JONESBORO, ARK. — After two middle-school boys in camouflage gear shot and killed four classmates and a teacher here, leaving 10 others wounded and a community shattered, it seemed inevitable that someone would see opportunity in the tragedy for a book deal.
Indeed, within days a publisher agreed to pay $25,000 to an Arkansas writer to produce a book on youth violence.
Victims' families were outraged. They called the payment blood money and said the author was cashing in on their pain. They demanded that the money go to the school, victims' relatives or scholarships for the wounded, not to the writer's personal bank account. He refused.
That the author was Mike Huckabee, Arkansas' governor at the time, made their resentment all the stronger.
"He took advantage of us," said Pam Herring, whose daughter, Paige Ann, had just turned 12 when she was shot to death.
"He was out for one thing and that was money," said Mitch Wright, whose wife, Shannon, a teacher, died protecting children. "He made money at our expense."
The slaughter at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro in March 1998 was, at the time, one of the worst school incidents in American history. Today, with Huckabee a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, his book deal continues to aggravate many of the victims' families.
Some critics of Huckabee say the incident fits his pattern as governor of enriching himself with gifts of cash, clothes and furniture donated by supporters.
At the time of the shootings, Huckabee was under investigation for numerous ethics violations, many of them for not reporting outside income and gifts. In all, he was fined or sanctioned five times by the Arkansas Ethics Commission.
Inauguration funds reportedly were used to buy clothes for his wife, Janet, and the couple later set up a "wedding registry" at department stores and collected linens, toasters and other furnishings from supporters; they had been married 25 years.
Bobby McDaniel, a Jonesboro lawyer who represented some of the families, said Huckabee "never saw a gift he didn't take." Newspaper editorial writers called him a "money-grubbing governor" and nicknamed him "Mike the Huckster."
"It was all quite unseemly," Vaughn McQuary, chairman of the state Democratic Party at the time, said in a recent interview about the book contract. "The governor of a state should set a better example."
