Court hears of student's death in stark detail

CAMBRIDGE -- The morning he allegedly stabbed a fellow pupil fatally, a Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student played a violent video game in which an animated character stalks a series of corridors to stab and shoot his victims, a prosecutor said yesterday.

A short time later, after arriving at school, 16-year-old John Odgren is said to have waited in an empty bathroom for a random victim of his own. Assistant District Attorney Daniel Bennett said Odgren left the restroom when no one entered and followed James Alenson, 15, into another restroom.

There, Bennett said, Odgren tried to slash Alenson's throat before repeatedly plunging a 13-inch carving knife into the 15-year-old freshman, a quiet student he had never met.

Seeking to show that the Jan. 19 slaying was premeditated, Assistant District Attorney Daniel Bennett said at Odgren's arraignment at Middlesex Superior Court that the teenager had visited numerous websites about knives on the night before the killing and had said goodbye to online friends in the week before the slaying. Odgren had also marked the day on his calendar with the word wolf, which the prosecutor said was a reference to the "Dark Tower" series by horror writer Stephen King.

In a notebook seized after the killing, Bennett said, Odgren had written: "If it looks like a murder, it was. If it looks like an accident, it wasn't."

Bennett also said Odgren had threatened other students several times since enrolling at Lincoln-Sudbury in September as part of a program to help special-needs students succeed in a mainstream setting.

Odgren once chased a student down a hallway with a sharp object, threatened to harm or kill other pupils, and spoke about committing a murder with a straight-edge knife, Bennett said in court documents released yesterday. On another occasion, Bennett said, Odgren waved a screwdriver at a student and said, "You wouldn't agitate me right now." Another time, Odgren told students he was a "trench-coat killer" and informed one he had decided not to kill that pupil.

Bennett did not provide further details about the allegations of prior threats. Defense attorney Jonathan Shapiro said that "most, if not all," of those allegations were untrue.

Lincoln-Sudbury principal John M. Ritchie could not be reached for comment yesterday, but school officials have said they did not know of prior threatening behavior.

Sudbury Police Chief Peter Fadgen said last week that Odgren brought a knife and toy gun to school on separate occasions last fall and that a school psychologist had confiscated them until the end of the class day.

Odgren was not disciplined, and Ritchie has said he was not informed of the incidents.

In an e-mail to parents yesterday afternoon, Ritchie said an investigation is continuing into why school administrators were not told about the knife and gun. "I will, to the best of my ability, and after our investigation, explain why it is the school policies and procedures regarding weapons possession were not, or certainly seem not, to have been followed," he wrote.

Ritchie also said he will tell parents this week about safety measures that the school has taken since the slaying. He included an advance copy of a letter he planned to mail today to parents and students.

"My paradigm is that we should treat the school as an airport," the letter says. "As you know, in an airport, there is absolutely no place for humorous or ironic comments about safety, bombs, weapons, or explosive devices. Any such comment is treated extremely seriously, not as a casual remark, and we must adopt the same approach here."

At the arraignment, Odgren, a sophomore from Princeton, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in a strong, clear voice. Odgren's parents sat quietly and stoically in the front row of the courtroom. Relatives of Alenson sat in another corner.

Judge Isaac Borenstein ordered Odgren, a special-needs student with a mild form of autism, to be held without bail but agreed to transfer him from a juvenile facility at the Plymouth House of Correction to a locked unit for juveniles at Westborough State Hospital, where Shapiro said his client can receive psychiatric treatment that is not available at Plymouth. Shapiro said Odgren had been on suicide watch for the past several days.

For the next 20 days, Odgren is to be evaluated for mental competence to stand trial.

Shapiro told the judge Bennett had prejudiced Odgren's ability to receive a fair trial with a lengthy recounting of the gruesome details of the slaying.

According to Bennett's account of the stabbing of Alenson, Odgren entered the school and waited in a bathroom that no one else entered for five minutes. He left, walked the school's corridors, and tracked Alenson into another bathroom.

There, he first tried to cut Alenson's throat, then stabbed him, cutting through the ribs and into a lung, thrust the knife into the stomach and liver, and finally drove it through Alenson's heart, Bennett said.

During the assault, Alenson said: "What are you doing? You are hurting me," according to Bennett. As Alenson stumbled out of the bathroom and collapsed, Odgren told another student to come out of a stall and get help, telling him, "Don't worry; I'm not going to hurt you," Bennett said.

When school officials converged on the scene, Bennett said, Odgren told them: "I did it. I don't know why. I just snapped."

He even tried to help crime scene officers, offering to hold a ruler as they took photographs and pointing to blood on Alenson's body and clothing. And when police read Odgren his Miranda rights, Bennett said, the suspect produced his own card listing a suspect's right to remain silent and have an attorney.

Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at macquarrie@globe.com.