Word: woodard
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...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 to hurt...
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...
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...
...friends. They didn't hang out." While the boys were assigned seats next to each other on the bus, the bus driver doesn't recall seeing them together often. Mitch's mother says Drew had never visited their home. "The name [Andrew Golden] had never come up," says Woodard. "As a matter of fact, the first time I heard the name was when this all happened...
...Mitch have a penchant for violent video games? Gretchen Woodard says the family couldn't afford them. As for marksmanship, she says, real guns are barred from the household. She acknowledges, however, that both Mitch and Monte had hunter-education cards and BB guns. "We don't need to paint a rosy picture of Mitch. He knew right from wrong," says Woodard. She adds, "His punishment will be knowing what he has done and having to live with it." She must now learn to live without her son. And so must his half-sister Jessie, 2. Says their mother...