John Klang’s killer will not be receiving a new trial. Sauk County (WI) Circuit Court Judge Patrick Taggart said in a written ruling that Eric Hainstock received a fair trial for the shooting death of Principal Klang in the halls of Weston High School. Judge Taggart said that the jury had plenty of other evidence that showed Hainstock was intent on killing Klang.
“There is the physical evidence of the multiple shots delivered in close contact to the victim,” he writes. “Hainstock’s statements to others that Klang would not live to see homecoming (that evening), defendant’s statements to the janitor that he was there with two weapons to “(expletive) kill someone.”
Hainstock, who was 15 at the time of the 2006 murder, is serving a life sentence.
Not only does Eric Hainstock want us to feel sorry for him now he also wants a new trial.
As you’ll recall Hainstock shot and killed Principal John Klang of Weston Schools in Wisconsin.
His latest attorney has filed a motion stating his counsel during the trial was ineffective. Paul G. Bonneson says that Hainstock wasn’t competent enough to waive his rights before he was questioned.
That’s strange because he was competent enough to steal, load, and fire a gun killing a father, husband, and principal.
This is an article from the alternative weekly in Wisconsin called Isthmus. In it are a series of letters that Eric Hainstock wrote to the publication. For those of you who may not remember Hainstock was 15 when he shot and killed Principal John Klang of the Weston Schools. Hainstock was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison with a possibility of parole in 2037.
In his letters Hainstock sort of takes responsibility for his actions…
Hainstock says some people in prison have told him he’s “cool” for having killed his principal. He corrects them: “No, I’m not. I took a life. He can’t go to his daughter’s wedding. He can’t walk her down the aisle.”
But for most of the article, as usual, he blames his situation on everyone but himself…
“When I was 15 years old I shot my high school principal. I never meant for this to happen. He grabbed me from behind and I got scared. I was already pretty stressed, so that freaked me out even more. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not blaming Mr. Klang for grabbing me. But I am blaming him, the teachers, social services and the school as a whole for never listening to me…. No one ever listened.”
The article goes on about how much he learned in prison but I guess he still hasn’t learned that everyone is responsible for their own actions. The article also says that he likes prison more compared to his old life. I’m glad that was arranged for him.
Eric Hainstock has been sentenced to life behind bars with the possibility of parole in 30 years for the shooting death of Weston Schools principal John Klang.
Judge Patrick Taggart said that he considered Hainstock’s age and background before sentencing. He said that he believes the teen can be rehabilitated, WISC-TV reported.
Defense attorneys had requested parole eligibility after 20 years while the state had requested 49 years with the date of eligibility being Sept.29, 2056 — or 50 years after the shooting at Weston Schools, WISC-TV reported.
The jurors who convicted Hainstock said that they focused on the guns and ammunition that he brought to school and the number of shots fired in determining his intent to murder.
Juror Brian Ludolph, of Prairie du Sac, said on Friday the fact numerous shots were fired by Hainstock convinced them the student intended to kill Klang. Ludolph said that Hainstock bringing the guns and ammunition to school also played into their finding of intent.
Juror Diana Mielke, of North Freedom, said that the jury was initially split on whether Hainstock intended to kill Klang.
Mielke said that she was initially among the six who thought Hainstock didn’t have intent to kill, but changed her mind after recalling Hainstock’s lack of emotion during the trial.
Thankfully, there was a jury with common sense who recognized Hainstock’s intent and weren’t fooled by his lies.
Justice has been served.
While you’re at WISC’s website, take the poll and let them know how you feel about the verdict and sentence. You can probably guess how I voted.
Not only was Eric Hainstock found guilty in the shooting death of principal John Klang, he was also convicted on the first-degree intentional homicide charge. He’s looking at life in prison.
Here we go. Now we get to see how rough poor widdle Eric Hainstock had it.
On the morning of the shooting, Hainstock testified, he awoke feeling tired of being picked on at school and said to himself, “I have to get all of this to stop.”
At school, he was stuffed into lockers, had his head dunked into toilets and was called a “fag” by his classmates, he said. As a result of the bullying, he attempted suicide three times.
His classmates’ comments “cut a little deeper,” he said, because at the age of 6, he was sexually molested by his 12-year-old stepbrother. He kept the alleged assaults a secret, he said.
Hainstock’s father, Shawn Hainstock, cried as his son testified.
Wait a minute. I thought his father was an abusive ogre who didn’t care about his son.
When he came home from school, Hainstock said, his parents forced him to do most of the housework. When he failed to do so, he was disciplined.
Hainstock testified that his father often kicked him and also used a wooden board called “the board of education” to spank him.
He said his father also refused to provide him with medication to help curb his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Yeah, like that. If they were as poor as everyone is making them out to be, they more than likely would have been eligible for government assistance, where the medication would have cost them next to nothing. Not to mention the fact that ADD and ADHD are probably the most misdiagnosed and over-diagnosed conditions of the modern medical age, in my opinion. And which one is it that makes the kids go crazy? Is it being on meds or not being on meds? I forget, since I’ve seen both used as criminal defenses.
