Related article: 2 killed, 3 injured in shootings at Vt. school, homes; gunman shoots self
By Adam Silverman
The Burlington Free Press
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Essex Elementary School personnel knew Christopher Williams was acting strangely Aug. 24, 2006, and his former girlfriend, a teacher, warned administrators to call police if he approached the building.
But when Williams did arrive, teachers and staff members had no time to react before he began shooting as he stalked the hallways in search of the woman who’d broken off their relationship the night before.
“I saw this car just tear into the driveway, driving really fast,” Assistant Principal Cathy Quinn said. “I saw a person jump out, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Chris.’ ... A second or two later I heard two loud pops.”
The story of the chaos two years ago inside the kindergarten-through-second-grade school emerged Friday during the third day of testimony in Williams’ murder trial. Witnesses included a popular first-grade teacher whom Williams shot and critically wounded. Accounts of fear, pain, survival and tragedy transfixed the courtroom.
Williams, 29, of Essex has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts each of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder arising from the slayings of Linda Lambesis, 57, the mother of estranged girlfriend Andrea Lambesis, and her friend and teaching mentor Alicia Shanks, 56. He is jailed without bail, and each count carries a possible punishment of 35 years to life in prison.
Defense attorneys do not dispute Williams was the gunman; they claim instead he suffered delusions and a dissociative disorder that prevented him from complying with the law or distinguishing right from wrong. Prosecutors contend the killings were calculated revenge for the break-up.
Principal Jan Keffer testified in Vermont District Court in Burlington that a day of meetings ahead of the coming school year had just ended when Williams arrived. About 40 people were inside. Warned of a gunman in the building, the principal ran into the hallway toward the main office to announce a lockdown when she nearly collided with Williams.
They stood perhaps a foot apart and stared at each other for several moments, Keffer said.
“We made eye contact,” she testified. “He just had a look about him that was very different from what he usually looked like. ... Then he ran.”
Keffer broadcast an emergency message over the loudspeaker system and told Quinn to call her.
“I said, ‘It’s Chris,’” recalled Quinn, whom Lambesis had warned about Williams. “She said, ‘Yes, I know; he has a gun.’”
Williams had hurried away toward Lambesis’ classroom, but she had gone to another part of the building. Williams stopped and killed Shanks in her own room, which adjoined Lambesis’. The two teachers were close friends, and Shanks had met Williams and liked him, according to testimony.
Jenky’s shooting
As he ran from the building less than a minute later Williams spotted Mary “Jenky” Snedeker through a window in an exterior door and shot her, prosecutors and witnesses said. Prosecutors suggested he mistook her for Lambesis; the defense implied Williams might have had difficulty seeing inside the classroom.
Snedeker testified she heard the lockdown announcement, walked into the room next to hers to help a new teacher and then glanced out the window.
“I looked over, and I saw a man’s face, and I heard a pop, and I felt an impact,” she testified. “I knew right away I’d been shot. It was like this feeling of getting crushed, like this heavy, heavy crushing.”
The bullet struck her in her right hip, shattering her pelvis but somehow missing major blood vessels. Her right side went numb, and she feared she was paralyzed. Slumped on the floor, she forced herself to try to move her toes and was relieved when they wiggled, Snedeker said.
Student teacher Christine Hertz, still in Snedeker’s classroom, heard the shot, looked out the window and saw a man running away.
“He had a pistol in his hands, a small gun. It was silver. It caught the light a little bit,” Hertz said. “He was jogging. He wasn’t sprinting, but he was definitely running.”
She heard a woman yell for help, saying, “I’ve been shot. It hurts. It hurts so much. I need first aid,” Hertz recalled. Some 12 to 15 minutes later, Snedeker crawled back into her classroom. Hertz helped apply pressure to the wound, and 10 or so minutes afterward a police quick-response team — authorities had received several 911 calls from the school but knew little about what happened, including how many suspects there were, and where — carried Snedeker from the building.
Sanity questioned
Police began rescuing other people from the school. Among them was special educator Laurie LaPlant, who testified police evacuated her through Shanks’ classroom. She saw her friend’s body lying on the floor.
“Her arms were at her sides. It looked to me like she was running toward her closet area,” LaPlant said. “There was a large pool of blood under her head.”
LaPlant watched for any sign of movement or breath but saw none. She said she wanted desperately to go to Shanks, whom she’d known since 1997, to see whether she needed help, but she knew she shouldn’t.
“If the police aren’t attending to her she must be dead, and this must be a crime scene,” LaPlant thought.
Williams was captured about an hour later at the nearby apartment of a friend, whom Williams shot and injured after a dispute. Williams used the same gun the friend lent him before the rampage, according to authorities. He killed Linda Lambesis first, at the town house she and her daughter had shared with Williams until the previous evening.
The defense appeared to boost its theory when questioning witnesses from the school, most of whom had met Williams during his two-year relationship with Andrea Lambesis before the rampage. The teachers and administrators described him as pleasant, nice but shy and helpful until the day of the spree, when his demeanor changed, he looked at people without seeming to recognize them and his hair seemed wild.
“You told the police he didn’t look sane?” defense attorney Margaret Jansch asked Snedeker, adding she also used the word “deranged.”
“I was trying to comprehend how I had gotten shot,” the teacher replied, noting she made the comment just one day after the incident while she grappled to understand why someone she interacted with previously would try to kill her.
Snedeker, who has recovered but remains in pain when she walks, just completed her first year back at the school. She taught in the same classroom where she nearly died.
Copyright 2008 The Burlington Free Press