On May 21, 1998, Kristin Kinkel, a 21-year-old college student at Hawaii Pacific University, received a phone call. There had been a shooting at her former high school in Springfield, Oregon, where her brother, Kip, was in ninth grade. More unimaginable news soon followed: Kip was the one who had opened fire at the school. He had killed two students and wounded 25, and he had also killed both of their parents. “That’s not Kip,” Kristin told an attorney, on a trip back home to Springfield that spring. “There must be something wrong.” A psychiatrist soon diagnosed Kip with paranoid schizophrenia.
“I love my brother more than I ever thought possible,” Kristin told a judge at Kip’s sentencing hearing, in 1999. “And not because he needs me to, but because I need to. It is a difficult concept for an outsider to understand, but it comes from what is inside us.” Kip has now been incarcerated for more than a quarter century, and has surpassed all expectations of what he might be able to achieve. He goes to his job at 7 A.M. each day as a prison electrician, and has learned how to manage his illness. Kristin is close with her brother, whom she calls her “best friend.” When the New Yorker writer Jennifer Gonnerman asked what his life would have been like if his sister had not stood by him, Kip answered without hesitating. “I probably wouldn’t be here,” he said. “If I didn’t have her love and support, I probably would have ended things a long time ago.” In 2023, Gonnerman wrote about Kristin and her relationship with her brother—and how she’s still reckoning with his crimes.
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