After loading his father’s 20-gauge shotgun and .22-caliber revolver, he drove to school, hoping he could force Klang to listen to his problems, he said.
Again, no reason to load the guns if his intent was to scare, which it wasn’t. Not only that, but what made him think that taking two guns to school to threaten people with wasn’t going to land him in jail. Did he think that miraculously all his problems would disappear and there would be no repercussions to his actions? What a dumbass.
When he entered the school, he screamed, “Everyone get in the office. I’m not f—ing kidding!”
He said he didn’t get flustered when the school’s maintenance man, David Thompson, was able to grab the shotgun out of his hand. Hainstock said he reacted by pulling the handgun out of his pants.
That sounds strangely like the characteristics of a cold-blooded killer to me. He’s lucky that Mr. Thompson didn’t blow him away right then and there.
When Klang turned the corner, Hainstock testified, he pointed the gun at him and said, “I ain’t going to do nothing … let’s go to the office, I want to talk.”
Hainstock said Klang agreed to talk to him in his office, but as they walked there, Klang grabbed him and the gun went off accidentally.
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” Hainstock testified.
He said he then aimed the gun at Klang’s arm and fired “so he would let go of him.”
After an accidental third shot fired, Hainstock said he was in shock.
“I didn’t think Mr. Klang was going to die … I hoped not,” Hainstock said. “I didn’t plan to hurt nobody.”
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” How in the hell would he have to be holding the gun for that to possibly happen?
The last witness to testify was Hainstock’s grandmother, Irene Hainstock, who said Eric called her from jail after his arrest.
“What have you done,” she recalled asking her grandson. “I don’t know, grandma. Something snapped in my head,” was the response.
Some more students…
Other defense witnesses included five students at Weston who saw Eric enter the school with a shotgun and saw it taken away from him. None remembered hearing him say, “I’m here to (expletive) kill somebody,” as one witness recalled.
On cross-examination, however, most said they weren’t sure they could hear everything that was being said that day.
Now let’s hear from Hainstock himself…
In his own testimony, Hainstock said he brought the shotgun and pistol to the school to make people listen to him and did not intend to kill Klang.
Hainstock said he needed the weapons — a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber revolver — “because they would be scared,” he said, referring to people at the school. “If they were scared they’d listen, hopefully.”
Hainstock, 16, testified unemotionally as the first witness in the defense case after prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning.
Mounting frustration with his home life and with persistent taunting at school led him to the desperate action, he said, which he said was not intended to hurt anyone.
But after Klang grabbed him from behind at the school, Hainstock testified, the gun went off.
“It was accidental,” he said. He heard a grunt from Klang, he said, who continued to hold him. Hainstock said a second shot, which struck Klang on the side of the head but did not penetrate his skull, was intended for Klang’s arm, to get Klang to let go of him.
Hainstock said he underestimated the lethal power of the .22.
“I didn’t think it would hurt nobody that bad because it was so little,” he said.
I don’t buy any of it. According to this article, when asked by his attorney why Hainstock loaded the weapons he said it was “just a reaction.” Loading two separate weapons is not a reaction. That’s intent. And what did he think the .22 would do? Just bounce off people? And what if the shotgun was not taken from him. Did he think that a shotgun “wouldn’t hurt nobody?”
Anything less than a conviction of first-degree murder is a travesty of justice.
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.
From special needs teacher James Nowak who had a metal stapler thrown at him by Hainstock.
During testimony Monday afternoon in a Baraboo courtroom, teacher James Nowak recounted his own rising sense of tension with Hainstock, beginning with an incident on Sept, 14. That day, he said, Hainstock threw a metal stapler at him, narrowly missing his head and chipping the wall. When he returned to the classroom with Klang and Buildings and Grounds Director Phillip Rachuj, they found Hainstock holding a chair.
“He had a chair above his head and he looked like he was going to swing it at us,” said Nowak.
Rachuj was able to take the chair from Hainstock, and he was suspended from school for three days.
Apparently, someone fashions himself as Stone Cold Steve Austin. Well, Trench 3:16 says your ass is going to prison.
From Angela Young, the guidance counselor at Weston Schools…
She said Hainstock was a boy who sought attention, enjoyed playing the victim and often placed blame for his actions on others. Young said he was often teased by other students, but he picked on them in return.
Young testified that she was in the hall when Hainstock walked into the school but said she could not see him because of the decorations. She testified she heard Hainstock say “I’m going to (expletive) kill somebody.”
You can’t play the bullying card when you’re a bully yourself. Then again, this whole incident was never about bullying. It’s about a selfish and self-absorbed punk kid who wanted to exact his revenge on a man who cared enough to actually discipline Hainstock.
