as a whole seemed to move on. There was no high-stakes investigation to follow, as the killer had been known since almost day one. Brandon McInerney, who was 14 at the time of the shooting, was referred to as the “alleged killer,” but the shooting took place in front of over twenty other students in first-period English. There was little doubt about who to prosecute, and also little for the public to sink their teeth into until a trial — so, until now.

The trial so far has been a complicated and intense one to follow. The LA Times has done an excellent series of updates on it, but other coverage has been light. It’s hard to place blame, though; the nexus of two families’ terrible grief along with all of our culture’s ideas about gender, violence and the passage into adulthood makes for a picture that’s so layered and fraught with tension that it’s difficult to even know where to start.

For instance, there’s the testimony of Larry’s English teacher Dawn Boldrin on giving Larry her daughter’s strapless formal gown, which was met by his surviving family with tears, anger, and storming out of the courtroom.

An infuriated Greg King, father of Larry King, stomped out of the courtroom. He returned a short while later and rounded up the entire King family to leave the courthouse for the day. As the group walked past Boldrin’s daughter and another relative, Larry’s mother, Dawn King, whispered an expletive to them. On Friday morning, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Charles Campbell ruled that was egregious enough to get Dawn King ejected from the courtroom for the rest of the trial. Outside the courtroom, Greg King explained that he became angry because he considered the women’s response “crocodile tears.”

 The King family claims that Boldrin was one of the teachers who complained about Larry’s presentation, who said that he shouldn’t be “coming to school in makeup and boots.” On the other hand, Boldrin claims that, essentially, Larry’s family are the ones who punished him for his clothing and style — she argued on the stand that King’s family had abused him, and that the dress was a private gift to him in recognition of the fact that he was “struggling with family and sexual identity issues,” and was meant to be worn outside of school. It’s true that at the time of the shooting, Larry doesn’t appear to have been living with his family. Reports from the weeks after the shooting in the NYT say that Larry was living at Casa Pacifico, “a center for abused and neglected children in the foster care system,” and had been there since the fall. There’s no realistic way of proving or disproving Boldrin’s claim, and even if there was, what light would it shed on this boy’s murder? Would it help us understand why he wasn’t safe at school if we knew he wasn’t safe at home, either?

Queried by Fox, Boldrin admitted that her former colleagues at the school didn’t agree with her. She lost her tenured teaching position and now works as a barista at Starbucks. Fox also brought out that Boldrin suffered significant mental issues after the shooting, which occurred in her classroom.

Fox asked her if she felt guilty about King’s death.

“You bet,” she said after a pause. “And I have guilt over Brandon sitting there too.”

Where does the responsibility lay for something that never should have happened at all?

Recalling the King family’s lawsuit in 2008, some people seem to think that the blame lies with E.O. Green Junior High. A number of teachers, presumably those who disagreed with Dawn Boldrin, say that they were worried long before the shooting that Larry’s clothes and makeup would be cause for torment and even violence, and that school administrators ignored them.  What’s more, they say that his appearance was only part of the problem; they claim that he openly baited his bullies in a way that family and other administrators don’t want to admit.

It wasn’t just that King, 15, had begun wearing makeup and women’s spiked-heeled boots, witnesses testified. It was that he seemed to relish making the boys squirm at his newly feminized appearance and was taunting them with comments like “I know you want me.”

In light of testimony like this, McInerney’s attorneys are claiming that while he did shoot Larry King, it was only because he was “pushed to the breaking point by King’s taunts.”  Now E.O. Green’s Assistant Principal, Joy Epstein, is under fire both for ignoring warnings that King’s outfits were inviting bullying, and warnings that he was in turn bullying other students. What emerges is a complicated picture of a group of educators with a lot of different ideas about how to keep students safe. There’s Jill Ekman, the teacher who reported telling Larry to wash off his mascara because the special ed program he was in taught students not to draw attention to themselves, and who now reports on  his “willingness to bring attention to himself, even if it was negative.” And then there’s Epstein; Larry came back to school the next day triumphantly wearing even more eye makeup, and said Epstein had told him it was his right. Which is true — Epstein was trying to protect him from sexual orientation and/or gender-based discrimination — but it’s also probably true that Ekman really was trying to protect him from harm. It takes a village to raise a child, and if something goes wrong, a village is left to point fingers. In the end, everyone at E.O. Green grew increasingly aware that what they were trying wasn’t working; Ekman says that “a group of male students in her classroom told her they wanted to beat King up because he would seek them out and follow them into the bathroom.” Ekman considered that sexual harassment, and informed Epstein, who told her there was nothing they could do.  Less than a week later, King was shot and killed.

