MARINETTE, Wis. — His first shots blasted the film projector and punched into a wall. The last he aimed at himself. In between, the 15-year-old high school sophomore held his teacher and about two dozen classmates hostage for more than six hours.
As the gunman died Tuesday, his motivation still unclear, students described how they put their captor at ease by engaging him in oddly casual conversations about hunting, fishing, movies and music. In the end, Samuel Hengel himself was the only loss.
Monday’s standoff unfolded on the day that students at Marinette High School returned from Thanksgiving break in this city of 12,000, 50 miles north of Green Bay.
Teacher Valerie Burd’s Western civilization class, the second to last of the day, began about 1:30 p.m. Among her students was Hengel, dressed in his favorite Tom and Jerry T-shirt and blue jeans. The teens took their seats in a fan-shaped arrangement, doing worksheets about the Greek demigod Hercules.
Shortly after class began, Hengel told the teacher he was sick, said 15-year-old Austin Biehl, another student in the class. Burd allowed Hengel to go to the restroom. He returned with a backpack, which police later said contained two semiautomatic handguns, ammunition and a knife. He had more bullets in his pockets.
Burd, a 39-year-old teacher with 10 years of experience in the district, started showing a film about Hercules.
Hengel asked his fellow students how they were doing, Biehl said, then he snapped.
He shot a hole in the wall, then fired two more rounds at the film projector, breaking a piece off of it. Then Hengel propped himself up on Burd’s stool at the front of the class, pulled another gun from his waistband and laid it on Burd’s podium along with a magazine of ammunition, Biehl said.
Girls in the class began to cry.
“He didn’t say anything,” Biehl said. “We were just scared and shocked.”
Hengel’s cellphone rang. He snapped it in half. He then made his classmates put their phones in the middle of the room.
When the bell rang signaling the start of the last class of the day, Hengel told Burd to post a note on the door telling incoming students to go to the library.
Hengel never made any demands or pointed his weapons at anyone, Biehl said. He never told anyone not to leave, but it did not matter, Biehl said. Everyone was too petrified to move.
“I didn’t know really what to think. I was just hoping to get out alive,” another student in the class, Zach Campbell, told CBS’s “Early Show.”
Then one of Hengel’s best friends started talking to him, and the rest of the class joined in, discussing movies and actors Hengel liked, deer hunting and fishing, Biehl said.
“All his favorite things,” Biehl said. “We were just trying to make him calm.”
Hengel complained he had not seen any deer in the last two years and never caught any big fish anymore. He said he had been sick over Thanksgiving with a sinus infection.
The school day ended, but the students didn’t move.
About 3:30 p.m., principal Corry Lambie went to the classroom, looking for a student. Hengel pointed the gun at him and told him to get out. He retreated and called 911. Police called the phone in the classroom, but Hengel would not talk. That fell to Burd.
Her calmness in the face of a potentially deadly situation, reassuring students that everyone would be OK, won her praise Tuesday.
About 7:40 p.m., he let some students go. He then fired off three rounds, hitting the room’s telephone twice and a computer.
SWAT officers, fearing the worst, broke down the door and rushed at Hengel, who pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger.
Hengel’s death leaves the biggest question unanswered: Why?
Biehl said Hengel was smart and well-liked. “No one hated him or bullied him,” Biehl said.
