Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Gretchen Woodard tells TIME of her son Mitchell's
troubles and his version of the Jonesboro massacre
By NADYA LABI
He didn't look real good," says Gretchen Woodard of her 13-year-old
son, Mitchell Johnson. She had just seen him at the Craighead
County Detention Center in Arkansas, where he and his partner,
Andrew Golden, 11, are in solitary confinement, awaiting an April 29
court
hearing into the Jonesboro massacre. For now, though, Gretchen is
thinking
about smaller matters. Her son is "thin, sallow and dehydrated, with
very dry,
cracked lips," she says. "I begged him to drink." But Mitch, she says,
is not
taken with the prison's beverage selection: tap water, milk and, on a
good
day, Kool-Aid. He is terrified and confused, she says, able to provide
few
clues to his mother to explain the horror that he and Drew Golden are
accused of inflicting on the Arkansas community. Last week Jonesboro was
still deep in mourning as almost 8,000 people gathered at Arkansas State
University to remember the four girls and one teacher murdered on March
24.
A clear picture of Mitchell Johnson has been obscured by his disparate
identities--choirboy, volatile romantic, school bully. To those images
must
now be added the ravages of family turmoil and rootlessness. But was
Mitch
the instigator of the shootings at Westside Middle School, as Drew's
grandfather has cast him? Gretchen Woodard has another version. She told
TIME her son says it was Drew who proposed an attack last month. Mitch
had said no, Woodard says, but then on the bus ride home from school the
afternoon before the fatal assault, Drew approached Mitch again. "Mitch
told
me he never meant to hurt anybody and he didn't take specific aim," says
Woodard. "He just meant to scare 'em, I guess. But then something went
terribly wrong." She learned of the shooting from two back-to-back phone
calls. "Don't you know?" demanded the first caller. Then her son Monte,
11,
rang: "Mom, you have to come get me. Mitchell shot some kids."
Their mother tells her story from her weather-worn mobile home on a dirt
road northwest of Jonesboro. Next door is Brand Custom Hauling--the
company that employs Gretchen's third husband, Terry Woodard, as a
heavy-equipment operator. In the house a bobtailed cat prowls the
kitchen
counter while Trigger, the pet guinea pig, snoozes in its cage. "The
hardest
thing for me is that this was the happiest any of us had ever been,"
says
Woodard. On the morning of the shooting, Mitch had sat at her circular
kitchen table, slumped in her spindle-back chair, chuckling with his
stepfather
over how an old woman grabbed his ear during a visit by his church group
to
a local nursing home. Mitch, who had been troubled since Gretchen's
divorce
from his father, Scott Johnson, in 1994, had seemed happier; he had
brought
home A's in music, choir and phys ed in January. He had even made three
different middle-school teams, becoming a Westside Warrior in football,
basketball and baseball.
Gretchen chooses not to talk about another story that surfaced last week
from her son's past. According to a sheriff's report in Minnesota, where
the
family had originally lived, Mitch had admitted sexually touching the
two-year-old granddaughter of his father's fiance, during the boy's
summer
vacation in Minnesota last year. Mitch told his friend Andrew O'Rourke,
13,
that the situation had been "misunderstood"--he was only trying to help
the
toddler pull up her pants after she went to the bathroom. But Mitchell
also
told authorities that he "put his finger inside of her once." The girl
corroborated that statement, pointing to an anatomically correct doll.
Mitch
was ordered to undergo psychological counseling.
For his mother, even the dilapidated domesticity of Arkansas was an
improvement over Minnesota. By the early 1990s, her marriage to Scott
Johnson was failing, and home life had become something of a health
hazard.
"There was dog crap on the kitchen floor," recalls an occasional visitor
to
their farmhouse in Grand Meadow. "Rotting food was lying on the counter
for
weeks. The yard was not cleaned or mowed." As for Mitch, the visitor
recalls once finding him asleep behind some paneling in the house. He
says,
"He didn't look like someone I wanted my kid to play with. His clothes
were
dirty. If I had more kindness, I would have cleaned him up." In 1993
Scott
Johnson was arrested for stealing meat at the grocery where he worked,
and
was dismissed. He and Gretchen divorced a year later.
While her husband tangled with the law over the gross misdemeanor,
Gretchen, who was a corrections officer at a federal-prison medical
center in
nearby Rochester, befriended Woodard, a felon who had been convicted in
1990 of drug and firearms charges. In 1995 he won a "supervised release"
from a halfway house and moved to Jonesboro with Gretchen and her sons.
This time around, she chose to be a homemaker, and they set up house on
a
county road half a mile outside Jonesboro. The Woodards' daughter Jessie
was born in Arkansas.
Just how Drew Golden and Mitch Johnson became partners is still a
mystery.
The Goldens live 2 1/2 miles away at 210 Royale Drive, an address that
asserts its respectability with a sunflower-painted mailbox and a stone
squirrel
poised next to a tiny fountain on the front lawn. "The families didn't
know
each other, and they don't know how the boys know each other," says
William Howard, Mitchell's court-appointed attorney. Says Alisha Golden,
who used to sit next to Drew (no relation) in English class, "Mitch and
Drew
were not friends. They didn't hang out." While the boys were assigned
seats
next to each other on the bus, the bus driver doesn't recall seeing them
together often. Mitch's mother says Drew had never visited their home.
"The
name [Andrew Golden] had never come up," says Woodard. "As a matter of
fact, the first time I heard the name was when this all happened."
Did Mitch have a penchant for violent video games? Gretchen Woodard says
the family couldn't afford them. As for marksmanship, she says, real
guns are
barred from the household. She acknowledges, however, that both Mitch
and Monte had hunter-education cards and BB guns. "We don't need to
paint a rosy picture of Mitch. He knew right from wrong," says Woodard.
She adds, "His punishment will be knowing what he has done and having to
live with it." She must now learn to live without her son. And so must
his
half-sister Jessie, 2. Says their mother: "She cries at night, 'Where's
my
Mitchell?'"
--
Two rules in life:
1. Don't tell people everything you know.
2.
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