4-9-10
Boy Shoots Classmate, Then Self
By JIM KEVLIN : COOPERSTOWN
At 3:08 Good Friday afternoon, rookie officer Jim Cox was sitting in the front room of the police station at 22 Main, doing paperwork.
All of a sudden, loud shouts broke out in front of the glass window that separates the police department from the foyer at Village Hall’s Fair Street entrance.
“Pop” – the characteristic sound of a gunshot.
“Pop,” and a bullet pierced the wall, shot past Cox and went through the next wall into Police Chief Diana Nicols’ vacant office and hit the back of her desk.
Cox, the county Law Enforcement Academy valedictorian who joined the police department full time Jan. 31, rose, pulled out his department-issued handgun and sharply ordered the young man with the 22-caliber rifle to drop it.
Instead, the young man fumbled with the rifle, succeeded in pointing it to his chin, and fired; the bullet exited through the area around his nose. Anthony Pacherille, 16, a Cooperstown Central School sophomore, was soon being transported to Bassett Hospital and, as of Tuesday, April 6, was still there, recuperating from his wounds.
Lying on the floor next to the police department door was Wesley Lippitt, also 16 and a classmate of Pacherille’s. The first bullet had passed through his upper left arm. He was bandaged at the scene and transported separately to Bassett, where he was treated and released.
By then, 3:45 p.m. on April 2, the news of the shooting – a rare incident for Cooperstown – had spread through the village, and clumps of spectators, some tourists, some local residents – perhaps 150 people – had gathered between Cooper Park and the police department entrance.
County Sheriff Richard J. Devlin, Jr., who heard an initial report on the scanner in his office at The Meadows, was the first officer to join Cox. Undersheriff Cameron Allison was close behind him, and cordoned off the west side of Village Hall with that characteristic yellow tape.
With the two wounded teens transported, Devlin shifted his attention to Cooper Park, where the action of the afternoon had begun. A silver 2005 Chevy Trailblazer SUV had run up against the metal fence at the Main Street end.
When Chief Nicols arrived, Devlin deferred to her. Soon, then-Mayor Carol B. Waller and Mayor-elect Joseph J. Booan, Jr., were also at the scene, although they remained outside the yellow tape.
Shortly after 4 p.m., village staff was allowed to go home.
The events of the afternoon began at about 2:45, when a number of CCS students, out of school for the sunny and warm Good Friday holiday, were lounging, chatting or throwing Frisbees around Cooper Park when the SUV entered the loop, according to a sheriff’s department statement.
Two or three boys went up to the vehicle and began kidding the driver about whether he had a learner’s permit or driver’s license. Suddenly, there were words. Then, one of the boys shouted, “He’s got a gun,” according to the sheriff’s statement.
The driver emerged with a rifle – the SUV “lunged forward” into the fence – and the other boys scattered; Wes dashed through the Cooper Park gate, down Fair Street and into the police station, with the rifle-bearing SUV driver in hot pursuit.
At 11:33 that evening, thedailystar.com, quoting an unidentified source, was calling what had happened “a hate crime,” and Associated Press sent out a dispatch with this lead: “A white schoolboy with a rifle chased a black classmate into a police station and shot him, then himself, as the lone officer on duty closed in, authorities said.”
Lippitt, an Eagle scout and JV basketball player, is black, although the other boys who approached the SUV were not. Pacherille, who played JV baseball and is active in his parish, is white.
The lead caused the story to be prominently played across the country – the story even led googlenews.com for a period, and was the topic of an AOL Alert – and focused media attention on America’s Most Perfect Village™.
However, various other scenarios have been circulating the community, including that the alleged shooter had been subject of taunting, or that the argument had been over a girl.
For his part, Anthony’s pastor, the Rev. John P. Rosson, who called the teen “a vital, vibrant member” of his St. Mary’s “Our Lady of the Lake” Catholic Church, said he has visited the boy several times and supported the view that bullying or taunting provoked what happened.
Of the race-based explanation, Rosson said, “I believe that’s unfounded.”
“It’s not just one individual,” he continued. “I believe it’s a climate in that particular school,” particularly a focus on athletics.
“We had no prior indication that there were any issues,” said Superintendent of Schools Mary Jo McPhail. “As you know, it’s not our job to investigate this. That’s up to the authorities.
“But should it become necessary as time goes by, that there are topics we need to discuss, we certainly as a school district will discuss them,” she said.
For his part, county District Attorney John Muehl, quoted Tuesday by reporter Lizzie Cooper in the Utica Observer-Dispatch, said Pacherille’s tongue had been too swollen for him to tell anybody anything.
“My understanding is very simple,” the article continued, quoting Muehler. “The defendant, as far as I know, never told any police officer or official he hated black people.”
Perhaps the village only seemed particularly subdued over the weekend, although everywhere people spoke of nothing else.
First thing Monday morning, Waller and Booan were being interviewed by Arthur G. Sulzberger, a reporter for the New York Times, great-grandson of Adolph Ochs, founder of the modern Times. (Sulzberger and Times photographer Nathaniel Brooks had been kicked off the CCS campus a few minutes before.)
The story, which appeared in Tuesday’s edition, was headlined, “After a Shooting, Cooperstown Searches for Answers.”
At CCS Monday, Wes was back in school, his arm in a sling. A hundred or so parents had convened at the Fly Creek home of his parents, Craig and Tracey Lippitt, Saturday evening to express their support; Wes’ father is a Bassett Hospital physician’s assistant, Tracey a fiber artist.
Over the weekend, McPhail convened “our crisis team,” and administrators addressed a middle-school and a high-school assembly, then met individually with sophomores.
At the assemblies, the students expressed “their support for their fellow classmates; the importance of focusing on facts rather than rumors, to be supportive of each other,” the superintendent said.
“As you would expect, a small number of students were visibly upset, students who may have had closer relationships with the students involved, but that was to be expected,” she said.
Meanwhile at Village Hall, Booan met with the village office staff, then separately with the village crew, with the idea of reassuring them and also to begin developing “protocols” on how to respond if similar events were to happen in the future.
“What was considered invulnerable became vulnerable,” Booan said at the beginning of the reorganizational meeting Monday evening. “ We are confused and saddened. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the two young men and their families. We can’t imagine what they are going through. “
He added, “I will take every measure to ensure that our village remains a safe, healthy and vibrant community in which to live and work. Life will go on, and together we will move forward from this event. “
“Out of respect for the families” and concerned about the scenarios sweeping the community, Booan directed village officials to refer all questions from the press to him.
He was concerned, he said, that Village Hall not do or say anything that would interfere with Muehl’s investigation.
For his part, Muehl said he expects to file charges of attempted murder, second degree, against the Pacherille boy when he is released from Bassett, which was expected to happen by week’s end.
He said he will then have 144 hours to present the case to a grand jury, or he could seek a felony hearing before Village Justice Leslie Friedman to have the matter turned over to county court; village courts can only handle misdemeanors.
For now, Anthony’s parents, Tony – a patent attorney – and Kathy, a Bassett nurse, “aren’t focused on themselves. They’re focused on their son,” said Father Rosson.
At his Sunday sermon, the priest exhorted his parishioners to “pray for peace at the school.” He added, “We can find help in compassion.”
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