Charlie Decker shot by police

The final act of the Placerville High School hostage crisis was a deliberate, staged suicide by police. After the twenty-three classmates had filed out of Room 16, their hands streaked with black ink, and Ted Jones lay catatonic against the wall, Charlie Decker sat alone with the bodies of Jean Underwood and John Vance. He had unloaded the pistol and placed it in the top drawer of Mrs. Underwood's desk. When Captain Frank Philbrick stepped through the door, he glanced down at the drooling Ted-thing and then up at Decker. Decker made as if to grab something behind the desktop row of books and plants, screaming, "Here it comes, you shit cop!" Philbrick shot him three times.

The Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath

The shooting was the culmination of a morning in which Decker had systematically dismantled every authority figure who had tried to control him. He had shot Mrs. Underwood in the head, killed Mr. Vance, humiliated Principal Thomas Denver, psychologically tortured school psychiatrist Don Grace into sobbing like a baby, and survived a sniper's bullet that struck the steel padlock in his breast pocket. When Philbrick entered the room, Decker was exhausted. He had told Ted Jones, "You're going to get better. You're going to forget this day ever happened," and then added, "Or maybe you won't. Maybe you'll go on from here, Ted. Build from this." But for himself, Decker had no such hope. He had already unloaded the gun and put it away. The feigned grab for a weapon was a provocation, a way to force Philbrick to kill him.

Legal Consequences and Institutionalization

The shooting did not kill Decker. He survived and was tried in Superior Court on August 27, 1976, convicted of the willful murder of Jean Alice Underwood and John Downes Vance. Five state psychiatrists determined that he could not be held accountable for his actions by reason of insanity. The court remanded him to Augusta State Hospital, where he would be held in treatment until certified responsible to answer for his acts. Decker's own gloss on the legal language was characteristically bitter: "In other words, until shit sticks on the moon, baby."

Thematic Significance: The Terminator Crossed

The shooting represents the final crossing of what Decker calls "the terminator"—the line between light and dark, sanity and madness. Throughout the narrative, Decker had described this boundary as the point where the universe's logic breaks down, where "life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch." By forcing Philbrick to shoot him, Decker completed his own trajectory from victim to perpetrator to sacrificial figure. The act mirrored his earlier confrontation with his father in the garage, where he had picked up a hatchet and said, "Take one step, and I'll cut your head off, if I can." In both cases, violence was the only language that seemed to resolve the impasse. But where the garage fight ended in a stalemate, the classroom shooting ended in Decker's institutionalization—a fate he had anticipated since the morning began.

The Unresolved Legacy

The shooting left Ted Jones in a catatonic state at Woodlands, where Dr. Andersen considered electroshock therapy and hallucinogenic drugs. Decker himself, in the final chapter, reports that he has not had bad dreams for two weeks, does jigsaw puzzles, and has a secret: he hates the custard they give him but eats it anyway, letting them think he likes it. "So I have a secret again," he writes. "Finally I have a secret again." The shooting, then, did not end the story but merely transferred it from the public stage of the classroom to the private one of the asylum, where Decker's rage has subsided into a quiet, custodial existence.