• 1927 – The Bath School disaster: Forty-five people, including many children, are killed by bombs planted by a disgruntled school-board member in Bath Township, Michigan.

RETROPOLIS

Remembering the deadliest school massacre in U.S. history

By Theresa Vargas
May 24, 2022 at 8:03 p.m. EDT



Residents pitch in to find survivors after the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan was dynamited by school board member Andrew Kehoe on May 18, 1927. In this community about 10 miles northeast of Lansing, a historical marker marks the site where 38 students and five adults died in the explosion. (The Detroit News/AP)

A version of this article was originally published on April 16, 2017, under the headline “Virginia Tech was not the worst school massacre in U.S. history. This was.”

That spring morning in 1927 could not have been more beautiful, one of the students would later recall. ... The Bath Consolidated School just outside East Lansing, Mich., was holding final exams, but before the morning bell rang on May 18, 1927, children ran and played outside. Peals of laughter could be heard. ... “Little did their young minds, as the rest of ours, fancy their destiny was at hand … perhaps in half an hour they would rest in eternity with their playmates,” a 15-year-old student name Martha Hintz later recalled in an essay.

Later that morning, once students and teachers had settled into their classrooms, an explosion brought walls and ceilings down. The school had been dynamited by an angry school board member, but no one knew that yet. The only thing certain was that children and educators were hurt and others were dead or dying.

[14 students dead in Texas elementary school shooting, governor says]

“We began to run screaming and crying in the same breath, some running for the door while others made for the windows,” Hintz, a ninth-grader, wrote in an essay published in a book titled, “The Bath School Disaster.” Once outside, she recalled: “From every direction, we could see people coming, some running at their utmost speed, and others driving machines, both hoping and praying that their children or friends were not among the dead.”

After each school killing, there is an urge to capture its magnitude in superlatives. That happened after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which senior Seung Hui Cho killed 32 people and then himself. Media outlets at the time — and as recently as 2015 — described the event as the country’s “worst school massacre.” One Virginia newspaper ran a headline with the phrase: “Nation’s Worst Rampage.”

But they were wrong. As horrific and devastating as that April 16, 2007, day proved, it was not the worst mass killing on a school campus. ... That distinction belongs to the mostly forgotten, harrowing explosion at Bath Consolidated School 95 years ago. That day, local farmer Andrew Kehoe, angry about taxes used to fund the school, killed his wife and then blew up the building before doing the same to his car as he sat inside it. In total, 45 people were killed, among them 38 children. ... After the bombings, a sign found fastened to a fence on Kehoe’s farm read, “Criminals are made, not born.”

{snip}

Gift Article
https://wapo.st/3OkI6rt

By Theresa Vargas
Theresa Vargas is a local columnist for The Washington Post. Before coming to The Post, she worked at Newsday in New York. She has degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University School of Journalism. Twitter https://twitter.com/byTheresaVargas