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At 12:45 p.m., they filed out of the school after a fire alarm went off, probably feeling the excitement that we all used to feel when class was interrupted by a fire drill. They probably walked down the hall covering their ears with their hands to drown out the noise of the alarm.

One 12-year-old student would later say in the simple, straightforward language of a child, "I saw my best friend Natalie Brooks get killed. She was shot in the head twice." The stories, all from the mouths of children who should be too young to even hear them, sound like reports from a war front. A teacher throws herself in front of a student and is shot to death. Another teacher makes tourniquets from a wounded student's jeans.

A few miles away and a few days later, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Goldman are in prison. Both have cried for their mothers, requested pizza from the guards, apologized through tears and expressed a fervent desire to go home. Mitchell has been studying the Bible.

Their prison stays will not last as long as the suffering in Jonesboro. Under Arkansas law, the two boys cannot be held past their 18th birthdays and cannot be tried as adults for the killings.

It will be years before the boys can drive or vote. A decade will have passed before Andrew can buy his first drink. But under the Arkansas legal code, Mitchell and Andrew have the right to own the powerful deer-hunting rifles with which they killed Jonesboro's sense of security. Only handgun ownership is limited, and then only for people under 21.

But the issue is deeper than gun control. Trying to restrict guns may help the problem, but it will not solve it, just as putting an ice pack on your head when you are sick may make you feel better, but not cure you. The day before the shooting, Mitchell reportedly pulled a knife on another student in a locker room. Could an anti-knife campaign have prevented this? I doubt it.

The lesson is not that guns should have been kept away from Mitchell. At least, that's not the only lesson. Consider this quote, from a 13-year-old classmate of Mitchell's: "He had said that he was mad at everybody and he was going to kill them. Nobody believed him." Why did nobody believe him?

Before we can answer, we must consider some background: Mitchell was the increasingly angry child from a broken home, a character familiar enough to most of us. He attended some church group functions but seemed to be more and more a victim of his own rage. He dabbled in gangs, proclaiming himself a Blood, and did his best to wear appropriate gang colors.

So why did nobody believe him? Because there are literally thousands of Mitchells out there. Many of us can recall yelling in a pre-teen rage that we hated the whole world. Many of us can remember threatening to kill somebody but not meaning it. Who is to tell the difference between you and me and Mitchell Johnson? His teachers? They see hundreds of students a day, many of them angry and frustrated like Mitchell. His parents? How could they know that Mitchell's threat wasn't a simple tantrum? The hard-to-accept answer is that perhaps no one was there.

Of course, that does not excuse the cracks Mitchell fell through. The officer who caught Mitchell and Andrew running away through the woods said that the boys didn't say anything. But they had to have said something -- only nobody heard. There must have been warnings, and those warnings must have been missed.

There is no excuse for allowing a 13-year-old to lead his 11-year-old cousin into the world of murder. Maybe his parents should have been there. Maybe the school should have taken his threats seriously when he said he would kill all the girls who had broken up with him.

There is a surely a lesson to be learned here, though it may be hard to unearth from the emotional rubble left in the wake of the killings. If nothing else, Jonesboro should teach us that each and every child must have someone to look after him and pay attention to his needs, wants and problems. Perhaps then, Mitchell, Andrew and Jonesboro could have been saved.

But it's too late now. The people of Jonesboro are left to their grief, and we are left to our questions. The students of Westside Middle School have reported back to school already. Some have expressed the fear that there is still a killer in the woods. They probably don't walk outside with the same enthusiasm. When they walk down the hall during the next fire drill, clapping their hands to their ears, it won't be the sound of the alarm they are trying to drown out.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the April 3, 1998 issue.