Wis. Teen Told Police He ‘Freaked Out’:
The videotaped statement that Eric Hainstock gave to investigators was shown to the jury yesterday.
The video, filmed just hours after the Sept. 29 shooting, shows Hainstock slouched in a Sauk County Sheriff’s Department interview room with Klang’s blood on his clothes. He tells detectives that he complained to Klang for three years about kids teasing him and calling him a “fag,” but that Klang did nothing to stop them.
That morning after his parents left their home, he says in the video, he “was still ticked off” at various students and the principal.
According to the criminal complaint, Hainstock, then a 15-year-old freshman, went to school outside Cazenovia, about 65 miles northwest of Madison, with a shotgun and a revolver.
A janitor tore the shotgun away, and Hainstock pulled out the revolver, cocked it and got ready to fire, he tells detectives in the video.
Hainstock was well-trained in firearms. You don’t cock the hammer on a gun unless you have full intentions of using it.
He says Klang came toward him and asked him, ‘What’s going on?’”
“I’m like, ‘I’m sick of you guys,’” he says in the interview.
He ordered Klang into an office, and as they turned to walk there, Klang jumped him, Hainstock says. He stuck his pistol under Klang’s left armpit and fired three times, he says. Klang later died.
“I just freaked out,” Hainstock says.
Yet multiple witnesses have testified that they heard Hainstock say he was there to kill someone. To me cocking the gun definitely shows intent. If he wanted to scare someone he could have just pointed an empty gun at them. But no Hainstock went in there with two different loaded weapons with multiple rounds available for reloading. He was planning on a massacre. He didn’t freak out. He probably realized that when John Klang went for his gun that it was probably the only chance he was going to get for revenge. John Klang probably saved a lot of lives that fateful day.
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