If I Don’t Make It, I Love You

THE LAST TIME I felt like I belonged anywhere was on the morning of December 1st, 1997. Before the shooting. I’m on the phone with Kelly Carneal Firesheets, the sister of Michael Carneal, the fifteen-year-old boy who shot and killed three students at Heath High School on that same morning. Michael is still alive and is in prison. Kelly tells me how teachers, parents, and counselors, never really knew how to classify her. The grown-ups whispered in the hallway, “What the hell do we do with Kelly?”

Kelly’s is a story of not belonging, but that’s not just her story. It seems like that idea, the not belonging, is Heath’s story. I was a junior in 1997, and I don’t remember hearing about the shooting at Heath High School. I confess that I, like many adults my age, always remembered Columbine as the first. I had no idea that while I was living out my teenage years in my corner of Pennsylvania, there was a growing trend of school shootings sweeping across the country. And I’m not the only one. In their extensive and well-respected database of research on school shootings, the Washington Post estimates that 220,000 students have experienced gun violence¹ at school since Columbine. Since Columbine.

There are hundreds of students, maybe thousands, not counted in those numbers, including those killed, those wounded, and those who live with the emotional scars of the shooting at Heath and the many shootings that came before. We’re not included in that number by the way. We’re culturally irrelevant in post-Columbine America, Kelly writes.

This idea is repeated in story after story in this chapter. Christina Hadley Ellegood, whose fourteen-year-old sister, Nicole, was murdered that day, remembers, Every time I went to a counselor, I was told they had no idea how to help me. There was no one else like me in America. I was the only person to survive a school shooting and lose a sibling in the same event. Contributors told me unbelievable stories of the students returning to school only twenty-four hours after the shooting. They called on the community to help clean the school, to scrub away the shooting.

Before Columbine, there was Heath. A tight-knit community who had to heal and survive a mass shooting with little or no assistance from the rest of the country. They found a way forward, together. Still, when I think of the systems and supports we have in place now: the readiness response, the protocols, the extensively trained first responders, the checklists of alarming behavior, the drills, the training, I can’t help but feel sad in some way. Is this the world my girls will grow up in? A world in which the best I can hope for is that they’ll be well taken care of after a mass shooting?

AMYE ARCHER

DECEMBER 2018

The following students were shot and killed at
Heath High School:

Nicole Hadley, 14

Jessica James, 17

Kayce Steger, 15

TERROR SPRINGS ETERNAL

By Hollan Holm

Hollan Holm was a fourteen-year-old freshman at the time of the shooting.

Our prayer group met that morning in the lobby of Heath High School before class started. We prayed and were headed back to class when I heard a series of pops, like a firecracker or a small balloon. I heard two—maybe three—pops and everything went black. I woke up lying facedown on the tile floor of the lobby.

I saw drops of a red liquid hitting the white tile in front of me and wondered if someone was pouring something on my head. When I touched the side of my head I pulled hand away and saw blood—my blood—and hair in my hand. I had the awful realization that I had been shot in the head. My gut churned, and I thought I was going to die.

My mind flashed back to news coverage of the 1991 Luby’s Cafeteria shooting in Texas that I remember watching on television. I was in third grade when that happened, but the stories about how those survivors played dead in order to avoid being killed came back to me in that lobby six years later. Afraid the shooter at Heath would shoot me again, I played dead, too. I said what I thought would be my final prayer: begging for forgiveness for whatever sins a fourteen-year-old can have and praying for blessings for my family.

Then I closed my eyes, slowed my breath, lay still, and waited to die.

I spent almost twenty years after I graduated from high school trying to put the aftermath behind me. Trying to run from it.

What we didn’t know over twenty years ago was that we couldn’t run away from it, couldn’t forget it. You can never put it behind you. No matter how much you want to. Because three months after Heath, there was Westside Middle School in Arkansas, and we saw the same kinds of images on the news that had been broadcast about our school. And then, five months after Heath, there was Thurston in Springfield, Oregon.

And the next year, despite how hopeful I was that we would get through just one school year without another shooting, with only a couple of months left in the school year there was Columbine. When we were out on our own as young adults there would be Virginia Tech. And by the time we were parents with young children, we would watch the coverage of the horror at Sandy Hook, learning a new way to be afraid and sickened.