The last two interactions between Larry King and Brandon McInerney that anyone in the courtroom seem to have reported both seem to confirm Ekman’s story that King had taunted McInerney in the days before his death. On Monday, February 11th, McInerney and teachers have testified that King passed the other boy in the hallway and called out “What’s up, baby?” and later, when waiting to be picked up at the end of the school day, had been “parading” back and forth in high-heeled boots and makeup near a bench where McInerney was sitting after school waiting to be picked up. A group of boys was laughing as McInerney grew visibly angry.”   McInerney told psychologist Doug Hoagland that these were the events he fixated on the evening before coming to school to kill Larry King:

“I sat and I thought about it over and over… It didn’t calm me down. It made me more angry. All I could think about was I wanted to kill him.”

It appears that the defense is claiming that a strong emotional response to Larry King’s presentation or orientation pushed McInerney into “a transient period of dissociation,” which may have been facilitated by McInerney’s living with an abusive methamphetamine-addicted father. Douglas Hoagland, McInerney’s attorney, says that his client was having second thoughts after having brought the gun to school, and almost changed his mind — until he heard King tell a friend that he was changing his name to Leticia. The defense claims McInerney “snapped,” and later remembered hearing the teacher scream and seeing a pool of Larry King’s blood.

In the 1999 trial of Matthew Shepard’s killers, Judge Barton Voigt threw out what he called the “homosexual rage” defense. Aaron McKinney’s defense strategy rested on the premise that based upon previous life experience, including one instance of rape by a man at age 7, he was unable to function reasonably upon finding out that Shepard was gay, and that while he couldn’t deny he killed him, the sentence should be manslaughter instead of murder. From Judge Voigt’s court order:

“The defense is, in effect, either a temporary insanity defense or a diminished capacity defense, such as irresistible impulse… There is no proffered evidence of a homosexual rage syndrome that would make the evidence relevant. …That cannot be the law. Is it murder if a white supremacist kills a white man who jostles him in a crowd, but only manslaughter if he kills a black man who does the same?”

Aaron McKinney is now serving two consecutive life sentences for second-degree murder.

Obviously nothing that Larry King could ever possibly have said or done to tease McInerney, if that’s true, could justify having killed him. (Really the most appropriate response to taunting, it would seem, is to taunt in return.) It seems legally improbable that it will even justify changing the charge he’s convicted for. Rage will never be an excuse to kill anyone, “homosexual rage” or otherwise. But at the same time, it’s a fact of life. And in the aftermath of a life, when it’s so easy and so tempting to think about what could have been done differently, it’s also possible to sympathize with those adults in King’s life who knew what rage makes people capable of, and tried to protect him from it however they knew. The instinct to protect a child you care about from the world is powerful, even if that means trying to protect him from himself.

But do we change our behavior to please our oppressors? One could tell the boy not to wear a dress, or one could teach the other boys why it’s not appropriate to discriminate against a boy wearing a dress. At times, this case has seemed like nothing more than an extended episode of victim-blaming, but it’s hard to view gender-based discrimination objectively from where we sit. As we so often see discrimination, institutionalized and overt, against gay and trans people overlooked or excused in courts and in schools, it’s easy to blame the teachers’ concerns about his behavior and its impact on his fate to their exaggerated response to gender deviance. But maybe that had nothing to do with it, really — if a girl had done all the same things King did, it’s possible the teachers would’ve reacted with similar concern and perhaps also similar inability to know how to best help the student stay safe.

