Ten years after the shootings, Jim Crist is an assistant principal at nearby Thurston Middle School. The trauma, although is continues to be personally painful, crystallized his desire to work with students and his commitment to keep schools safe. (Photo by Thomas Boyd)

Jim Crist remembers dropping his things in the office, where he was checking in as a substitute teacher, and sprinting toward the cafeteria as a torrent of Thurston High School students burst out the doors.

From there, it's as if someone turns off the sound. He hears nothing, feels nothing and sees no faces as he fights through the crush of anguished teenagers. Pausing to glance through a window, he sees a boy in the cafeteria holding a rifle at hip level, firing, most of his 50-round clip spent by then.

Crist is 27 at the time, a sub trying to find a niche, called in at the last minute to teach a Spanish class. This is his first time at Thurston; he doesn't know these kids, and they don't know him. Because he looks so young, with his casual clothes, close-cropped hair and smooth face, a cop will later mistake him for a student and ask whether his parents have been notified.

But he rounds the corner and flies through the doors, duty and leadership running with him, because that's what you're supposed to do.

"It's like I was supposed to be there that day,'' he says later. "Everything I thought I was about was reaffirmed.''

Ten years' time makes it no easier to tell of the carnage in that cafeteria on May 21, 1998. Amid a spasm of school shootings nationwide, it was Oregon's turn. Twenty-four students fell wounded, bullets ripping into chests, foreheads, faces, arms, legs, backs. Ben Walker and Mikael Nickolausen were lost to their families forever. Up the McKenzie River east of Springfield, in a graceful home among towering firs, the shooter's parents, Bill and Faith Kinkel, both teachers, lay dead.

Crist has always thought the lessons of Thurston should not be hidden. If there was some way to bottle the sorrow and loss, he said once, people ought to be vaccinated at birth so such violence does not happen again.

So when people ask, he talks. But it's not easy, even now. His voice catches, his face turns red. He dabs his eyes and apologizes; it's a hard thing. Crist says he always wore his emotions on his sleeve. Since Thurston, the ache wells up more easily. "Now it's times 10,'' he says.

* * *

Crist grew up in Oakridge, a mill town set in the Cascade foothills about 45 from Springfield. He spent significant segments of his childhood playing outside the office of school district Superintendent Ken Carver, who was his godfather. His mother, Donna Crist, was the golf-loving superintendent's administrative assistant, and many people would laugh and say she just about ran the district. His father, Don, was a mill worker and logger who served on the school board.

Jim grew up reserved like his father and with a "No complaints, no excuses'' streak from his mother. He admired the coaches and school administrators who were part of his family circle. Often they seemed gruff and stern, but then it would turn out they were rounding up donations for a struggling family or quietly buying some kid lunch.

In Oakridge, where everything flows through the schools, it was something to be a Crist. His father, uncle and charismatic older brother, John, all had their names on the high school trophy awarded to the top senior athlete. Jim, who pitched, wrestled and threw 25 touchdown passes while quarterbacking the football team into the playoffs, earned a spot there, too.

He graduated from Willamette University in 1994, earned a teaching certificate from Western Oregon University in 1997 and began work as a substitute.

The work was hit or miss. He'd teach a calculus class one day and wood shop the next week. His wife, Stephanie, had a hair salon, but after a year, Crist began scanning help-wanted ads.

The call to sub at Thurston that morning was typical; he knew enough Spanish to order a second beer in Mexico.

But Dick Doyle, a former Oakridge administrator, was Thurston's assistant principal, and Crist welcomed the chance to see one of his old mentors. Crist hurried to get ready.

He arrived shortly before 8 a.m. and introduced himself to the harried staff; as a secretary raised her arm to point where Crist should go, the terrified boy burst into the office.

* * *

Time, sight, sound and motion disappear when Crist rounds the corner and flies through the doors. His next memory is finding himself atop a dog pile of boys who've tackled Kip Kinkel. They've taken the boy's empty rifle; he pulled a pistol and shot Jake Ryker in the finger before they got that, too. Kinkel frantically struggles to pull another pistol from his waistband. Suddenly the pistol skitters across the linoleum. A half-dozen hands reach for it.

