She survived a school shooting. Now her children have, too

By Taylor Galgano, CNN

(CNN) — “Mom, there’s a shooter,” Michelle’s fifth grader said through the phone.

Something about her son’s serious tone was familiar.

“If you’ve ever gotten a call that a loved one passed away … that kind of tone,” Michelle explained.

She knew that tone.

The 40-year-old mother would later compare it to the sound of her principal’s voice echoing through the loudspeaker 25 years ago: “Lockdown! Lockdown!”

When she was in ninth grade, a former classmate opened fire at her high school in El Cajon, California.

Like then, she immediately knew in her gut the situation with her son was serious.

And Michelle was right. A former student had just shot through the glass doors of her son’s school, Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, and opened fire on a special needs classroom, killing a beloved teacher and three students.

CNN has agreed to withhold Michelle’s last name and the names of her family members for privacy concerns.

Michelle told her son she loved him, but that he needed to hang up immediately and remain quiet while she called 911.

As a school shooting survivor herself, she knew the importance of her son staying silent and not alerting the shooter to his location, she said.

Michelle immediately fled the Olive Garden where she and her mother had been eating lunch and called 911 as she ran, her mother trailing behind her. Emergency operators in Bend always answered immediately in her experience – but that didn’t happen this time.

“It was just ringing, ringing, ringing, and nobody was picking up,” she said.

No response breeds panic

Police cars and firetrucks crowded the streets as Michelle neared the school. Alarmed parents followed closely as she ran up to Silver Rail Elementary.

“What’s going on? Is someone hurt?” she frantically asked parents and police officers as she approached the front of the school. A police informed them the shooter was dead, though this offered little relief.

Michelle saw a kindergarten class sitting on the ground near the teacher’s parking lot. “They were all crying, which was really hard to see because they are tiny,” she said.

Even though she had heard from her fifth grader, Michelle’s mind raced with thoughts of her first-grade son who remained inside the school. She texted her first grader’s teacher, but did not receive a response, sending her “panic to 100.”

She had no other way to reach him.

Flashbacks from her own experience of the shooting at Granite Hills High School in 2001 crept into her thoughts, including brief recollections of the shooter, a boy she had sat next to in physics class. But these memories were quickly overtaken by the thoughts of her own children in their classrooms.

‘Were they safe?’ ‘What did they see?’ On a loop, her brain replayed ‘it was your kid’ who was shot.

Last Thursday “was just honestly the worst day of my life, much worse than when I actually went through it myself as a child,” she said.

At one point, she had to sit down on the pavement at her sons’ elementary school as she grew faint from the overwhelming emotions.

Lightning strikes twice

Michelle’s husband, alerted by her mother on the drive over from the restaurant, had also arrived at the school. The family was redirected to Journey Church, where authorities sent everyone to be reunited with their children.

As petrified parents filed into the warehouse-like church nestled in a strip mall and took seats on folding chairs, Michelle noticed a woman near the front, sitting alone.

The woman’s cell phone rang.

She answered the call, and soon broke down in tears, collapsing out of her chair. Other parents rushed to comfort her. Inferring what news the woman had likely learned on that call, Michelle stared at the dark screen of her own phone for the next three hours, praying it wouldn’t ring.

Later that day, a childhood friend reminded Michelle of her own reunification process decades earlier. After the SWAT team methodically cleared each room, she and her classmates were let out in a single-file line with their hands over their heads to a park where parents waited. All the kids around her were screaming “mom” and “dad,” so Michelle screamed her mother’s full name to stand out in the crowd and find her mom.

“How can lightning strike twice? How can I go through this and then my children go through this?” she asked.

Knowing her oldest was safe, Michelle texted her fifth grader to see if he had seen his little brother. Communicating through the tiny screen on his Apple watch, he said he had. Michelle asked her son again, to which he confirmed his brother was alive, but Michelle’s thoughts still spiraled.

“What if he saw a kid in a blue shirt and thought it was (him)? I was still worried,” she said.

Finally, after three grueling hours waiting in the church, Michelle was reunited with her two sons. Her oldest had heard the gun shots and the sound of people screaming in the school. As she picked him up and gave him a hug, the first thing he said, through tears, was “Mom, can I be homeschooled? I never want to go in that school again.”