And at the same time, it seems easy from our position now to look back at the sashaying, performative, attention-grabbing and maybe even intentionally taunting behavior that they were so worried about, and understand it. Anyone who has been bullied, who obviously didn’t fit in, who felt ostracized from a community that was supposed to welcome them, be it family or peers, has probably harbored the fantasy of doing exactly what they’re not supposed to. Of laughing in bullies’ faces, living out loud instead of making every waking moment about trying to be inconspicuous, retaliating with the obvious insecurities that their tormentors are trying to cover up. The defense is implying that Larry King’s reportedly having called “What’s up, baby?” to his killer was the reason he died; his former teachers say they feared the same, and ended up being vindicated. It’s a unique twist on the idea of “gay panic;” that the victim actively participated in inciting panic in the person who killed him, that some kind of “panic” was his aim. But there’s a reason popular high school flicks end in the tables turning on the mean, popular kid, who we last see with a look of frantic dismay as he finds himself on the receiving end of what he’s been dishing out the whole movie. That fantasy is as inalienable as Larry’s right to wear mascara. Even if he did catcall or “taunt” — what unpopular gay junior high school student wouldn’t love to do the same? And how would McInerny have responded if it was a girl calling, “What’s up baby?” to him in the hallway.

Defense lawyers rested their case yesterday, without Brandon McInerney ever having testified. The prosecution still has to present its case, which will undoubtedly present new and complicated angles from which to look at this heartbreaking loss which continues to slowly and surely break the hearts of everyone still following it. Larry King is dead, and Brandon McInerney — who is being tried as an adult — gave up any chance at a normal life at age 14, whatever chance he may have had growing up in a home with abuse and addiction. There’s no ending to this story that will help anything make sense to these families. But the way we talk about Larry King’s life and death can tell us a lot about how his community in Oxnard and our community as a nation think about gender, about masculinity, about students’ rights, about adults’ responsibilities, and inevitably about violence. We can only hope that as a community we’ll come out on the other side of this somehow sadder but stronger than how we started.

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Rachel

Originally from Boston, MA, Rachel now lives in the Midwest. Topics dear to her heart include bisexuality, The X-Files and tacos. Her favorite Ciara video is probably "Ride," but if you're only going to watch one, she recommends "Like A Boy." You can follow her on twitter and instagram.

Rachel has written 1142 articles for us.

27 Comments

  1. “We can only hope that as a community we’ll come out on the other side of this somehow sadder but stronger than how we started.”

    No, we won’t learn crap from King’s execution. It was only because King was viewed as a young gay boy and not a gender variant person or trans girl that most gay media even followed this crime in the first place. Many young transfeminine people of color (many only a few years older than King) are murdered every year in a grotesque holocaust and our “community leaders” continue to explain to us how marriage equality is first on the list of issues.

    Moreover, I still see how virtually all GL media (including Autostraddle) repeatedly center much of the crime around King’s supposed “teasing” of McInerney (which was largely perpetuated by a story in Newsweek by a gay male writer) yet say virtually nothing about what King endured from other students and teachers (or his family). Would anyone here be okay if Teresa Butz were described by the defense as “acting slutty and deserving to be raped and murdered?” I’m really sick of hearing this trial described using this transmisogynist fodder. Yes, this is the tactic the defense attorney (sadly a cis-lesbian) has chosen to use, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be reprinted as though it had merit or logic.

    • i can’t speak for rachel, but it’s my understanding that this piece is a reaction to the Defense’s case, which they rested this week. I totally get how this could be read otherwise, especially through the lens of other GL media coverage of the case, but this article is about the defense’s case — that’s the topic of the article. When the topic is the Prosecution’s case, the prosecution’s case would be discussed. I read everything we’ve published about this and I’ve never heard about King allegedly teasing other students to this degree until I read this this afternoon. And this post about the defense’s case would be incomplete if all their claims — even the baseless ones — were tossed out.

      I already wrote a take-down of the Newsweek article you mention many moons ago. This is our only other article about the trial.

      • Reise, I think I must have been referring to some of the responses to the prior article you posted (responses which overwhelmingly focused on the McInerney’s age) and perhaps I also mixed up some of the other LG blogs entries on this crime. If so, my apologies. But… for me repeating large amounts of the defense’s BS then adding a paragraph or two of discussion is not really going over how horrible these defense tactics are much less that they’re being perpetrated by a community member. This trial and the way it’s being conducted say more about what queer and trans youth really go through than a thousand ‘It Gets Better’ videos.

