Bath School Disaster: The Deadliest School Attack in American History

On the morning of May eighteenth, nineteen twenty-seven, the town of Bath Township, Michigan was changed forever by a crime so methodical and so terrible that it remains, nearly a century later, the deadliest mass murder at a school in American history.

The man responsible was Andrew Kehoe, fifty-five years old, a farmer and the elected treasurer of the Bath Township school board. Kehoe had spent the previous year acquiring and secretly hiding hundreds of pounds of dynamite and the World War One explosive pyrotol beneath the floors of Bath Consolidated School, working during odd hours when the building was empty, making his preparations with the patience of someone who believed he had an argument to make and had chosen the most monstrous possible way to make it. His stated grievances were taxes, specifically the school property taxes that had risen as rural townships consolidated their one-room schoolhouses into a central building. Kehoe had run for township clerk in nineteen twenty-six and lost. He had also learned his farm faced foreclosure.

At nine forty-five in the morning, as students sat in their classrooms, the explosives detonated. Part of the school's north wing collapsed. Children and teachers were buried in the rubble. Rescuers rushed to the scene. Then Kehoe drove his truck, also packed with explosives and metal shrapnel, onto the school grounds, called the superintendent over, and detonated that charge as well, killing himself and several rescuers. A second unexploded cache was found beneath another wing of the school. Had it detonated, the death toll would have been catastrophic.

Thirty-eight children died. Six adults died, including Kehoe. Fifty-eight people were injured severely enough to require hospitalization. The town of Bath was under eight hundred people. Almost no family was untouched. The sign Kehoe had wired to his farm fence before he drove away read: Criminals are made, not born.