What Happens to a School Shooter’s Sister?

Kip’s attorneys called William H. Sack, a highly regarded psychiatrist who had evaluated Kip. He gave his diagnosis—paranoid schizophrenia—which, he said, responds “better to treatment” and has “a better prognosis in general than the other forms of schizophrenia.” The plan was to send Kip to MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, a juvenile prison with a strong mental-health program, where Sack worked. “If Mr. Kinkel takes medication, is consistently cared for by a psychiatrist he trusts, in twenty-five or thirty years I think he can be safely returned to the community,” Sack said.

When Kip got his chance to speak, he apologized. “I absolutely loved my parents and had no reason to kill them. I had no reason to dislike, kill, or try to kill anyone at Thurston,” he said. “I am very sorry for everything I have done.” But rage at Kip seemed to unite the courtroom audience. When the survivors and their parents testified, they spoke not only about injuries but also about plunging grades, fears of loud noises, difficulties sleeping, and a sense of terror at the prospect of Kip getting out.

“You made the rest of my high-school life absolute hell. I became someone other kids avoided because I reminded them of you and the shooting,” Jennifer Alldredge, who had been shot in the back and the hand, said. “My name became ‘victim.’ ”

“I don’t care if you’re sick, if you’re insane, if you’re crazy,” Jacob Ryker, the wrestler who tackled Kip despite having been shot in the chest and then in the hand, said. “A lifetime in prison is too good for you.”

One of the last to speak was Tony Case, the former varsity baseball player, who had been shot four times and critically injured. Tony was now enrolled at Lane Community College, in Eugene. Reading aloud from a statement he had written, he described how a bullet had severed an artery in his leg, making it excruciatingly painful for him to walk without shoes. “Because I will be affected for the rest of my life, I feel that he should be, too,” he said.

Judge Mattison sentenced Kip to nearly eighty-seven years in prison for his nonfatal shootings. This, combined with the previous sentence, brought Kip’s total punishment to “111.67 years, which is more than anyone will ever serve,” Mattison said. There would be no possibility of parole.

After the sentencing, Kristin and her aunt Claudia dodged reporters and hustled across the street, to the office of Kristin’s lawyer. A family friend, Judy, was there, waiting to hear the news. Judy recalled that she saw only Claudia come in: “I said, ‘Where’s Kristin?’ And Claudia said, ‘She’s in the bathroom vomiting. She’s so upset.’ ” Judy ran in, opened the stall door, and held her. “And I remember Kristin saying, ‘He’s going to kill himself!’ ”

Judy tried to assure Kristin that that would not happen. “As soon as you see Kip, you need to say you cannot lose another member of your family,” Judy told her. “He needs to be here for you.”

Kristin moved to the Portland area and took on two jobs: as a bilingual teacher’s assistant and as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers’ stunt team. Once or twice a week, she made the thirty-minute drive to visit her brother at MacLaren, in Woodburn, Oregon. He was now on an antipsychotic, but the doctors were still figuring out the right dosage, and sometimes when she visited he would fall asleep. “He needed guidance, he needed taking care of, he needed advice, he needed a lot of parenting,” she recalled. For his eighteenth birthday, she brought him a cake decorated with his favorite candy: gummy bears. When he graduated from high school, she went to MacLaren for the ceremony, and she was there when he graduated from college, too. (He got a B.A. from the University of Illinois via correspondence courses.)

Sack, the psychiatrist who testified at the sentencing hearing, treated Kip weekly at MacLaren. “He was absolutely normal once the medication took the voices away,” Sack told me. “During all that time, you couldn’t find a nicer kid.” A psychologist who treated Kip at MacLaren wrote in a memo, “He is a very bright, witty, kind man who other youth look up to.”

In 2007, when Kip was about to turn twenty-five, he was transferred into the adult prison system, and ever since he has been confined at the Oregon State Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Salem. The siblings’ relationship has changed significantly over the years. After Kip entered the state prison, “there was a kind of transition period where I would notice myself saying to people, ‘You know, he just doesn’t need me in that way anymore,’ ” Kristin said. “And so the relationship shifted from big sister–little brother to just siblings—much more equal, learning from each other.”

Kristin married at the age of twenty-six, divorced at thirty-six, and now, at forty-six, is a single mother with two children. When a wildfire broke out near Kip’s prison, in the fall of 2020, she was terrified that something might happen to him, and she asked him to call her every day. The habit continued, and today she describes her brother as her “best friend.” She told me that sometimes after she goes to see him she feels even better than when she walks out of her therapist’s office. “He just has this insight and wisdom,” she said. “And he knows me so well. He knows how to comfort me.”

She has tried hard over the years to forge an existence outside her identity as Kip Kinkel’s sister, but being related to Kip has complicated her life in ways she could not have imagined. She told me that the topic of Kip had come up with two men she’d dated in recent years. One figured out who her brother was after reading something online. “He freaked out,” she said. With the other, she tried to bring up the subject—“I have to tell you something”—but he interrupted her. “He just said, ‘I know,’ and he hugged me,” she recalled. That relationship, however, did not last.