Word: gretchen
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...picture of Mitchell Johnson has been obscured by his disparate identities--choirboy, volatile romantic, school bully. To those images must now be added the ravages of family turmoil and rootlessness. But was Mitch the instigator of the shootings at Westside Middle School, as Drew's grandfather has cast him? Gretchen Woodard has another version. She told TIME her son says it was Drew who proposed an attack last month. Mitch had said no, Woodard says, but then on the bus ride home from school the afternoon before the fatal assault, Drew approached Mitch again. "Mitch told me he never meant...
Their mother tells her story from her weather-worn mobile home on a dirt road northwest of Jonesboro. Next door is Brand Custom Hauling--the company that employs Gretchen's third husband, Terry Woodard, as a heavy-equipment operator. In the house a bobtailed cat prowls the kitchen counter while Trigger, the pet guinea pig, snoozes in its cage. "The hardest thing for me is that this was the happiest any of us had ever been," says Woodard. On the morning of the shooting, Mitch had sat at her circular kitchen table, slumped in her spindle-back chair, chuckling with...
...Gretchen chooses not to talk about another story that surfaced last week from her son's past. According to a sheriff's report in Minnesota, where the family had originally lived, Mitch had admitted sexually touching the two-year-old granddaughter of his father's fiance, during the boy's summer vacation in Minnesota last year. Mitch told his friend Andrew O'Rourke, 13, that the situation had been "misunderstood"--he was only trying to help the toddler pull up her pants after she went to the bathroom. But Mitchell also told authorities that he "put his finger inside...
...says, "He didn't look like someone I wanted my kid to play with. His clothes were dirty. If I had more kindness, I would have cleaned him up." In 1993 Scott Johnson was arrested for stealing meat at the grocery where he worked, and was dismissed. He and Gretchen divorced a year later...
While her husband tangled with the law over the gross misdemeanor, Gretchen, who was a corrections officer at a federal-prison medical center in nearby Rochester, befriended Woodard, a felon who had been convicted in 1990 of drug and firearms charges. In 1995 he won a "supervised release" from a halfway house and moved to Jonesboro with Gretchen and her sons. This time around, she chose to be a homemaker, and they set up house on a county road half a mile outside Jonesboro. The Woodards' daughter Jessie was born in Arkansas...