        • Hi! I’m sorry if you feel like my coverage of this is part of the problem rather than the solution. I do feel like it’s crazy and insupportable that the defense is so explicitly blaming the victim in this case, which is a large part of why I wrote this article — something which I hoped was clear in the text, but maybe I’m wrong. I did my best throughout to make it clear that we don’t know anything Larry said or did for sure; there are events reported by teachers and witnesses at the school in a number of sources, but of course I wasn’t there and can’t know for sure. I felt it was also clear from the article that of course, whether his teacher’s claims are true or not, it would in no way validate McInerney’s defense. I really agree with you — “This trial and the way it’s being conducted say more about what queer and trans youth really go through than a thousand ‘It Gets Better’ videos.” — and felt like the most productive thing to do was discuss it rather than let it slide. I’m sorry if you feel it wasn’t constructive or made the problem worse.

        • Ginasf,

          I could not agree more. There is sometimes this need by people who have members of their community being harmed to try to figure out and even rationalize the behavior of the attacker. Brandon McInerney is a killer. He took a gun, he put it to the back of someone’s head, and he pulled the trigger. That the defense is allowed to use this gay panic defense is a stain on the judicial system. This gay panic approach condones and embraces bigotry by attempting to get a jury to be lenient with the crime because the “gay boy was asking for it”. Lawrence King was flirting, a behavior done by many boys and girls on a daily basis at every school.

          Where does blame lay? It lays on Brandon McInerney.

          I recently read In the Garden of Beasts which is a nonfiction book about the US Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937. Throughout the first year in Germany, him and his family rationalize the behavior towards the Jewish people. They try to see it from the viewpoint of the Nazi’s. They rationalize.

          Lawrence King was killed for being gay period. The defense is playing to the same prejudices.

          • blame does NOT just lie with brandon; it lies with a society that puts just about ZERO resources into helping people with addiction or children in abusive homes, and that does absolutely fuck all about a toxic culture of masculinity/heterosexuality built on stigma, a stigma that clearly terrified brandon. That doesn’t excuse his actions, but it definitely explains what he did. We’re talking about two children who have been shamefully let down on all fronts.

    • Personally I don’t condone violence toward anyone, even if I don’t agree with their lifestyle. I also think the victim was baiting the other boys and although doesn’t justify a shooting can also understand why one of them would snap. Not blaming the victim, just understanding where the others are coming from and if some girl was baiting me I wouldn’t shoot her though I would sure as heck want her to get out of my face. Like said though don’t condone the violence which although media never shows us just as much against straight people as homos.

  2. This whole thing just makes me sick. This kid better not get off for killing Lawrence based on that ridiculous defense.

  3. It’s crazy to me that Larry’s family think it’s more appropriate or legally viable to sue the school for NOT forcing Larry to dress in gender-normative attire than it is for them to sue the school for providing him with a safe space in which to obtain an education.

    In other news, that ‘homosexual threat’ argument is one of the silliest legal arguments I’ve heard for a long time… I know I’m from a different legal system but here typically ‘what’s up baby’ over the hall wouldn’t cut it, the gay man in question would need to be quite physical or proximate before the defence could be raised. So to my mind it’s a stupid and homophobic defence even by the standards of a stupid and homophobic legal principle.

  4. This is such a complicated issue, so thank you Rachel for doing very fair coverage of this. I can’t even put my thoughts into words because it all boils down to rage over the victim-blaming defense, and me thinking that if the defense feels Brandon is justified in killing someone who “sexually harassed” him, how many women SHOULD get away with taking the same action against legitimate sexual harassers. Sexism and Heterocentricism at its finest here, folks. It makes me sick and sad.

  5. I agree that victim-blaming is wrong and the gay panic defense that has been tried in hate crimes is ridiculous. But I think the world is different for kids and it’s hard not to at least see how the McInerney (who, for all we know, could have his own unresolved sexuality issues) would be bothered by Larry’s behavior. I know these kids are in high school, and maybe I’m just getting old, because the kids in the pictures look so damn young. Maybe this really shows us that kids need better lessons in accepting people’s differences, but kids have never been great at that. That’s why most people I know came out the closet after high school, because kids are different than adults — they are more cruel and notice differences more than adults do. (Don’t get me wrong. I think hate is taught. But kids are quick to point out or mock someone who is different in some way.) Do I think McInerney hates gay people or is a natural born killer? I think he’s a kid who felt very embarrassed, mocked and confused and reacted very poorly, as kids are apt to do.

