Furtively, speaking in a whisper, a fourth-grade girl dialed the police. Around her, in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School, were the motionless bodies of her classmates and scores of spent bullet casings fired by a gunman who had already been inside the school for half an hour.
She whispered to a 911 operator, just after noon, that she was in the classroom with the gunman. She called back again. And again. “Please send the police now,” she begged.
But they were already there, waiting in a school hallway just outside. And they had been there for more than an hour.
The survivors will never be the same:
Noah Orona still had not cried.
The 10-year-old’s father, Oscar, couldn’t understand it. Just hours earlier, a stranger with a rifle had walked into the boy’s fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire, slaughtering his teachers and classmates in front of him. One round struck Noah in the shoulder blade, carving a 10-inch gash through his back before popping out and spraying his right arm with shrapnel. He’d laid amid the blood and bodies of his dead friends for an hour, maybe more, waiting for help to come.
But there he was, resting in his hospital bed, his brown eyes vacant, his voice muted.
“I think my clothes are ruined,” Noah lamented.
It was okay, his dad assured him. He would get new clothes.
“I don’t think I’m going to get to go back to school,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it,” his father insisted, squeezing his son’s left hand.
“I lost my glasses,” the boy continued. “I’m sorry.”
The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. Body counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.
Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings. There are the more than 360 kids and adults, including Noah, who have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.
No one understands that better than Samantha Haviland, who for years directed counseling services for Denver Public Schools. One day in 2008, she sat on the floor of a school library’s back room, the lights off, the door locked. Crouched all around her were teenagers pretending that someone with a gun was trying to murder them.
No one there knew that Haviland, then a counselor in her mid-20s, had survived Columbine nine years earlier.
On that day, April 20, 1999, Haviland ran from gunfire and heard some of it, too, but she didn’t get shot or see a bullet strike anyone else. The shock and grief solidified her plan to become a counselor, though Haviland didn’t get counseling herself for years.
The nightmares — always of being chased — lingered for years, but she didn’t think she deserved help, not when classmates had died, been maimed or had witnessed the carnage firsthand. She would be okay.
But now there she was, a decade later, sitting in the darkness, practicing once again to escape what so many of her friends had not. Then she heard footsteps and saw the shadow of an administrator checking the locks. Her chest began to throb, and suddenly, Haviland knew she wasn’t okay.
On Tuesday, Haviland did all she could to avoid the details of what had happened in Texas. She didn’t want to know. Years of therapy had helped, but the passage of time was no cure. On Wednesday, she turned 40.
This could be prevented. America just refuses to do it.