Canton, TX school shooting

[Steff]

CANTON, Texas – The father of a high school football player shot and wounded the team's coach with an assault rifle Thursday and fled in a pickup loaded with weapons, claiming to have a hit list, state officials said.

 

 

Gary Joe Kinne was airlifted to a hospital in Tyler. Schools in the district were locked down while police searched for the suspected shooter, Jeffrey Doyle Robertson. His truck was found abandoned about two hours after the shooting near a golf course outside Canton, and he was captured soon after, authorities said. No other details were available.

 

Gary Joe Kinne, who is also the Canton High School athletic director, was shot in the school's field house with an AK-47 rifle, according to the state's Homeland Security office. Kinne was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Tyler, but authorities were not releasing his condition. Police Chief Mike Echols said Kinne, a former assistant coach at Mesquite High School, was shot in the chest.

 

Police were investigating a possible motive. Robertson had said he had a hit list, Homeland Security spokeswoman Sophie Yanez said.

 

Robertson had been banned from the Canton High School campus and told not to attend school functions, Echols said. Robertson had previous confrontations with some of the coaches, including Kinne, who took over the football program in 2003, authorities said. Kinne's son was the team's quarterback.

 

Kinne, 37, was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Tyler, officials said. Authorities declined to release information on his condition.

 

Diane Price, a cashier at Sister's Cafe in Canton, said she has known Robertson for 37 years; he was a high school classmate of her daughter.

 

She said after the coach was shot, customers told her that Robertson, whose birthday was Wednesday, had gotten drunk at a party last night and bragged about his plans.

 

"I've heard that he was ill and not expected to live and he was going to even some scores," said Price, who didn't know what illness Robertson supposedly suffered.

 

Another Canton resident said Robertson threatened his son last year.

 

"He's a very high-strung, hot-tempered individual," said Steve Smith, a Canton business owner and the father of another athlete. "I had an encounter with him a year-and-a-half ago, when I got a call from my son, who told me this guy had just threatened to kill him."

 

The threat arose from an incident on the field, Smith told the Tyler newspaper. Robertson's son, a freshman football player then, was walking off the field, when some older students "razzed" him, Smith said.

 

"This guy blew up," Smith said. "He thought some kids were picking on his son. My son wasn't even the one who said anything. But he threatened to kill him."

 

Smith said he complained to the school and to police, but Robertson was never charged.

 

Amanda Sheperd, owner of Backwoods Bar-B-Que in Canton, said she was alarmed when she heard about the shooting because her ninth-grade grandson, Ty Sheperd, plays baseball and has a class in the field house. She believes he had left the fieldhouse and gone to band class before the shooting.

 

"I talked to the school just now and they said the kids were taken care of, and they're not letting anybody in or out," said Sheperd, who was continuing to serve lunch customers as news helicopters hovered overhead the school about a half-mile away. "The guy's on the loose, so they're out looking for him."

 

Kinne was named coach and athletic director at Canton in May 2003.

 

Also Online

 

Rebecca Lopez reports

He was an assistant coach at Mesquite High School. He was promoted to defensive coordinator in 2002 after Mesquite won the 2001 Class 5A Division I state championship with a 15-0 record. Kinne also was a standout linebacker at North Mesquite in 1983 and '84 - being named the district defensive player of the year his senior year.

 

He played for Grant Teaff at Baylor. Kinne was a three-year starting middle linebacker and was the second-leading tackler for a stingy Bears' defense that had future NFL starters James Francis and Robert Blackmon.

 

Nearly all of Kinne's life has taken place within an hour's drive of Mesquite. That geography made Canton appealing when he was hired there.

 

His son, G. J. Kinne, was the AP 3A All-state honorable mention quarterback last season.

 

 

http://www.dallasnews.com

[TheBigHurt35]

Wow, that's completely screwed up. And I thought that they were just exaggerating in Friday Night Lights.

 

Hopefully he'll be apprehended before he does more damage.

[Steff]

Apparently they found him in a wooded area attempting to kill himself by slitting his wrists...?

[EvilMonkey]

Maybe they should have been a little slower, he would have saved the fine state of Texas lots of money on court costs. I am suprised KWF didn't post this first!

Edited April 7, 2005 by EvilMonkey

[Texsox]

Wow, that's completely screwed up.  And I thought that they were just exaggerating in Friday Night Lights.

 

Hopefully he'll be apprehended before he does more damage.

 

During football season the Rio Grande Valley teams will be in 12-14 games at various levels each week. The local sports radio station will have reporters at every one. The TV news will lead with football action and it will take up at least 3/4 of the expanded sports coverage. The average fan could name a dozen of the top players by name.

 

In Donna, Texas varsity players were caught putting on gloves and sodomizing underclassman as a kind of initiation. The coach tried to cover it up. The School Board fired him and parents were up in arms and protesting his dismissal. Could be he led them to the state playoffs last year. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen.

[LowerCaseRepublican]

Well at least it wasn't a student.

 

Still very tragic.