    And the adults faced the struggle of supporting who Larry is and trying to avoid making him feel bad about himself, or encouraging him to tone it down to avoid abuse. Can the adults at school be blamed for it? I think they’d be criticized either way. Larry had already been rejected by his family, which seemed to have its own issues, so I wonder how much his home life made him act out. (I don’t think his home life made him gay or trans or whatever his identity was. But it’s possible it made him act out inappropriately, the way another boy might’ve instead started being violent or something.) Maybe support from his family is what Larry really needed. But did they know how to deal with it? Did they understand it? Clearly not. Does that mean they didn’t love him though?

    Mostly, this is a tragic situation that no one was really equipped to deal with — not the adults and not the kids. Sad. There is at least a comfort after a murder where the pieces are picked up and you can say “Well, this is why it happened.” That one thing that, if changed, would ensure the murder wouldn’t have happened. I don’t think there’s that thing in this case. At least not yet.

  6. i don’t understand the blaming process at all. it’s messy and useless and doesn’t bring him back.

    we had a trans woman at my school that acted a lot like how larry did (i know you want me, stuff like that) but she had enough money to make sure the school let her dress the way she wanted, and a lot of friends that would do whatever it took to defend her. yeah, i heard a lot of death threats towards her (guys were genuinely scared of her, one guy i knew would freak out if he even heard her voice, and have to leave before he “did something stupid” which i don’t understand) but because of the “posse” she kept and the school’s following of the anti discrimination rules, which only happened because of nikki’s lawyers, she was safe. and this was in texas of all places. small town, podunk texas.

    if it can happen here, there’s no excuse why they can’t protect kids from this happening anywhere else. preferably without the use of lawyers, but whatever it takes.

    • I just don’t understand what people expect out of gender variant or trans kids who are extremely feminine? Should King have just lowered their head in shame and just taken endless abuse. King (who was already referring to themselves as Letitia in private) was trying to make the best out of a horrible situation both at home and at school and didn’t create big drama out of it. The defense team at the trial (and some of the teachers at the school) are calling King sitting at the same lunch table as some other students “taunting them” and trying to initiate conflict??!!

      First off, many children who are that overtly feminine can’t hide it. It’s not like the great masses of gay people who laid low in high school… MAAB people who are extremely femme push buttons NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO and it’s often by doing extremely subtle things like how you throw a ball, pick up a paper, how you run or how you pronounce certain words or move your hands. Even if King did 1/10th of what he did do, didn’t wear makeup or high heels he would still have been bullied and it’s very possible the outcome would have been the same. :(

  7. Rachel, thank you for this article, it was really well written. I feel sick that they’re blaming King for his dramatic and taunting behaviour. At fifteen, I can totally understand flaunting his differences and experimenting with reactions to clothing, makeup and jewelry. It’s insane that McInerny was so crazyangry that he actually killed him- and where the hell did he get a gun from?
    The bit about his teacher giving him the dress had me in tears. Sweetest thing ever, although perhaps not under the circumstances.

  8. It’s really messed up to me that all the pictures of him seem to be of when he was younger. He just looks like a tiny, little kid.
    Obviously everything about this is messed up. It’s so different from the Matthew Shepard case IMO, because everything about Larry’s life sounded fucking impossible, and both boys were struggling so much with their lives, and now neither of them have one. This also makes me SO fucking glad to live in a place where guns are not so easily available.

    • I still don’t totally understand what’s so ‘complicated’ about this issue… one kid executed a trans kid with obvious premeditation. He attempted to get other kids to murder King and when they refused to do it, he did it. He often bragged to other students about his guns. The day before the murder, he told one of King’s friends, “Say goodbye to your friend Larry because you’re never going to see him again.”Brandon McInerney is going to be 18 this January. If they tried him as juvenile he would, literally, serve no time for murdering a picked-on young trans kid. People at the school described McInerney has being fairly popular and King as being a total outsider. If King were a cis-girl would people be still be describing this as ‘complicated?’

