My story with gun violence isn’t graphic or disturbing. It’s partly unsettling but not a survival story. However, this shows how much anxiety and fear can impact you, even if you’re not really close to the situation.
About two years ago, I was participating in a Black History Month play. The energy was so vivid, and everyone was having a great time. It was a beautiful day, and once the play had ended, everyone was eager to get outside. But then everyone got the alert.
There was a school shooter at McEachern High School. The security guards had locked down the entire building and wouldn’t let anyone go outside. We were about 1.5 miles from the school, so people were definitely nervous.
My mom turned on some dance music to try to distract people from what was happening, but the mood had switched. My friends and I had gone to a different part of the building, and it was just dead silence.
We were right next to a construction zone, and it was so unnervingly quiet. No cars were driving past. No birds were flying by. There wasn’t any normal background noise — just silence.
What should’ve been 30 minutes packing up and leaving turned into 3 hours of staying in the building. When my family and I finally left, we went to a restaurant for dinner. While waiting for the food, my dad showed me the video of a student recording the shooting.
Two non-McEachern teens had walked into the campus, got into an argument with a student, and opened fire on him. Another student had been shot, too. They then escaped the scene. It scared me that, with all the security the school had, people were still able to walk right in and wreak havoc without the security guards even being there.
I had nightmares about the situation, and I was so petrified about it happening to me. I was only 12, and yet so many kids and teens were dying from getting shot. I had just learned about school shootings 2 years ago when the Uvalde school shooting happened.
