What happens when your child is not the victim of a shooting like Columbine – but the perpetrator? From denial to loss, this documentary tells the stories of three such families
To call Raising a School Shooter (BBC Four) a study of grief is to understate the case by some distance. It is more a study of how much pain can be compressed into one person without fully breaking them.
The Storyville documentary tells the story, largely in its subjects’ own words, of the parents of three students responsible for taking weapons into their schools and killing classmates and staff. In 1988, Clarence Elliot’s 16-year-old son Nicholas took three firebombs, a semi-automatic pistol and 200 rounds of ammunition into Atlantic Shores Christian School in Virginia and killed one teacher and injured another. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is still in jail.
