Charles Andy Williams

As the parents of two students slain in the Santana High School shooting rampage prepared to bury their children, school officials announced plans Thursday to transfer four students who had heard the alleged gunman making threats of violence but kept silent because they thought he was joking. Granger Ward, superintendent of the Grossmont Union High School District, said the four will be transferred to another school in the district for their own safety.

As the parents of two students slain in the Santana High School shooting rampage prepared to bury their children, school officials announced plans Thursday to transfer four students who had heard the alleged gunman making threats of violence but kept silent because they thought he was joking. Granger Ward, superintendent of the Grossmont Union High School District, said the four will be transferred to another school in the district for their own safety.

He feared he might go down in history as the character who rode his horse right up the state capitol steps and into his office in Baton Rouge, La. He wanted to be remembered instead for his accomplishments as a two-term governor. Or maybe for the 400 or so hillbilly, western and gospel songs he wrote and recorded that got him into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1972.

The school locker, long feared as a repository of drugs and weapons, is making a comeback. Some administrators are returning the metal boxes to campus, figuring it's better than creating a generation of students with back problems. In one Orange County school district, a board member who watched a student wobble and fall over from the weight of her backpack has proposed reinstalling lockers in middle schools.

A student on a remote Indian reservation in Minnesota burst through the metal detector at his high school Monday and shot dead five classmates, a teacher and a security guard before turning the gun on himself, authorities said. Before his rampage at the school, the student shot and killed his grandparents at their home on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, authorities said. His grandfather, Sgt. Daryl Lussier, had served for more than 35 years on the Red Lake police force.

Families of two students killed in a shootout at a high school here last year sued the school district, claiming that officials failed to act on warning signs that accused gunman Charles "Andy" Williams was a troubled teenager, an attorney said Wednesday. The families of Bryan Zuckor and Randy Gordon accuse the Grossmont Union High School District of negligence and wrongful death stemming from the March 5, 2001, shootings at Santana High School in Santee.

Charles "Andy" Williams, the former Santana High School student convicted of killing two boys in a shooting rampage at the campus, has lost a bid to overturn his 50-years-to-life prison sentence. A three-member appellate panel unanimously rejected Williams' argument that he should have been considered for placement in the California Youth Authority instead of prison and that a judge should have dropped a firearms charge that lengthened his term.

The parents of the two students killed in the Santana High School shooting in 2001 offered to drop their lawsuit against the school district if it agreed to hold a conference on school violence. The district has refused, saying it held forums on the topic. Michelle and George Zuckor and Mari Gordon-Rayborn sued the district, saying that officials failed to detect warning signs in the behavior of Charles "Andy" Williams, who opened fire on the Santee campus on March 5, 2001.

Re "Youth Gets 50 to Life for Shootings" (Aug. 16), on Charles "Andy" Williams' school rampage: Trigger locks are well made and difficult to remove. Many young men think a lot about guns, and sometimes about using them to get revenge. Chances are that the kids will know where the gun is hidden, but with a lock inserted it would be inoperable. If the gun owner had spent about $20 for a trigger lock this horrible situation may not have happened, and these young lives could have been saved.

A divided state appeals court upheld 2 to 1 a sweeping juvenile justice law approved by voters last year, ruling that the measure does not violate rules requiring that an initiative cover only one subject. The 4th District Court of Appeal issued the ruling in the case of Charles "Andy" Williams, who was 15 when he allegedly shot and killed two students and wounded 13 others in March at a high school in the San Diego suburb of Santee.

The Newport-Mesa school board has adopted an anti-bullying policy, one it hopes will prevent school violence of the kind that rocked Santana High School in San Diego County last week. Now officials in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District must determine how to enact the policy so youngsters can feel safe without parents and students fearing that their rights will be violated.