Class Action

by Lynn Rosellini

Six heroes are made as they throw everything they’ve got into protecting their teacher.

Debbie Shultz is the kind of teacher students love. At Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, Mrs. Shultz makes studying Spanish fun. To help students learn vocabulary, she cajoles them with clever rhymes and sayings—“memory jogs,” she calls them. To brighten the trailer that houses her classroom, she spray-painted the walls vivid blue, fuchsia and yellow, and edged the ceiling with tiny white Christmas lights. After class, she always has time to listen when the teens bend her ear about problems with girlfriends or boyfriends or Mom and Dad.

If the popular Spanish teacher ever had problems of her own—an emotionally troubled husband, an impending divorce—her sunny demeanor hid them well.

At 9:25 one morning last December, Shultz, 46, looked up from her desk and froze. The class had just completed its Spanish II final exam, and she was about to take the papers to the office. Then she noticed her estranged husband, Ted, 51, a stocky man with brown curly hair and wire-rimmed glasses, standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Shultz had taken out a restraining order against Ted the previous week, telling police he had been stalking her. Since their separation, Ted had attempted suicide. He’d also tried to buy a shotgun at a nearby Wal-Mart.

Debbie Shultz and her salvadores.

Now her husband of seven years removed a 12-inch butcher knife that had been hidden under his jean jacket. As students looked up, uncomprehending, Ted lunged for his wife, the knife pointed at her chest.

“Go get help!” she screamed. “Dial 911!” She grabbed her husband’s right arm and pushed his knife hand toward the floor. But it was too late. The blade slashed deep into her thigh, laying open her jeans, cutting through muscle and severing a vein. But Shultz kept struggling. The next swipe of the knife landed a gash nearly three inches long across her thumb.

Austin Hutchinson, 16, jumped to his feet. Around him, students were screaming and running from the classroom. Hutchinson, a bear of a boy at six feet, 215 pounds, hesitated. Should I run? No—I can’t just leave her! Scott Wigington, 17, a starting lineman for the Heritage High Patriots, was on his feet too. Son of the county sheriff, Wigington thought: I’m gonna save her!

Debbie Shultz was losing her grip on her husband’s hand. Ted would have the weapon free any minute.

In a blur of motion, Wigington grabbed Ted’s right arm. Hutchinson took his left side.

Then Nimesh Patel, 17, a slender, bookish boy who prefers science to sports, leapt on Ted’s back, grabbing desperately at the man’s collar. Together the three boys pulled him off their teacher, flung him against the wall and wrestled him to the floor. Three more boys piled on.

But Ted, a muscular five feet, ten inches and 190 pounds, was not about to give up. Gripping the knife, he struggled to get free. With a sudden burst of strength, Wigington bent Ted’s arm back, and then pried his fingers from the knife. He flung it toward the door, where another student, Matt Battaglia, scooped it up.

“Mrs. Shultz, get out!” Wigington yelled. But the teacher, bleeding profusely, refused to leave her students. “Not until help gets here,” she gasped.

Within moments, Capt. Ray Girardin, the school ROTC instructor, barged through the door and jumped on the pile, followed by the school security officer. The police soon arrived and arrested Ted Shultz, charging him with aggravated assault and stalking.

“An hour later, it hit me what actually happened,” said Patel. Like the other boys, he said instinct and adrenaline took over in the classroom fight, and he felt no fear. “But afterward, I was shaking.”

The next day, with her leg and thumb stitched, Debbie Shultz stopped at school. Although she had to lean heavily on a friend to walk, she hugged and thanked every one of her students. “I wanted them to see me in the flesh, smiling,” she said.

Her husband, Shultz explained, had recently checked into a psychiatric hospital in nearby Atlanta. Unknown to her, after a week in its alcohol detox program, he had walked out. She said that if Ted arrived 40 minutes later—when her class ended—she would have been alone in the classroom. “I’d probably be dead now,” she said.

After the incident, the six boys—Hutchinson, Wigington, Patel and Battaglia, as well as John Bailey, Jr., 16, and Andy Anderson, 17—were honored by the governor and the Georgia house of representatives.

As for their teacher, Debbie Shultz, she’s back in the classroom, once again using her favorite “memory jogs” to drill vocabulary words. The Spanish verb for “to help” is ayudar. “Help, help, are you there (a-yu-dar)?” she recites rhetorically to her students. On a chilly morning last December, their answer was: Absolutely.

Originally published in the April 2004 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

Ted Shultz served six-and-a-half years in prison for aggravated assault, cruelty to children and possession of a weapon at school. He was released in 2010 and now lives in Georgia.