Crist snatches it and holds it flat in his palm. He's been around guns before but recalls being unable to close his fingers on it. He turns and hands it to a teacher. Kinkel is screaming at his tacklers to kill him.

The enormity of it slowly comes into focus.

Crist realizes every student remaining in the cafeteria has been shot. One boy lies on a table, waiting to be treated for a leg wound. Crist's eyes sweep the scene several times before he realizes a boy nearby has not moved. Mikael Nickolausen stares back with eyes that no longer see.

Crist tends to Ryker, who had been shot in the chest before charging Kinkel and suffered the wound to his hand during the struggle. Crist recalls keeping pressure on the boy's chest wound and talking to Ryker, keeping him awake until paramedics take over. When they do, Crist walks into the kitchen to wash his hands. He turns on the water, slowly takes off his watch and rolls up his sleeves. His knees buckle.

He wills himself to choke it down. "This isn't over,'' he recalls telling himself, "you've got work to do.''

Returning to the cafeteria, he finds sophomore Ryan Atteberry slumped against a wall, his cheek puffy, blood splattered on his face and shirt. He's oddly cheerful, saying he's not doing too bad. Crist checks for an exit wound, finds none and realizes the boy still has a bullet in his head. He flags down a paramedic and they walk Atteberry to an ambulance, emerging from the cafeteria into a sea of cameras.

They pass reporters straining against a police barricade. "You have no idea what's inside,'' Crist says to himself.

The Springfield School District, with an unofficial nod that he had proved himself, hired Crist full time the next fall. He's been at Thurston Middle School, home to 575 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders since. He taught PE and health, then became assistant principal, an administrator like his mentors.

"He's where he needs to be,'' says wife Stephanie.

She says there are reasons for everything, and that the shootings, as horrific as they were, crystallized Jim as compassionate husband, father and educator.

Stephanie's known him since she was 14, but it took him five years to open up to her about the shootings, she says. He's always been serious and reserved; she had to let him work it out, she didn't press.

"It was so huge, so profound, the only people who could really help him were those who knew the pain,'' she says. "I just had to let him go do that, and see what I got back in return.''

Crist was racked by post-traumatic stress, renewed memories of his older brother, who died in a 1988 car wreck, and other losses. He believed that no one who wasn't there could fathom the trauma.

He found solace in long talks with Doyle. It helped greatly when Crist and the boys who tackled Kinkel were given commendations by the Eugene chapter of the Marine Corps League. A retired Marine approached Crist and identified himself as a combat veteran. "I understand,'' he said.

What Stephanie got back, over time, was a husband who doesn't take much for granted.

"We don't play many games,'' she says. "We're more open, we're more honest, because you just have to be. We deal better with each other, in a kinder way. It's just made life really important.''

They have three sons: Cade, Nolan and Eli.

Crist half apologizes for the corny inspirational posters and slogans on his office wall at Thurston Middle. A kid might remember one, he says, and it might make a difference. You never know.

Over here is a leather backpack, full of a kid's stuff. The boy was in all kinds of trouble, and his single mom finally sent him off to live with his dad in Portland. The boy's backpack has sat in Crist's office for a year; maybe he'll come by some day and want it back.

"Never say never,'' Crist says.

He leads a tour of the school, stopping at the boisterous cafeteria. The students eat lunch in two shifts and arrange themselves by identical socioeconomic cliques, he says. At the far right tables are the poorer kids, the ones at the center tables occupy the social middle ground, and the far left tables hold the richer kids, jocks and popular girls.

He notices things like that. He notices when kids move oddly in the hall or gather somewhere unusual. He notices if they watch him too closely or ignore him too pointedly.

Is he watching for the next Kip Kinkel?

"Boy, now you got me thinking,'' he writes later in an e-mail. No, he decides. He would be vigilant regardless; that's the best way to do the job.

Crist drives past the high school every day on his way to work. Most times, he doesn't think about it, but spring is the worst. This year, however, seems better. People are approaching him; 10 years later the district is talking about Thurston again.

"It's been good,'' Crist says. "I look at myself as a tremendous resource with a story to tell. I can relay firsthand the realness of it: Why you should plan for it or, God forbid, if you go through it, what to expect.''

(Eric Mortenson is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore., and can be contacted at ericmortenson(at)news.oregonian.com)