In the spring of 1998, Kipland Kinkel, then 15, shot and killed his mother, his father and two students at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. He wounded 25 others. At the time, the country was only beginning to fear that mass shootings at schools might actually become a trend.

A shooting at a Mississippi high school the previous October was followed by a cluster of killings across the country perpetrated by students who seemed to select victims at random. After the third in eight months, at a middle school near Jonesboro, Arkansas, President Bill Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to take action. We do not understand what drives children, whether in small towns or big cities, to pick up guns and take the lives of others, Clinton said. Two months later, Kinkels crime marked the highest-casualty school shootings by a student in three decades. Less than a year after that, the tragedy at Columbine happened, followed by the horrifying string of school shootings that have become a routine of American life since.

Kinkel was sentenced to nearly 112 years without the possibility of parole, which to many in the community felt like the closest thing to closure. A parent of one of the students Kinkel killed said at his sentencing she had no idea how long it will take before we can lead a normal life without all the constant reminders of her sons death. The media rushed to piece together a narrative about him. Friends and acquaintances described a boy with an all-American upbringing but who was obsessed with bombs and guns, dressed in black and listened to Marilyn Manson.

That image of Kinkel has remained frozen in time: the dangerous child people point to as the reason some kids need to be locked up for life. For decades, Kinkel never tried to correct it. He refused every interview request and even avoided being photographed in group activities inside the prison. He worried that reemerging publicly would only further traumatize his victims. But last year he agreed to speak to HuffPost.

Kinkel is one of about 10,000 people nationwide serving life or life-equivalent sentences for crimes they committed before they turned 18, when their brains were not yet fully developed. The U.S. is the only country that allows juveniles to be sentenced to life without parole. The children condemned to die in prison are disproportionately Black and brown, the result of years of racist fearmongering about so-called super-predator youth. But in Oregon, which is overwhelmingly white and has had a high rate of juvenile incarceration , Kinkel is one of the most infamous prisoners.

In recent years, Oregon has undergone intense debates about whether its appropriate to lock up juveniles for life. Senate Bill 1008 , a juvenile justice reform bill that dramatically changed the way Oregon punished people who committed crimes before they were 18 years old, was introduced in the state legislature in 2019. It eliminated sentences of life without parole for minors, made it harder to prosecute kids as adults and created early-release opportunities for those who demonstrated rehabilitation.

Prosecutors and conservative media personalities inaccurately claimed that S.B. 1008 would automatically allow Kinkel to go free. He was the subject of television commercials and testimony in the state Capitol urging lawmakers to vote against the bill. The legislation narrowly passed, but weeks later politicians clawed back a key part of the reform effort. In response to concerns about Kinkel, the state legislature passed another bill amending S.B. 1008 to specifically exclude people who were sentenced before its passage. That move makes it more likely Kinkel will spend the rest of his life behind bars, but it also affects hundreds of other people in Oregon who are in prison for crimes they committed as kids including people who have played a role in Kinkels rehabilitation.

I have spoken with Kinkel over the phone for about 20 hours over the course of nearly ten months. It was a rare opportunity to hear from the perpetrator of a school shooting; those that survive almost never speak publicly again. No questions were off-limits. He described to me the childhood onset of hallucinations and delusions that would later be identified as symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. He walked me through the events that drove him to amass weapons and his memory of the psychotic break he experienced during his crime. He described his intense guilt for what he had done. He told me about the treatment and support he received from his doctors, therapists, sister, volunteers and his community of juvenile lifers.

Today, Kinkel is unrecognizable from the 15-year-old boy who inflicted devastating harm on his community. Within the confines of the prison system, where he has now spent most of his life, Kinkel has earned his college degree, become a certified yoga instructor and advocated for criminal justice reform before elected officials. He is diligent about his mental health treatment and says he rarely hears the voices anymore. When they do emerge, they are quiet and garbled. Even when he can make out what they are saying, he understands them as manifestations of his illness; they dont hold a powerful influence over him anymore.

I found Kinkel to be a remarkably reliable narrator of his life. When listening back to recordings of phone calls months apart, he remained consistent on even the smallest details, and his version of events was supported by doctors and people who lived with him in the prison. Our conversations took place throughout the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and sometimes wed go weeks without talking when his unit went into lockdown after a COVID-19 outbreak. In September, he and others incarcerated in his prison were evacuated to a nearby prison due to historically destructive wildfires.

Kinkel is still worried about hurting his victims by speaking publicly, but as he watched people use him as the reason to exclude some of his closest friends from getting a second chance, he began to feel as if his silence was causing harm, too.

We spoke for the first time last summer, about a year after the legislative roller coaster. Ive never done this. Ive never done an interview, Kinkel told me. Partly because I feel tremendous, tremendous shame and guilt for what I did. And theres an element of society that glorifies violence, and I hate the violence that Im guilty of. Ive never wanted to do anything thats going to bring more attention.

I have responsibility for the harm that I caused when I was 15. But I also have responsibility for the harm that I am causing now as Im 38 because of what I did at 15, he said.