Whenever there’s another shooting, I’m back there over twenty years ago, in the lobby of Heath High School. I’m fourteen years old again, and I’ve been shot. Terror springs eternal.

In December of 2017, I watched the coverage of the twenty-year anniversary memorial of the Heath shooting from a laptop in my kitchen and was overwhelmed at how little has changed in twenty years. My daughter had come home from school that fall, early on in her kindergarten year, and told me about a new safety drill she learned at school. One in which she and her classmates had to be quiet and hide in their classroom with the lights out from “the bad people.” An active shooter drill was now as commonplace as the tornado drills or a fire drills we had to practice in elementary school. Now two generations were living with gun violence in schools.

In January of 2018, there was the shooting at Marshall County High School. Not forty miles from Heath. The shock of it happening again, so close, and so similar to our trauma twenty years earlier wrecked me. I saw that same trauma echo across the faces and voices of my parents, friends, classmates, pastors, teachers, and first responders, and you realize how far the impact of one event ripples out. I heard stories of the impact of gun violence on my friends that I had never heard before. My gut churned again.

Like so many others from Heath and McCracken County we had lived these stories, felt this pain, and experienced these fears before, and we relive it every time there’s another shooting. And in the midst of all this, I got angry.

Angry that the only solution the party in control of our state and national governments offer to the problem of gun violence is thoughts and prayers—and more guns. Angry that the party in control of the levers of government at the federal level and in my state will not act on commonsense gun solutions to stop this horror show which now repeats day after day in grisly syndication.

I’m also outraged at the utter indecency of National Rifle Association (NRA) president Oliver North speaking at a fundraiser on August 3, 2018, not twenty miles from Benton, Kentucky, home of Marshall County High School. This was just six months after the shooting at Marshall, while the horror and the trauma were still fresh and raw for that community.

This was nothing short of a show of force, and it came as no surprise from an organization that once held its annual convention in Denver the day after Columbine families buried their children. At best, the decision to fund-raise off the NRA president’s words was tone-deaf in the extreme, at worst, it was a calculated attempt—an attempt to demonstrate to victims and their families who calls the shots in government in Kentucky.

The NRA is not interested in ending gun violence. The NRA uses fear of gun violence to help its most prominent donors, the gun manufacturers, sell more guns. The NRA then uses fear of gun safety reforms to help those manufacturers sell more guns and help firearms sales spike after major shootings. The only school safety reforms NRA-funded politicians will propose, like arming teachers in the classroom, are those that—you guessed it—sell more guns.

When the NRA’s only tool is fear, every problem starts to look like a target. The NRA wants to make a conversation about gun violence prevention a conversation about taking away guns. Gun violence prevention advocates don’t want to take away guns. We just don’t want your guns to take our lives or the lives of our children.

Gun violence prevention advocates have plenty of common ground with the NRA’s members. And together we can start by passing real, commonsense gun safety solutions.

We can start by strengthening and enforcing laws that keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, because 54 percent of mass shooters are linked to domestic or family violence.² Sixty-eight percent of NRA members believe people who’ve been arrested for domestic violence should NOT be granted concealed carry permits.³

We can start by requiring background checks for all gun sales because 34 percent of mass shooters were prohibited from owning or possessing a gun at the time of their shootings.⁴ Seventy-four percent of NRA members have supported background checks for all gun sales.⁵

We can start by requiring safe gun storage so our children can’t hurt themselves or others. Sixty-six percent of gun owners believe it’s essential to keep all of their guns in a locked place when there are children in their home.⁶

Universal checks for gun buyers, bans on sales to known or suspected terrorists, and a bar on gun sales to violent criminals, are all gun safety laws that experts rate as some of the most effective changes we can make to prevent mass shootings.⁷ All are supported by greater than eight in ten Americans.

Twenty years of gun violence in schools is twenty years too many. Mass shooter drills have now become as commonplace as tornado and fire drills. I will not accept this as the future for my children or any child.

We don’t have to accept this as the new normal. It’s not normal. It’s not okay. We need to remind our elected officials who they work for. It’s not the NRA. It’s not the gun lobby. It’s us: the voters. Their constituents.

