Murder of Nick Corwin

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Nicholas Brent Corwin (1980–1988) was an eight-year-old boy who was shot and killed by thirty-year-old mentally ill woman Laurie Dann, inside the Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois, United States, on May 20, 1988. Dann also shot several other students, all of whom survived, then took a family hostage, injuring an occupant with a gunshot before committing suicide. Earlier that day, Dann had tried to poison several acquaintances and set fires in a school and a daycare.

Victim

thumb|Nicky Corwin remembered at [[March for Our Lives on 24 March 2018 in Washington, D.C.]]Nick Corwin was born on April 9, 1980, to Joel and Linda Corwin in Chicago. In school, he was a student athlete known for his sportsmanship and skill. His name has since been attached to a popular soccer field and playground in Winnetka, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

According to a report in People magazine, 1,500 people attended Corwin's funeral. Shortly after his death, playing on the meaning of his name (“giver of gifts”) his friends and schoolmates created a book, The Gifts that Nicholas Gave.

Following Corwin's death, Winnetka passed a handgun ban, which stood until D.C. vs Heller and subsequent NRA lawsuits.

Corwin is interred at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie, Illinois.

Perpetrator

Early life

Laurie Dann was born Laurie Wasserman on October 18, 1957, and grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, a north suburb of Chicago. She was the daughter of Edith Joy and her husband, accountant Norman Wasserman. The family was Jewish and she had one older brother.

Laurie was described as shy and had trouble socializing; in childhood she displayed signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder but they seemingly disappeared when she started adolescence. In high school she had a couple of short-term romantic relationships. The Wassermans vacationed in Hawaii over the 1973 holiday season during which time Laurie met Barry Gallup, a year older than she and also from the Chicago area. They continued seeing each other after going home to Illinois but Barry graduated high school the following spring, went to college, and broke off the relationship. The Wassermans moved to a different neighborhood in 1974 and Laurie would attend a different high school for her senior year. During a summer trip to Aspen, Colorado, she met another boy her age named Wade Keats, also from the Chicago area, and they continued seeing each other afterwards but broke it off in two months. Laurie pursued several brief relationships for the rest of her senior year and also got plastic surgery to reduce the size of her nose.

In September 1986, Russell accused Dann of stabbing him in his sleep with an icepick, barely missing his heart, despite not having seen his attacker. Police decided not to press charges based on a medical report which suggested that the injury might have been self-inflicted, as well as Russell's abrasive attitude towards investigators and a failed polygraph test. The drinks were often leaking and the squares unpleasant-tasting, so few were actually consumed. In addition, the arsenic was highly diluted so nobody became seriously ill.

Hubbard Woods Elementary School shooting

Dann drove three and a half blocks away to the Hubbard Woods Elementary School, armed with three handguns. It is speculated that she was out to get the Rushes' two older children but they were on a field trip that day. She wandered into a second-grade classroom for a short while, then left. Finding a boy in the hallway, six year old Robert Trossman, Dann pushed him into the boys' washroom and shot him in the chest with her Beretta pistol. Her Smith & Wesson revolver jammed when she tried to fire at two other boys, and she threw the weapon into the trash along with its spare ammunition. The boys fled the washroom and alerted staff. She saw a police car coming so turned around and went the other direction.

Taking Dann's story at face value, the Andrews tried to convince her that she need not fear police because she had acted in self-defense.

|quote=Killed:

Nicholas Brent Corwin (8)

Injured:

Lindsay Clark Fisher (8)
Peter Munro (8)
Mark Teborek (8)
Kathryn Anne Miller (7)
Robert Trossman (6)
Philip Andrew (20)

Aftermath

Corwin's murder inside an elementary school was among the first to feature prominently in the 24-hour news cycle, mostly revolving around Dann's mental state. Because no other school shooting had received such wide coverage, the murder is sometimes called “the first school shooting.” Since Corwin's murder, a school shooting has been widely reported almost every year. Others noted that the shooting marked an "end of innocence" for the prosperous community along Chicago's North Shore, which had not seen a murder in thirty years.

All but one of the victims wounded by Dann recovered from their injuries, including a girl who was shot and suffered severe internal injuries. The victims and their parents received extensive support to help them cope with the psychological after-effects of the attacks.

Parents and members of the community subsequently devoted many years to campaigning for gun control policy. Philip Andrew gave interviews about gun control from his hospital bed, and later became active in local and state gun control organizations as the executive director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence; he subsequently became a lawyer and then an FBI agent.

Dr. Donald Monroe, superintendent of Winnetka School District 36, noted "his 'safe' school" was "not as isolated and insulated as we thought." At the time of the shooting, Hubbard Woods, like many schools, was an open campus, with many doors, such as those to individual classrooms, kept open. After the shooting, a pattern of single-point entry emerged in more schools. Russell Dann helped coach Bertinelli while she was preparing for the role.

Search for a rationale

Some blamed Dann's parents for shielding her in spite of the signs of her deteriorating mental health. or to provide access to Dann's psychiatric records, which were eventually obtained by court order. On the night of the shooting, Dann's parents allowed only a very brief search of her bedroom; afterwards, they cleaned the room and removed potential evidence. Norm Wasserman also insisted Laurie's wrecked Toyota be returned to him as it was registered in his name. The drug's effects were initially considered as contributing factors to Dann's mental decline, but ultimately ruled out.

Two newspaper clippings were found among Dann's possessions. One described a man who randomly killed two people in a public building. The other described a depressed young man who had attempted to commit suicide in the same way that Dann did; he survived and discovered that his brain injury had cured him of his OCD.

In his book The Myth of Male Power, author Warren Farrell suggested that Dann's actions were an example of women's violence against men. He claimed, erroneously, that all of Dann's victims were male, that she had burned down a Young Men's Jewish Council, had burned two boys in a basement, had shot her own son and had justified the murder of Nick Corwin by claiming he was a rapist. Men's rights activists, academics, and the media have repeated Farrell's errors and conclusion. Farrell later issued a partial correction on his web site.