Seeking parole after 25 years in prison, Kentucky school shooter says he's still hearing voices like ones before the rampage

A Kentucky man who killed three students and wounded five more in a school shooting 25 years ago told a parole panel on Tuesday that he is still hearing voices like the ones that told him to steal a pistol and shoot into a crowded high school lobby in 1997.

The two-person panel hearing Michael Carneal's testimony deferred a decision until Monday, when the state's entire parole board will meet and could decide to grant his parole request, defer his next parole decision to a later date, or determine that he must spend the rest of his life in prison.

Carneal was a 14-year-old freshman on Dec. 1, 1997, when he fired the stolen pistol at a before-school prayer group in the lobby of Heath High School, near Paducah, Kentucky. School shootings were not yet a depressing part of the national consciousness, and Carneal was given the maximum sentence possible at the time for someone his age - life in prison with the possibility of parole. A quarter century later, in the shadow of Uvalde and in a nation disgusted by the carnage of mass shootings, Carneal, now 39, tried Tuesday to convince the parole panel he deserves to be freed.