Our legislators and politicians need to remember who we are: we are the students, teachers, and parents of this nation. We need to put them on notice that their thoughts and their prayers are not enough to stop the violence. We need action. And if they continue to ignore our voices, then it’s time for them to retire, or be retired by us at the ballot box.

THE NEW NORMAL

By Christina Hadley Ellegood

Christina Hadley Ellegood was a sophomore at the time of the shooting. Christina’s fourteen-year-old sister, Nicole Hadley, was killed that day.

I survived the school shooting at Heath High School, but lost my younger sister, Nicole. We were only nineteen months apart, fourteen and fifteen at the time of the shooting. It never occurred to me that morning would be the last time I’d see my sister alive.

My memory is foggy, but I do remember a panicked girl running up the stairs. She said someone had a gun. She pointed outside our window. I thought she meant someone brought a paintball gun and shot at a school bus. I don’t remember hearing screams or seeing people running from the school, but I was told later this happened. As I was looking out the window, the bell rang initiating the start of class. I said goodbye to my friends, still not concerned, and headed to class. I walked down the stairs where a large group of students had gathered. A friend of Nicole’s looked at me and said she thought Nicole was shot. I was confused. I calmly walked to my class, put my backpack down, and then walked to the lobby to see what was going on.

I saw a body in the lobby, and knew that person must be dead because of how they were laying. Then, two more people. I couldn’t see their faces, but knew they were seriously hurt. Then, I saw Nicole. She was lying on her back and not moving. She’d been shot in the head. I’m told there was a lot of blood around her, but I don’t remember. I do remember what the bullet hole looked like.

I also remember steeling myself for sobs and hysteria, but they never came. Instead, time stopped. I know I was the one who called my mom to tell her that her daughter, my sister, Nicole was shot, but I don’t remember how or when.

A friend took my mom, my brother, and myself as well as two friends to the hospital. My dad was in Nebraska on business. My mom called him before she left home to let him know that there was a shooting at the school, and that Nicole was injured. Even though I saw Nicole lying there, and I must’ve known she was gone, I was telling people I didn’t know if she would be okay. It was like if I didn’t say it, it wasn’t true.

At the hospital, we called my dad to tell him that Nicole was brain dead and would never recover from her injuries. I remember everyone being very calm. No one was crying, instead everyone sat stunned. My parents quickly decided they wanted to donate Nicole’s organs. Being an organ donor was something that was very important to my sister. It was something we had discussed as a family. I then asked if I could be the person to tell our friends, all of whom had been waiting in the emergency room reception for hours. I met them and said Nicole was brain dead and that my parents were going to donate her organs. They screamed and cried.

My sister was put on life support so the doctors could perform tests and line up the people who would receive her organs. Nicole was on life support until my dad arrived at the hospital. Throughout the day, the nurses and doctors went above and beyond to help all of the kids and parents that were in and out of Nicole’s room. I went into Nicole’s room a couple of times. She looked very peaceful, like she was sleeping. There was quiet. And then, she was gone.

At fifteen years old, I had no idea how much my life had changed. I had no idea that in the upcoming weeks, months, and even years, I’d have to learn to deal with the media, to share my grief with the world over losing my sister.

In the immediate aftermath, life was chaotic. There were reporters camped outside of our front door for weeks. Our phone rang nonstop from early in the morning to late at night. There were people coming in and out of our house all day. I returned to school a week after the shooting. I had my mind set that I was not going to let the shooting make me a different person. I felt the shooter took something away from me that couldn’t be replaced, so I wasn’t going to let him take away another second. I also felt I had to be there to support everyone. I was a happy person before that awful day. I was determined to stay that way.

The school shooting at Heath was the first to be broadcast around the world. It would be another year before the Columbine tragedy played out on live television. Our small community had no recovery plan, no easy path forward. There were no experts in the field of school shootings, no trauma response units or busloads of mental health experts coming to save us. We relied on one another, and we did what we thought was best. That’s why the school administration thought it would be best to have us return to school the very next day. Maybe they thought moving forward or getting back into a routine would help. It didn’t.

