THE SQUALID LIFE OF A BOY WHO KILLED

America's youngest classroom killer sat in the police interview room armed
with only his tormented innocence and a box of coloring pencils.

He was just six years old, too young to understand the gravity of what he
had done the previous day in the first grade rooms of Buell Elementary
School in Michigan.

The police told him the student he had shot, Kayla Rolland, also six, was
dead, but he was too young to have a real concept of what that meant.

He asked for more paper. He just wanted to draw pictures.

"He is a victim in many ways," said the local prosecutor, Mr Arthur Busch.
"It is very sad. We need to put our arms around him and love him."

Police began to fill in the missing details of the boy's life on Wednesday:
a young life laid bare amid the social ruins of a dysfunctional black
family, beset by drug abuse, crime and violence.

The boy and his brother had spent the past two weeks living in a crack
house with an uncle and an endless procession of drug addicts, petty
criminals and vagrants.

It was no place for a young child, but he had no choice. His father, Dedric
Owens, was in jail. His mother, Tarmarla, had been turned out on to the
streets, evicted from her home and had apparently allowed the uncle take
the boys from her. The six-year-old had found the .32-calibre handgun he
used to kill Kayla loaded and lying beneath the sheets of a bed in the
crack house.

Mr Owens, speaking to police from his jail cell, said the occupants of the
house often traded weapons for crack. He said his son had been in trouble
at school before, suspended once for fighting and on another occasion for
stabbing a girl with a pencil.

"He said his son liked to watch violent movies - the television shows,"
Sheriff Robert Pickell said.

Police arrested the boy's uncle on Wednesday over an outstanding warrant
and questioned him about the handgun, a loaded shotgun and drugs found
during a raid on the crack house. The man who owned the pistol was also
arrested.

Mr Busch said the boy was considered too young to be charged over the
killing but the two men in custody would be questioned to see if either had
acted with criminal negligence in leaving the loaded weapons unsecured in
the crack house.