Shrout said he got up at 5 a.m. armed himself with a .380 caliber pistol and walked into his parent’s bedroom. He shot his mother first, then his father. The noise brought Kristen to the doorway of her own room where she was also gunned down. Shrout didn’t say how he shot and killed his sister Lauren, but did say he shot his father a second time as he crawled toward the door of his bedroom. “He told me, ‘I wish it was a dream; I wish I could wake up,’ ” Brown said.
It was the murder of his family that sent Shrout to prison. The charges related to his actions at the school were dropped as part of a plea deal, a deal that Shrout accepted to avoid the death penalty. There was no trial. The judge declared he was guilty, but mentally ill.
Shrout never had to explain why he did what he did. The courts sealed his psychological evaluations. For Gale Sams Sipple, whose son attended Ryle at the same time as Shrout, the slaying of his family outweighs anything that happened at Ryle. She thinks Shrout should stay in jail.
“He has none of the things that parolees who are successful in re-entering life outside prison have; most importantly, a support system,” Sipple said. “He killed his support system that day in 1994.”