Posted on 05/21/2002 2:26:05 PM PDT by Glutton
Couple's tie bound tighter by tragedy
The Register-Guard
They reconnected at Thurston High School several years later and when they started dating in 1998, they were a hot item: He was the towering athlete, a wrestler, the guy you'd want on your side in a fight; she was the one you'd be fighting over - slender, with blond hair and blue-green eyes
Jen Alldredge and Jake Ryker, both shot at Thurston four years ago, were married last fall.
Photo: CHRIS PIETSCH / The Register-Guard
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Then everything changed, four years ago today. It changed when freshman Kip Kinkel walked into their school, shot and killed two students and wounded 25 others. It changed when Kinkel reduced Jen to the agonizing status of victim and forced Jake into the unwanted role of hero.
She was shot through the hand, torso and chin. He was shot in the chest, tackled the gunman and, with the help of five other boys, disarmed him.
"I wondered, will their relationship survive the trauma?" says Zane Wilson, Jake's pastor at Springfield Lutheran Church. "Here Jake is, getting this kind of attention, this kind of adulation, this kind of hero worship. Is Jennifer going to be able to live with all this?
"She's a strong kid, she has a personality, she's got a plan for her life, she's got things she wants to do. I would not see her as sitting in the eclipse. That's not her style."
IN HIGH SCHOOL everybody dates everybody, trying, as Jake puts it, "to see who wanted to be with who."
But Jake and Jen kept getting back together. She was the one who listened, really listened, when he vented about girls or school or family. And she was drawn to his openness. At 6-foot-5, Jake was all rough-and-tumble, tight jeans and muscle T-shirts, but alone with Jen he dropped the macho act to say, "Here's what's going on in my life."
By the spring of 1998, they were together, and in love.
On the morning of May 21, in fact, Jen was conspiring to crash Jake's 17th birthday party. She chatted up friends in the cafeteria while he worked close by on homework.
Then they heard a pop-pop-pop-pop - school-election pranks, they assumed - until students started falling around them.
They no longer dwell on that day.
They mourn it now as you would the death of a grandparent.
"You start to not necessarily move on, but you recognize that your life can't be lived constantly in the past," Jen says.
AFTER THE SHOOTINGS, Jen lay incapacitated in a hospital bed.
Her contacts had been removed, and a tube filled her mouth and throat; she couldn't see or speak. Her own mother was afraid to touch her, and Jen was scared. "Am I going to die?" she asked, in a scribbled note.
Jake was at another hospital. He communicated with Jen by fax, sending a message that seethed with such fear, anger and concern that, in reading it to his daughter, David Alldredge wept openly. Upon his release, Jake went immediately to her bedside.
"It was ... so sweet," says Diana, Jen's mother. "Like when you see two people that just love each other so much and what passes between their eyes is so tender that you just can't watch. I would loved to have taken a picture, but I couldn't violate it."
The period that followed was decidedly darker.
Jake struggled with his image as a hero.
He blamed himself for failing to save a close friend and, at any rate, he didn't see his actions as sensational; he was raised to be responsible - nothing more, nothing less.
Yet people kept demanding that he play the part, from the media requesting interviews to special-interest groups such as the National Rifle Association seeking his endorsement to peers awed simply by his presence.
Wilson, the pastor, recalled a visit Jake and his brother, Josh, made to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.
"Jake is talking to five or six guys who had all been in Boy Scouts," he says.
"As I'm watching, a little kid - probably 16 or 17 - he just kind of walked up, and he stood behind some of these guys, and then he kind of sidled around, and the whole time he's watching Jake, and finally he gets over and he just reached out" - Wilson extends his arm reverently - "and put his hand on him, and then pulled it back, and walked away.
"Now how do you deal with that when you're 19 years old?"
Jen was also in turmoil.
She lost most of the use of two fingers on her right hand. When people saw how awkwardly she gripped a pen, they invariably asked the questions that forced her to recount the entire traumatizing experience, a vicious loop. A friend eager to snatch a bit of the media limelight abused her friendship.