Shortly after Nicole’s death, my parents sent me to counseling. Every time I went to a counselor, I was told they had no idea how to help me. There was no one else like me in America. I was the only person to survive a school shooting and lose a sibling in the same event. I was living with the trauma of surviving a mass shooting, and mourning my sister. I was told I would go through the stages of grief. I was reluctant. I didn’t want to accept I would have to change my life or change who I was. Looking back, I do believe I went through those stages, but not how I thought I would.

When I was first told about the healing process and the stages of grief, I thought I’d quickly go through each stage, never having to deal with sadness and loss again. I was very wrong. I didn’t start to deal with the emotional impact of that morning until twelve years later. I finally realized I was not going to be a truly happy person until I dealt with the anger and sadness that built up inside. It took me several years to really start to get to a place where I felt like I had dealt with my feelings. There were times when I thought I’d moved on from one issue and it would come back. I dealt with many layers of emotions and feelings before I could heal.

Meanwhile, at school we didn’t talk about the shooting or what we were going through. Every day, we walked silently past reporters lining the school grounds. I completed my sophomore year at Heath and then the decision was made to have my brother and I attend a private school. There, I never talked about what happened at Heath. I made up my mind that I didn’t want people treating me differently because I lost my sister at Heath.

Another way in which Heath was different is that our shooter survived. Many school shooters and mass shooters end their lives by suicide. Our shooter didn’t. He was sentenced to prison with a chance of parole after twenty-five years. Knowing he could be released is scary.

The hardest part has been learning to forgive the shooter, because I didn’t feel like he was sorry for what he did. I’m still not convinced he feels remorse. For many years I told people I’d forgiven him, but I lied. I couldn’t. When I was finally able to forgive him, many, many years later, I felt at peace.

It’s now been twenty years since Nicole was killed. I’m very happy and live a blessed life. I’m married with two step-daughters. There are still times when my sister is greatly missed like at my wedding and my brother’s wedding. She missed being an aunt to my stepdaughters and my niece, who is named after Nicole. I know someday my brother and I will have to explain where her name came from and why it’s special. I look forward to that day.

In 2016, on the nineteenth anniversary of the shooting, Heath was back in the news regarding a memorial that was built for Nicole and the other victims. When the memorial was originally built, no one would’ve imagined that school shootings would plague our country. But they did. A few years after the memorial was built a fence was put up around the school for security. This made it very difficult for anyone to visit the memorial. Shortly after the anniversary, I was able to get the Board of Education to agree to build a new memorial, a project which I oversaw. The community came together with donations and support we were able to build a new memorial across the street from the school. The new memorial was dedicated on the twentieth anniversary of the shooting. I also organized the first memorial service of the shooting. There was a service followed by the dedication of the new memorial.

During the process of building the new memorial, people who survived the shooting at Heath finally started to talk about the shooting, and for a lot of people it was the first time they dealt with their trauma. Perhaps, the new space gave us permission to process what happened. Now, when people go to the memorial they talk about how peaceful they feel. And it makes me happy that I had some small part in that.

A LETTER TO THE HEATH HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 1998

By Kelly Carneal Firesheets

Kelly Carneal Firesheets was senior at Heath High School when her brother, Michael Carneal, opened fire on a group of students praying in the lobby of the school, killing three of Kelly’s friends and injuring several others.

Let’s put it out there. Senior year was a mess.

Most people get nervous about their high school reunion. I had permission to be extra ambivalent about it. The truth is, I felt weird about going back and seeing you. I remember you all so well. We were a few days away from finals, holiday break, and the second semester of our senior year. This was supposed to be the best times of our teenage lives. There would be prom, and graduation, and senior pranks. But then, my little brother brought a gun into our school and sent the entire world to hell in a handbasket. Our class was hit so hard. Jessica died. Shelley was gravely injured. I don’t know how many of you were there, but pretty much everyone was affected. And then there was me. I became known as “The Girl Whose Brother Shot People.”

