KINGSPORT, Tenn. – Whenever Thomas Richard Cowan visited his probation officer, she met him in the lobby. She was afraid of him, she later told police. She didn’t want him in her office.
He already was known to be armed and unstable, with a history of tucking illegal weapons into the waistbands and pockets of his blue jeans, according to police accounts.
Nine years later, on Monday morning, the 62-year-old Kingsport man – described to emergency dispatchers as old, unknown, half bald and handicapped – held a Blountville school hostage with a .380-caliber pistol.
“We have a man with a gun at Central High School,” cried a woman into the phone, locked in her office just feet from the gunman. Code Red sounded over the intercom, sending the school’s 1,200 students hiding in dark corners, huddling under desks and crammed into closets no bigger than Nissan sedans. Some teachers stood guard over their doors, armed with broom handles and scissors, students recalled.
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Minutes later, after a standoff with the school resource officer, Cowan was shot dead by three Sullivan County deputies. He was the only one injured.
No one can say why Cowan drove his old Honda to the school, eight miles from home, and walked to the doors with the aid of a cane.
“No one knows why,” said senior Blake Roller. “It’s all we’ve been talking about all day. But I don’t know if we’ll ever know.”
It was his second trip to the school that day. He arrived early in the morning and Principal Melanie Riden shooed him away, said Kristin Helm, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. But he returned at 9:15 a.m., two hours after the first bell, with one loaded gun in his hand and another in his back pocket.
Emergency dispatch tapes, released Tuesday, reveal the madness and uncertainty he brought back with him.
“The officer has a gun pulled on him and he has one on her,” a custodian, hiding around the corner, told dispatchers. He’d never before seen “the gentleman,” he said. The man was old, average, wearing a red shirt and tan pants. “They have each other at gun point. She’s trying to talk him down.”
In the main hallway, school resource officer Carolyn Gudger and Cowan were in a gun-to-gun standoff.
“She’s warning him to sit down or she’ll fire at him,” the man said. “He’s not complying.”
Freshman Randy Brightsen, crouched in a adjoining classroom, said he heard the gunman shout “no!”
“God bless,” a woman cried into the phone. “You need to instruct them that he’s ready to shoot.”
Then, in the background, three gun shots rang out.
“Oh God. Shots fired,” she screamed. “Shots fired.”
Three more shots.
“Oh God.”
Silence.
“Oh God. I hope it wasn’t Gudger,” she said, not really talking into the phone anymore. “Is Gudger OK? I hear her. Did you get ‘em?”
Cowan was taken to the hospital by helicopter, where he was pronounced dead at 10:15 a.m.
Helm said Tuesday that the investigation will take several months and additional details will not be released until that time.
For nearly two decades the man has lived alone at the dead end of Mountain View Avenue in Kingsport, just off Memorial Drive. On Monday afternoon, his German shepherd, Radar, was still chained to the fence outside, with unopened letters in the mailbox and a yellowing newspaper still wrapped in plastic.
Cowan’s wife left him in 1992, according to court records. By the time their divorce was finalized the next year, he’d begun his career as a nuisance to the Kingsport Police Department. First, he reported a robbery at his house in October 1992. Someone broke in through the back door, he told police, and stole $495 worth of microwave ovens, telephones, clocks, planters and NASCAR collectibles. He suspected his wife, who’d just left him. She told police that he “orchestrated the break in to complicate matters pertaining to their marriage.” Around the same time, Cowan went to her house across town and threw all her clothes into the driveway.
At some point police went to his home and he greeted them on the lawn with a gun in his pocket, according to police reports. Then in February 2000, he arrived at the Kingsport Justice Center with a loaded .380-caliber Jennings handgun in his waistband and no permit to carry it. He told police the gun “was for his protection.” He was convicted of carrying illegal weapons, sentenced to a year of probation and ordered by the court to undergo a mental evaluation and counseling.
He did neither. But his probation officer with Alternative Correctional Sentencing in Kingsport, a private company contracted by the state to deal with misdemeanor offenses, released him from probation three months early. The director of the company did not return a Tuesday afternoon call.
Months later, Cowan was arrested for stalking at least two newspaper carriers. The arresting officer insisted he be forced to have a psychological evaluation, but still he did not. The case was dismissed.
By October 2001, he’d been banned from the convenience store around the corner from his house, then charged with trespassing, for cursing and threatening customers and employees with his cane.
He has a sister in North Carolina and a brother, Rodney Cowan, who works at Sullivan Central High School. He is, as far as anyone can tell, Cowan’s only connection to the school.
Rodney Cowan declined to comment Monday and said the family was trying to make arrangements.
By Tuesday afternoon, Thomas Cowan’s German shepherd was gone. So was the yellowed newspaper and the mail in the box.
At Sullivan Central, just a few hundred students called in.
“We really came together,” said a teacher, who declined to be named because she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to speak on the subject. “It was a very good day. The students were extremely respectful, reverent even, more so than usual.”
At school Tuesday, Roller said it was a day of “coping.” Teachers went easy on the students and let them chatter and discuss the previous day’s events.
The school called in counselors, but few students went to see them.
The students are already grappling with the impending loss of a classmate. Senior Bradley Brock is dying of Ewings sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, and students hold regular prayer sessions at the flagpole in his honor.
On Monday, some students heard the gunshots. Others just heard the helicopter take the body away. On Tuesday, students said they’re becoming all too aware of mortality.
“We went through that together,” senior John Long said. “I looked at someone today and thought, that’s the person I was looking at yesterday when I was scared. That’s a good friend.”
cgalofaro@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2531