  9. I am a conservative heterosexual male, a father, and a grand father. I look at this child who was murdered and all people can focus on is his “sexuality”. I know the horrible and suffocating pain of losing a child. This little boy was a beautiful, sweet, and kind child. I’ve never met him but I know him. I know his families souls are screaming in agony. I know this little boy had a voice, a smile, a soul, a heart. He had dreams. He felt things as all humans do. He felt joy, and sorrow, he felt hope and despair. This little boy was so beautiful, so filled with promise and dreams. He loved with the purest love of all, we call it “puppy love” and that love is based in innocents.

    His wonderful and promising life was cut short because some son of a bitch taught another boy hatred. This is what we got from the 60’s “social revolution”, people pitted against each other. Back in the day when this old man was a kid, we protected kids like this little boy because it was “dishonorable and cowardly” to pick on them. Bullies never look for a fight, only a victim. We knew boys who were “sissies” but we protected them like little sisters because we felt compassion.

    I want each of you to take time, look at this little boys picture and see him. Not is “celebrated sexuality”, but see him. If you do, you can almost hear his voice calling out to you. My hope is that you see this beautiful human being, this “little boy” for who he was. A sweet and loving kid. Defenseless. Then realize each of his agonizing last seconds of life. Tell me then, do you see a gay or the whole person.

  10. Surprise, surprise, the trial ended in a hung jury. All the obsessing over King “sexually harassing” Brandon McInerney paid off. There was someone on the jury stupid enough (or bigoted enough) to believe it. And once again, a trans young person’s life is viewed as being worthless. And now, if it is retried, it will likely be for a lesser offense involving a lack of premeditation (despite the fact Brandon bragged the day before he was going to murder King). And so it goes. :(

  11. The early (not to mention later) teenage years can be quite tormenting; there is often confusion over sexual identity as well. We all know how common it is for kids of 12 or older to have a crush on a teacher of the same sex, not to mention young boys being intimate with each other as they ‘discover” sex.

    Now if Larry King singled out certain kids to tease, it stands to reason that these kids were worried- and for good reason- that they might in turn be singled out by other kids to be tormented themselves.

    For McIerney, this was a real danger- and we cannot know if Larry King had some instinctive knowledge about latent homosexuality in others- knowledge of which his target, himself, was not aware.

    Again, it wasn’t just the multiple baiting incidents by King that aroused the anger- it was also the fear that he, too, would be singled out for bullying by the other children.

    We cannot impose “maturity” on a youngster who has committed murder- or another serious crime- because the fact is that a 14-yr-old’s brain is far from fully-matured, and he lacks the capacity to reason through the consequences of his actions; as with much younger children, they often do what seems necessary at the moment, and also foten tend to lack the capacity to control their emotions. This “snapping” by McIerney fits right into this scenario.

    When we put this scenario together with young McIerney’s upbringing– it is a recipe for disaster.

    Children are supposed to have a loving, nurturing environment, with parents who teach them appropriate lessons in teaching right from wrong, and interacting with other people. Young McIerney hardly had this in his life.

    Two troubled children in this case created the “perfect storm”- and the perfect tragedy. Yet,had the school personnel not been grossly negligent regarding the obvious problems- had they involved themselves properly this storm could easily have been prevented.

    • But we know thats not the case. He Larry was bullied before hand. Going through bullies and drama at home as well. I was in high school not that long ago and I know that I would have done the same thing. They’re blowing his so called sexual harrassment up because it gives more to the little murderer getting away with it. He didn’t hand pick out kids to mess with. Usually the ‘you want me’ back is a defense mechanism which no one thought to bring up. No one mentions that the kid was bullying Larry before all of this. And only until he came back with his comments that Mclerny started in the first place. And if a 14 year old isn’t fit to be able to reason, then isn’t it say to say that they’re all dangerous? Why have them in a classroom if they can’t keep from killing people? Stop making excuses.

  12. You wrote one of the better articles I have seen. It actually seemed to present some objectivity. The difficulty is that there are facts that were kept out so as to not put the victim on trial. I will always believe that none of this would have happened had Larry never been put into foster care. The reason and situations behind this came out in the civil trial. The king’s were awarded basically nothing based on their cop ability in the situation. That should say it all. I also never ever complained about Larry and his dress to or in school. Hence another lie the kings choose to perpetuate. The story is complicated…however The result…the loss of Larry is simple and will never be understandable.

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