The grown-ups whispered in the hallway, “What the hell do we do with Kelly?” But if you, my friends, my peers, didn’t know how to deal with me, you never let it show. You scraped me off the ground and dragged me to safety. You came to my house and sent me cards and flowers. You hugged me and you cried with me. You held my hand when I went back to school. But most importantly, you treated me like a normal person. You danced with me at prom, helped me learn lines for the senior play, and rehearse my graduation speech. You fought with me, laughed with me, and gossiped with me about who was kissing who. You loved me so well, and your love made me brave. It seemed normal then, didn’t it? The things we did seemed normal because they were the things we had to do. But we were just kids, and what we did was nothing short of heroic. We live in a flashy world, but your small and simple acts of love were the most heroic things.

The rest of the world hasn’t always been so kind to “The Girl Whose Brother Shot People,” and I don’t think I’ve really felt loved, or understood, or like I belonged anywhere in the twenty years since. The night before our twentieth reunion, I went to the school, sat on the sidewalk, and cried an ugly, heavy cry. I’ve never found a way to communicate the pain inside of me. That was the best I could do. My heart is still broken, and I needed to go home and grieve the fantasy that one day I will “be okay.” This will never be okay.

But twenty-four hours later, I stood in the middle of our high school reunion and cried happy tears. You’re so beautiful! You’ve turned out so well! And what a special gift to have so many of the most important people in my life in the same place at the same time. I looked at your faces, and was overwhelmed with how you greeted me with warmth and kindness (then and now). For a moment, I belonged. I know I’m a painful reminder of what happened, but somehow you still want me around.

Twenty years later, my heart is still broken. I’m afraid it always will be. But my life has been full of good stories, too, and a lot of that is because of you.

This would make a nice and tidy ending to my love letter, but I need to say some hard things to you. What my brother did twenty years ago was unimaginable. The world was shocked. No one knew what to do, what to think, or how to help us. But now I’m afraid it’s becoming normal. The Washington Post estimates that since 1999, more than 200,000 people have survived a school shooting.⁸ We’re not included in that number, by the way. We’re culturally irrelevant in post-Columbine America. But Heath High School became an archetype. Our story reads like the blueprint for so many other school shootings.

You know all those nameless students who run from their schools with their hands on their heads, traumatized, with tear-streaked faces? The world occasionally wonders what happens to them. We don’t wonder. Those students will grow up to become us. Many of them will face profound challenges. Some of them will have pain they can never quite articulate. But at the same time, most will turn out to be very normal, functional, and likeable adults. They’ll get married, have kids, get jobs, and pay taxes. Those 200,000 survivors are not doomed. But they have a long journey ahead of them, and no one knows that trail better than us. Because we blazed it. We’re the grown-ups now. We’re the seniors. The leaders. Everything we did was uncharted territory, but those 200,000 people walking behind will walk with a guide.

After our reunion, I had the privilege of meeting with five students from Marshall County High School. They’re smart and brave. They’re hurt and afraid, but they have a gritty determination that makes you want to stand up and cheer. Their stories and experiences are incredibly different from mine. But we are all survivors. They want someone to tell them it’s okay to feel and to hurt so much. They also need someone to tell them that life will move forward, that they have a future. They need to know their lives aren’t ruined, that this trauma may sometimes define them, but it will not own them. I used to pray that someone would come along and give me hope for the future. When I talked to those survivors, I realized I’ve become the answer to that very prayer. I’m the hope. I’m the future. But only if I show up.

The showing up is the hard thing, isn’t it? Most of us haven’t shared our stories, and I understand why. I’ve spent the past twenty years trying to be anything but—everything but—“The Girl Whose Brother Shot People.” I’d prefer to be invisible. I’ve hidden my story because I’m ashamed. I don’t want to be defined by the worst moment of my life. It’s something I couldn’t control. I know some of you feel that way. But I also know some of you don’t think you have a story to share. You’ve confessed to me you don’t think about the shooting anymore. To you, it was an upsetting thing that happened, but it doesn’t affect your life today. Let me give you permission to say that out loud. In fact, that may be the most important story of all. I will admit I feel a tinge of envy, but knowing you are okay gives me so much relief and happiness. Imagine what a gift that story would’ve been to your younger self, to know you’re not irreparably damaged, and that you’ll be okay, normal, even. Your stories are important, they are the road map for the 200,000 people desperately in need of a future and some hope.

