The Knife in the Book Bag

By JON D. HULL CHICAGO

After the final bets were in, Okiki, a 13-year-old honor student, sat stony- faced at her desk in English class, silently preparing to collect a couple of hundred dollars on a dare. She had settled on a simple plan. Just wait for the bell to ring, reach into her book bag, grab the 12-in. fillet knife she had brought from home and stab the teacher in the chest while Marlena, a 12- year-old accomplice, pinned her down. Then -- whoosh -- instant respect.

With minutes to go, Okiki just stared straight ahead at the teacher, her arms tightly crossed. What could possibly run through the mind of a 13-year- old girl when she is about to kill? How hard to strike? How many times? Will it be messy? Okiki's hands and legs were visibly trembling. And outside in the hallway another student was sobbing.

Assistant principal Jacqueline Greenhill happened by and found the crying girl. "You can tell when a student is really upset," she says. The girl led Greenhill to another student, who sent her to another who finally revealed the plot: two girls were planning to kill teacher Jan Kirk, 46, at the end of class that morning. Something about being embarrassed or insulted by Kirk the | day before. Other students, maybe a dozen or so, wagered $200 in lunch money that the two wouldn't do it. But only fools bet against peer pressure. And the bell was about to ring.

When Greenhill entered the classroom, a few students whispered, "Get her now! Get her now!" while others said, "You better not." The assistant principal intervened and ordered the two conspirators to her office, where she confiscated the knife and called the police. Last Friday, Okiki and Marlena were charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated murder. Now parents, teachers and the 700 students at Irving Middle School in Lorain, Ohio, a racially mixed, economically strained town of 70,000, are looking for explanations. They are talking about the growing gang violence, the drug syndicates from New York City and Detroit that use Lorain as a drop point, the 11-year-old boy who held up a minimart at gunpoint last September and turned out to have had 46 previous encounters with the police. The townspeople, especially the young, "don't believe there's a future," says school superintendent Thomas Bollin. "At least they don't act like they believe there's a future."

Every time another knife or gun is drawn in one of the nation's classrooms, parents search for some reason why it was an unusual case, why it couldn't happen in their community. But the exception to the rule has become exceptionally common. The National Education Association estimates that every day 100,000 students carry a gun to class; another study reports that 13% of all incidents involving guns in the schools occur in elementary and preschools. This month the Los Angeles school district will initiate spot checks with portable metal detectors in many of its schools.

Every school day, 6,250 teachers are threatened with injury and 260 are actually assaulted. Just before Christmas a fifth-grade boy arrived at his school in Chicago one morning toting a concoction of household cleaners, including bleach, and poured it into his teacher's coffee. The teacher did not drink the brew, and the boy's classmates turned him in. Last week an eighth- grader in Washington shot a school guard in the stomach after he broke up a fight between rival gangs.

Okiki did not seem like the type to make trouble. Her friends describe her as a quiet girl who lived alone with her mother. But she roared on the day before the knife incident, when Kirk yelled at her for not paying attention. When Okiki left the classroom, she complained about how the teacher "got in my face" and warned, "I'm going to kill her." Other students apparently teased her, and then began betting on the life of their English teacher.

That night, Okiki told police, she got "angrier and angrier." She had told friends that "cutting somebody is no big deal" and that she stabbed her father once. A few hours before dawn the girl crept into the kitchen and selected a knife, which she tucked into her book bag.

Sergeant Russ Cambarare of the Lorain police department was shocked by the girls' matter-of-fact confessions. "We asked, 'Do you think it's right to take her life because she hollered at you?' Okiki calmly said, 'Yeah.' " The police doubt they will ever discover exactly how many students actually placed bets on the murder plot. But there is something else that troubles Cambarare even more: his first glimpse of the girls when they were brought into the police department. "They were giggling."

With reporting by Sophfronia Scott Gregory/Lorain