The Deadliest School Attack in U.S. History Happened in 1927

Spring flowers were blooming along the roadsides and farmlands of rural Bath, Mich., on the morning of May 18, 1927. The day dawned clear and mild, and as the children attending Bath Consolidated School arrived, thoughts drifted toward their upcoming summer vacation. 

But within an hour, their school would become a scene of horrific carnage as one disturbed man’s act of revenge took the lives of dozens of school kids, teachers and bystanders. The Bath school disaster—though it’s not widely known today—remains the single deadliest attack on a school in U.S. history. 

The township of Bath, located about 10 miles northeast of Lansing, was home to about 300 people at the time, consisting of tightly knit families and a handful of shops and small businesses. 

In 1919, Andrew Kehoe and his wife Nellie moved onto a farmstead on the outskirts of Bath. An indifferent farmer who was college-educated in electrical engineering, Kehoe spent many hours tinkering with farm equipment and other machinery. 

He was generally regarded as a quiet, helpful neighbor, but soon developed a reputation for also being short tempered, stubborn and vindictive. Kehoe was also suspected of needlessly killing animals, including one of his overworked horses and a neighbor’s dog. 

A notorious skinflint, Kehoe once ordered a priest from his local Catholic church off his property when the clergyman requested a donation to pay for a new sanctuary; Kehoe never again attended services at the church. Despite these traits—or because of them—he was elected treasurer of the Bath Consolidated School board in 1924, where voters hoped he would use his penny-pinching ways to bring some fiscal discipline to the school’s finances. 

Kehoe did exactly that, even cutting the vacation time for school Superintendent Emory Huyck from two weeks down to just one week. Kehoe also managed many maintenance tasks on the school building, where he worked for hours on the school’s plumbing, heating and electrical systems. But his irascible, headstrong manner soon alienated many members of the school board, including Huyck, and a rift soon developed between the two men. 

Kehoe’s obsession with machinery and electronics may have come in handy when working in his barn or the basement of the school, but it didn’t help when the time came to raise crops, and his harvests sometimes rotted in the field. The bank holding Kehoe’s farm’s mortgage began foreclosure proceedings. 

Another problem arose in 1926 when Kehoe’s wife was diagnosed with a respiratory condition (either asthma or tuberculosis), causing her to spend many weeks at a hospital in Lansing while her husband was alone at home. As the farm slowly fell into disrepair, neighbors noticed that Kehoe continued to putter around the barn, laying electric wires connecting the barn to his house. 

Despite his private woes, Kehoe continued to attend school board meetings and worked for hours in the basement of the school building. Only later would the sinister nature of his mad tinkering become apparent. 

On the morning of May 18, 1927, at around 8:45 a.m., a powerful “boom” ripped through the warm springtime air of Bath. For miles around, buildings rocked on their foundations, windows shattered and people screamed in fright. The fruits of Kehoe’s labor were now evident: The two-story school building, filled with schoolchildren, had blown up because Kehoe had, over a period of several months, secretly filled the basement with dynamite and surplus explosives rigged to timed detonators. 

The explosion caused the roof and second story to collapse onto the first story, crushing almost everything in the north wing of the building. The south wing of the building also sustained structural damage, but it was the human toll of the explosion that left rescuers—some of whom had seen ghastly violence in World War I—sickened beyond comprehension. 

Children as young as 7 years old were blasted through the air; some were tossed out of windows or holes in the walls, while others landed in the smoldering rubble of the first floor. All around the schoolyard, severed limbs and other body parts were strewn among the shattered brick and broken timbers of the school.

Word spread quickly throughout Bath, and horrified citizens drove or ran to the school. Many had children attending the school, and men from the local electric utility Consumers Power Company leaped into action, but there was a limit to what they, or anyone, could do to help.

In the book Bath Massacre: America’s First School Bombing, author Arnie Bernstein describes a particularly gruesome detail: “One little girl’s body was suspended by her heels from a second story window, limp and torn like a discarded rag doll. Doris Johns, dead at age seven, hung upside down in plain view.” 

As rescuers struggled desperately to pull survivors from the wreckage, the corpse of Doris Johns hung over the scene—that her mother watched in agony—until someone found a ladder tall enough to free the girl’s limp body from the window. Investigators later found that Kehoe had also planted explosives under the south wing of the school; if those explosives had detonated, the entire school would have been destroyed and many more deaths would have occurred. 

While pandemonium raged in the village of Bath, another scene of shocking destruction unfolded at the Kehoe farmstead. At around 8:45—the same time as the school bombing—a series of explosions shook the earth around the Kehoe home. 

Within minutes, the farmhouse and barn were engulfed in flames. A number of explosions occurred as neighbors, searching for Nellie and her husband, tried to save whatever they could from the flames. But their efforts were largely futile: As Bernstein writes, “Kehoe’s two horses … were burned through to their skeletons. Their feet were bound with wires, effectively preventing the animals from escaping.”

The entire farmstead was soon a smoldering ruin. But as shocking as these events were, Kehoe’s final sadistic act hadn't yet occurred. He was on his way to the now-ruined school, where rescuers were working feverishly to save children from death, driving his truck laden with dynamite and shrapnel. 

Superintendent Huyck was on the scene at the school, assisting with wounded survivors and the bodies of dead children and teachers, when Kehoe pulled up in his truck. He called Huyck over to his truck, then detonated the dynamite in his truck, causing another deafening explosion that immediately killed Huyck, Kehoe and several children and rescuers.

Rescue efforts continued until every possible survivor was accounted for. The final death toll from the Bath school disaster was 45 people: 38 children and seven adults, including Kehoe. About 58 people sustained injuries severe enough to require medical attention or hospitalization in nearby Lansing.

Nellie’s burned corpse was eventually found in an old cart at the farmstead. She had been murdered by her husband and had several broken bones including a cracked skull; it was unclear if she was dead at the time her body was burned. A hand-painted wooden sign was later found on a fence post on the Kehoe property with a chilling message: “CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.”

Relief efforts poured in from every corner of the country as the nightmarish story of the Bath disaster was headline news nationwide—for only a few days. On May 21, Charles Lindbergh successfully flew across the Atlantic and landed in Paris; that happy news quickly pulled the nation’s consciousness away from the gruesome massacre in Bath. 

Residents of the Bath area honored the dead and the survivors with a memorial park built on the former grounds of the Bath Consolidated School. A prominent feature of the park is the cupola that once crowned the building; it somehow survived the bombings. There are plans to build a new museum in Bath that will offer more exhibits and artifacts than those currently on display in a Bath middle school.

Outside of Michigan, the Bath school disaster remains a little-known tragedy. While that’s partly due to news of the small town’s massacre fading quickly from headlines, it’s also due to the horror of the event, which left many survivors too traumatized to speak of it. 

Johanna Cushman-Balzer, the daughter of a survivor, struggled to understand why so many people in Bath were maimed or scarred. "As a curious child, you might ask, 'What happened to that person, why did they have that bad scar?'" she told NPR. "And [the answer] was always that they had gotten it at the Bath school disaster. So you just didn't ask questions."

Echoes of the Bath school disaster are heard each time a school shooting occurs. Bernstein recounts how Seung-Hui Cho—perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shooting that killed 32 people—declared in a video sent to NBC News that killers "are made, forced into desperate acts by others, not born.” The message came frightening close to the one Kehoe posted on a sign before his own demise.