I’m not here to tell you what to say. Only to ask you to use your voice. I know it’s awkward. This is hard, but trust me when I say that it is the good kind of hard, and it makes a difference. You matter so much. Your voice matters so much. And your love is a powerful, healing force. You’re the answer to so many prayers, especially mine. Thank you for being my friends, my heroes, and my home.

Much Love,

Kelly Carneal Firesheets

I’M DONE PICKING SIDES

By Sarah Stewart Holland

Sarah Stewart Holland was sixteen years old at the time of the shooting.

I was a sixteen-year-old junior when three of my fellow classmates were shot and killed in the hallway of my high school. Twenty years later, on January 23, 2018, I was a thirty-six-year-old mother of three watching the community I love go through the trauma of gun violence again after two students were killed in the hallway of Marshall County High School, located only thirty miles away from my alma mater.

Now, twenty years out, I have chosen to deal with this in what many might see as contradictory.

First, in the heavy days after the shooting at Marshall County, I helped start a local chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a nonpartisan grassroots movement of American mothers demanding new and stronger solutions to lax gun laws and loopholes that jeopardize the safety of our children and families.

But I didn’t want to stop there. I didn’t want to pick a side. I wanted to understand both sides better, so I also decided to learn more about those who value gun rights and I didn’t think I could do that by continuing to avoid guns. So, in the weeks after the shooting, I fired a gun for the first time in my life.

Unlike many people in this area, I didn’t grow up around guns. There were no guns in my home. No one in my family hunted. My entire childhood experience with guns was contained in the images I saw in television and movies, as well as the one time my cousin showed me the gun of a family member which I refused to touch.

All of that changed on December 1, 1997. Suddenly, a gun and the young boy who wielded it changed my life and the lives of everyone I knew. Guns were no longer neutral items that played little to no role in my day-to-day life. They were scary and powerful and the symbol of a controversial political debate I became well-versed in at a young age.

The tragic events at Columbine—a year after our own shooting at Heath—re-traumatized us and galvanized the nation. Suddenly, the debate surrounding access to guns and gun violence in schools was happening all over the country. I watched Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine. I traveled to Washington, D.C., with my mother, classmate, and her mother for the Million Mom March. I argued and debated the Second Amendment with my college classmates, law school classmates, and coworkers for most of my young adulthood.

At the time, as a young survivor of a school shooting, I believed that you had to pick a side. You were either with the NRA or against them. You were either for gun control or against it. You were either a gun nut or a someone who cared about kids.

So, I picked a side. I spouted the talking points and I watched nothing change except the increasing frequency and intensity of mass shootings.

However, some things did change. I changed.

I moved back to my hometown of Paducah, Kentucky, after almost a decade spent attending college and law school and working on Capitol Hill. I became a mother. I ran for office and won (and then lost). And I started a podcast, Pantsuit Politics, with a dear friend from the opposite side of the political spectrum. All those experiences taught me that no side holds a monopoly on good ideas, kindness, or patriotism.

So, when the events of January 23rd shook me to my core, I was ready to look at the issue with a very different perspective than I did twenty years ago.

I’m done picking sides. I don’t want to “win” an argument. I want to work for change. Moms Demand Action has given me a sense of hope that I haven’t felt in a very, very long time. Modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving the premise is very simple: it’s a marathon not a sprint. Our work is to raise awareness and effect legislative change supported by data. We support the Second Amendment and have no interest in shaming those who feel differently than we do about universal background checks and commonsense gun laws.

I’m also done being afraid of guns and living in ignorance about how they work. My work in this community and on my podcast has taught me that there are so rarely only two sides to a story and that no matter how right I think I am my perspective is limited. I have also learned that curiosity is rarely a bad thing. I decided I had been judgmental about those who owned guns but I had not been curious. Through the generosity and training of fellow gun owners, I am trying to transform my previous fear of guns into a healthy respect.

The worst part of January 23 was the feeling that nothing changed. Hopelessness in the face of trauma is the worst kind of pain. But I realize now that things have changed, and while I can’t control the future and I certainly can’t control other people, I can control myself.

I felt powerless after the events of December 1, 1997.

I don’t feel powerless anymore. There is no power in picking a side. There is tremendous power in learning everything you can about a situation you care about, embracing all perspectives, and doing your best to move forward.