User Reviews

Living in Australia I had no idea about what happened at Thurston High until I saw this Documentary by Frontline which was aired on our program Four Corners.

However I didn't find it to be at all a good outline of the event that caused Kip to kill his parents or his fellow school mates, the arguments they put forward as to what cause Kip to snap and kill his parents then decided to shoot up his school are thin to say the least.

The mentioning of Kip's "obsession" with Romeo and Juliet is I think grasping as straws, thousands of school kid for hundreds of years have read or seen that play, with the violence that is included even in the original so now because then violence is in a form that is more recognisable to modern society it's all of a sudden to have an obsession with death to love the play or in this case the movie. That being said the connecting they made to the movie and then the music form that film is really lose thread in terms of the development of Kip as they portray him.

Kip's failure at school because he was dyslexic is weak also, I mean I am Dyslexic and know all to well how it feels not really find a place to fit in at school in the early years, and I too have parents how are teachers and expect a lot from there children. However that frustration didn't cause me to start looking at weapons as the answer. As the Documentary clearly want us to draw a connection between the two as both cause and effect, that if he had found a place to belong in school he wouldn't have turned to guns.

Why then too did the makers of this Documentary also chose to ignore or rather gloss over Kip treatment by the psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey Hicks, who after all failed to recognise a patient with Schizophrenia, let alone encourage a youth who had already shown violent tenancies with the bomb building and exploding to talk about guns, and Kip's interests in them.

No strong argument was put forward that through his past behavior Kip had been crying out for help. With throwing rocks over the overpass, theft, the use of explosives, the interested in guns. But his was ignored with this attempted to get attention, or rather the people around his both his family and the professionals failed to see the true extended of Kip's problems even though he had shown glimpses of how deeply trouped he was.

Having consider all the above flaws with this documentary I don't think it deserves that rating that it has gotten before. Also I fail to see the connection people make with other school shootings. Granted I have never experienced a school shooting in my state or anywhere else in Australia that i have knowledge of partly due to our gun laws, but I don't see how a case study of a boy who was in fact mentally ill has anything to do with killings such as columbine and other shooting that have occurred around the world. Kip didn't for the most part make a decision to go out and kill his class mates or his teachers, he was mental ill and from all the information I have come across indicates that he wasn't in his right state of mind at the time. With that being said how can what happened at Thurston be in anyway related to any other school shooting? It was a tragedy yes but meaning can't be drawn from all tragedies, sometimes there are no reasons, sometime no one is to blame, sometimes people just snap because they have a problem a serious metal problem, but to try and make the weak argument that this documentary makes well I find it insulting to both my intelligence and to the people who where hurt or killed by Kip.

Also I have lived with a person with a server metal illness for many years and I can tell you that sometime they just loss it and have no real control over what happens what they do, are these people to be held accountable when they aren't function at the same level awareness or even sometimes with seemingly without morals that you and I use to judge what our actions will be or even what the consequences will be.