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Some lines in Dawn Turner Trice’s Monday morning column in the Tribune on the NIU killings dug into me: “By many accounts there were few warning signs. . . . Days later, it’s still frustrating to not have a motive. . . . ‘People who can talk about their problems typically don’t act out their problems. . . . It’s not the trauma that causes people to go off, it’s their feelings of helplessness.’” Trice was talking to a violence-prevention expert. Trice again: “The current leader of the free world suggests that we fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here. What seems to elude us is that we are fighting them here. And they continue to be us.”
I write this as prelude to something I want to share with you. Franklin McCallie became principal of KHS long after my time there. I knew that he enjoyed an outstanding reputation as an educator, but from Chicago I could measure his performance only by the transformation of the Call from the cheery rag I’d contributed to into a school paper that consistently was ranked as one of the finest in the country. In retirement, McCallie spoke up two days after the bloodbath. He committed journalism. He released a statement in which he identified himself as Thornton’s friend and laid out a chronology of all the facts as he understood them. To a town that I’m sure was in dire need of lucidity, he offered it. A few days later, he spoke at Thornton’s funeral.