Some hours after the shooting in the safety of their home, adrenaline waning, Michelle’s mother turned to her and said she better call the Olive Garden to pay the bill they ran out on.

“Mom, I think Olive Garden is gonna be OK,” replied Michelle.

Enduring trauma

Later that evening, Michelle spotted her 11-year-old on his iPad reading a news headline that several people had died at his school.

For the first time, she told her son about her own survival story.

“This happened to you?” he asked, his eyes wide, and wondered if anyone had died at her high school.

Three students and two teachers were wounded in the shooting at Granite Hills. No one died.

Michelle reassured her son, but he didn’t want to talk about the incident. She told him she would be there to talk when he was ready.

In 2001, Michelle remembers hiding under her desk and hearing helicopters circling over her school. After roughly an hour, when the shooting was believed to be over, but still locked down in their classroom, her teacher put on a movie to pass the time. It was “The Karate Kid.” Then, cell phones were rare among students. Michelle recalls her teacher letting students use his computer to email their parents while they waited.

During a work-related meeting this past Monday, Michelle kept thinking of the 18-year-old shooter from her high school. The recurring image of his face clouded her thoughts while she tried to focus.

For Michelle, the trauma of enduring a school shooting has meant never feeling safe in her school or in public spaces again, finding herself always looking for the nearest exit in case of emergency, and later developing panic attacks. Well before last week’s shooting, she said she got a pit in her stomach every time she dropped her children off at school, which she previously chalked up to anxiety and her own trauma.

“What if that was just intuition? And I think that’s probably pretty ridiculous. But like, I was just in shock,” she said.

Now her oldest son seems to be facing similar feelings of dread at the thought of public spaces. The Red Cross and other organizations held a gathering over the weekend for Silver Rail students and families.

“I don’t want to go because what if a terrorist comes and shoots us all?” her fifth-grader asked Michelle. They did not attend the event.

Avoiding the school

Michelle doesn’t see a path forward at the elementary school at this point and is seriously thinking about home schooling both of her boys, and says other parents are considering the same.

“I feel like it happened to me twice. Who’s to say it’s not going to happen a third time?” Michelle said.

In the week since the shooting, she now avoids driving near Silver Rail and opts for different roads instead. She did go to the makeshift memorial on Saturday to put down flowers but tried not to look too closely at the school.

She said seeing the building brought back flashbacks of the excruciating helplessness she felt running up to the school last week but not being allowed inside, which triggered memories of desperately searching for her own parents in a crowd in 2001.

Earlier this week, at a secure FBI location, Michelle retrieved the belongings her children left behind at the school. The process for picking up the items was very well-organized and offered comfort items like therapy dogs, stuffed animals and snacks. Michelle told the FBI agent that they didn’t have anything like this after her experience in a school shooting.

“And then (the agent) kind of said to me, ‘Unfortunately, we’ve had 25 years to perfect this process.’”

Baby steps forward

But her family is also taking small steps toward healing, each processing the incident in their own way.

On Sunday, Michelle invited a therapist to their home to chat with her boys.

With the therapist and his mom present, Michelle’s 11-year-old finally started to open up about some of the questions on his mind. “Why did this happen?” he asked.

He also wanted to know who the victims were. After they told him, he got his yearbook out and looked at their pictures and explained some of his memories with them. Then he sat in front of the TV, the yearbook still in his hands, for “quite a while,” Michelle said.

He left the house on Monday for the first time since the shooting to get his favorite ice cream.

Michelle’s husband visited the memorial Monday night, after the kids were asleep, and found himself praying and processing his own grief surrounding the tragedy.

The family has set up a “free toys and books” bin in their yard where neighborhood kids could grab sensory toys and books, with a friend ordering books tailored to help children process this kind of traumatic event.

Her youngest rode bikes with some friends in the neighborhood and asked his mom to schedule playdates.

Michelle is working to cope with the recurring US epidemic of gun violence on school campuses. In the meantime, she’s focused on reassuring her boys.

“I went through this. I’m OK. You’ll be OK,” she told them.

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