Jen says some people found her to be "emotionally overwhelming," while she had difficulty relating to the issues in their lives, which were typically no more grave than whom to date.
She was plagued by survivor guilt, at times either hating or pitying herself, unable to understand why she had been spared but not her two classmates.
Jake and Jen also faced the pressure to graduate and chart a course for the future. And in the middle of it all, in April 1999, two boys walked into a Colorado high school and started shooting, pulling Jake and Jen back into the madness of a year earlier.
At one point, Jen talked to her mother about suicide. It's been four years ago, but it still makes Diana shake.
"Can you imagine how hard it is as a parent to hear your daughter talking about suicide, knowing that if she really truly wanted to, she could?" she asks.
"What I had to tell her was how important she was in my life and David's life, and how her loss would be ... unbearable. And I said, 'I know that Jake has guilt for not being able to save everybody, but imagine just for a moment how bad you would feel if you weren't there for him.' I didn't make it any harder than that, but she's a bright girl. She understood."
ONCE AGAIN, Jake and Jen came back together. Jen turned things around by getting mad, and found her solace in Jake. They consoled and counseled each other over long walks and painful discussions. She was his therapist, he was her punching bag.
"We had each other to lean on," Jake says, "so we were going to be OK."
The emotional dilemmas and life choices that make and break couples typically play out over time. But they rained down steadily on Jake and Jen in little more than a year, from Thurston to Columbine to the possibility of her taking a job on the East Coast to his enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves.
While he endured 3 1/2 months in boot camp, she wrote him daily. Young Marines around him were getting "Dear John" letters from their girlfriends, but Jen gave Jake her unflinching support.
Similarly, Diana says, when Jen was offered a TV news internship back East, Jake bit his lip and encouraged her to take it. Ironically, that ended her interest. She'd found something more important: a selfless companion.
The barrage of challenges to their relationship "didn't tear us apart," Jen says. "It actually made us stronger."
He proposed one afternoon three years ago, while they were alone in her parents' living room. Jen was so eager to be engaged that she had to fight not to pre-empt his question, "Do you want to be my wife, and love me forever?"
Wilson married them last October, in a simple ceremony. Jake wore khakis, Jen dressed in a blue shift. Diana says that from the back, you could see the dress shaking - they were both as nervous as two kids caught kissing behind the schoolhouse.
ON A RECENT spring night, Jake and Jen are walking close together down the streets of their east Springfield neighborhood, enjoying the evening air.
Jake flags down the ice cream man and returns with a Colonel Crunch ice cream bar that he devours in a few ample bites. "He's a 5-year-old trapped in a 21-year-old's body," Jen says.
They talk about youth with a wistfulness uncommon in young people. Jake, in fact, turns 21 today; it's a hallmark birthday but neither of them feels especially celebratory, considering all the loss inextricably woven into the date.
They have experienced pain and witnessed death, and on some days they feel they have been robbed of their time to be young, happy and foolish.
But they found each other along the way. And together, they can sometimes turn back the clock.
"He'll get this inclination to pick me up and start running around the park with me on his back," Jen says.
"You get to remember what it was like to be 17 again."
THURSTON SHOOTINGS UPDATES
On May 21, 1998, Kip Kinkel shot and killed two classmates and wounded 25 others at Thurston High School. A day earlier, he killed his parents at the family's home.
Background:
Thurston shootings background, story archive
The photo didn't work in preview, so I was doing 'surgery' to get it to come up. As an HTML physician, I am a butter knife wielder.
Well, that make sense. Sue the other murder victims.
I'm sure her dad would drop the lawsuit in exchange for ten minutes alone with Mr. Kinkle.
They maintain prison is the wrong setting to treat Kinkle's illness. Michel Nicklauson's father commentting on this on the TV news story I just watched was livid.
Essentially his message was along the lines of "tough!"
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