“We found Daryl first,” Carli testified. The dealer was in one of the clearings, angry because he was cold and that the students were by then a half-hour late. The deal couldn’t be completed yet, though, because Travis had the money. Carli called him and told him where they were. He said he’d be there in five minutes.

At that moment Frank Sterling had a panic attack, which wasn’t uncommon when the boy was in stressful situations. He began screaming and grappling with Michael and the dealer, who shoved him away and stepped back, shouting for them to calm down, which only made Frank more upset. That’s when there was a gunshot from the trees and Williams dropped to the ground. The two students, Carli and Michael, fled, leaving Frank curled in a ball, still hysterical, staring at the dealer’s body and screaming.

A few minutes later, Michael crept past the clearing again, looking for Erik and Travis. As he did, he saw Jude holding the gun. Michael found the two other students and they hurried to the car—it was Michael’s—and left. Travis and Erik had seen nothing. They were near the two-hundred-foot-deep quarry pit itself, which wasn’t fenced, and were walking carefully, paying attention to where they stepped.

Jude Sterling’s account was this:

After he arrived at the quarry he drove over the truck paths until he noticed a car. He drove to it and parked. The car was a Subaru Outback, Williams’s. He saw no one inside the vehicle. After walking the grounds for about five minutes he heard voices in a clearing thirty or so yards away. Jude started in that direction. A moment later he heard screaming—his brother. Then he heard the gunshot. Panicked, he ran toward the sound. On a path that led into the clearing, he found the pistol on the ground and picked it up.

“I, like, didn’t know what was going on. Maybe somebody else had a gun.” He didn’t see anyone else around him, though that would have been difficult, as the woods were quite dense in that spot.

In the clearing, Jude was shocked to see Williams lying there, he said, but concentrated on calming Frank down. He was about to leave but he rummaged through the dealer’s pockets and took a half-dozen bags of marijuana and four hundred dollars in cash. “I shouldn’t’ve, I know. I just, I was pissed Frank was upset and I didn’t want those assholes from the school to get the weed and the money.”

He and his brother returned to the pickup and drove home. On the way he told Frank not to say anything to their parents about what had happened. The brother said he wouldn’t.