NATURAL DISASTERS CAN PRODUCE A POWERFUL EUPHORIA. NEIGHBORS ON the outs, religious factions, and political antagonists set their differences aside and come together in a burst of unity. Initially, that is exactly what happened in the wake of these shootings.1 But it didn’t last. If the first fissures broke open over questions of blame and forgiveness, chasms later developed as both communities grappled with the problem of healing. Jonesboro Family Life minister Ron Deal compared the aftermath of the shootings to an earthquake, with many concentric circles around the epicenter representing the different rates at which people would heal. After the initial period of common shock and grief, neighbors recovered differently, creating yet one more fault line for conflict. How much support and attention did the peripherally affected owe to those who were at the epicenter? How fast should victim families be expected to recover? Agreement proved hard to achieve and feelings hardened. In these small towns, where one cannot avoid the neighbors for long, people who expected sympathy discovered that friends were ducking their company, avoiding the subject.
Not recognizing the differential rates of healing, each side thought the other was wrong—or worse, that they were “damaged goods.”The emotional needs of some placed them in direct opposition to the well-being of others. How close people were to the epicenter of the shooting created tension when others further removed tried to claim that they, too, had been damaged.Who had the right to claim true victim status? Rampage school shootings produced divisions reminiscent of the gaps that opened up among residents of Oklahoma City in the wake of the 1995 bombing of the federal building.2 Survivors of terrorism who failed to “get over it” were thought to have a mental illness, victims of posttraumatic stress disorder.
Yet in this divisive environment, decisions had to be made that would affect the whole community. How should counseling be handled? How should donations be distributed? How should the victims’ memories be honored? Public officials and charity directors were inevitably caught in the middle, unable to please everyone and fearful of causing harm to someone at every turn.
Raw emotion flowed through both towns for many weeks after the shootings. Numbness, disbelief, anguish, anger, and loving affection jumbled together on the sidewalks, in classrooms, across store counters, behind the polished desks of law firms, and inside the homes of countless families. Grim survivors of a terrible ordeal, residents turned to one another for solace. Ironically, some felt that they had never experienced such a closeness before in their lives.A Paducah pastor compared the sentiment in town to the solidarity he remembered during the Second World War.
In the days after the shooting at Westside, the entire Jonesboro area stood together as well. People worked together toward recovery, as they had in the wake of tornadoes that leveled the town about thirty years earlier, one of which killed more than forty people. Before the shooting, ministerial groups in Jonesboro were at loggerheads with one another over whether the county should remain “dry” or allow the sale of alcohol. It was a tense period, with open conflicts between denominations. In the wake of the shooting, the major antagonists put their differences aside and formed a Ministerial Alliance that was responsible for organizing a memorial at the Arkansas State University’s Convocation Center.A moment of true unity, the service symbolized their ability to grow stronger and closer in the wake of tragedy.
Community members also had a new enemy in common: the media. Seventy U.S. and foreign news organizations sent more than 200 reporters, photographers, and support personnel to cover the shooting in Westside.Out-of-town reporters began arriving at the school within ninety minutes of the first report of the shooting, and by the following morning, fifty satellite trucks and camera crews, including international representatives from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan occupied the school grounds.3 In Paducah, national media outlets, in fierce competition with one another, staked out the school, the local barbecue, and the courthouse.
The media besieged both towns, disrupting daily life, straining the nerves of residents already fraught by shock and grief. Sam Cartright, who manages a small bank in Jonesboro, said, “It was overwhelming.” “To become the center of the world in Jonesboro, Arkansas, overnight was really difficult for us. . . . It caused a little bit of a feeding frenzy.”
Even worse than the sheer size of the press corps was their aggressive behavior. Just when families most needed privacy, cameras followed them home, reporters pretended to be close relatives in order to get into victims’ hospital rooms, and children were waylaid by journalists scrambling for emotional, on-camera interviews without parental consent. One Heath student described how a reporter chased him all over the school grounds:
Me and my friends were sitting outside, at the back of the gym, . . . and a news reporter showed up in one of the big vans with the camera and jumped out, trying to get us interviewed on tape.We were like, “No, we don’t want to talk, leave us alone,” and we started walking away. He called [after] us about some questions, until finally we ended up . . . running around the front of the gym, trying to get into the school [to find] the security guard, [who] stopped them. . . . Obviously they were doing what they had to do, but . . . they were harassing people because they want to have their story. They just want some thirteen- or twelve-year-old kid who just saw someone shot . . . Have some respect!
Banding together against these invaders, both communities drew distinctions between insiders and outsiders. Members of the community were seen as sharing a common experience. Even the local media personnel, unlike the national and international reporters, were accepted as allies rather than foes in this battle. Communal solidarity strengthened in the face of this external force.
Aspects of teen culture changed for the better. Football players and band members, geeks and Goths, all had something in common, perhaps for the first time since they hit adolescence. Barriers between them broke down as students offered sympathy and support to one another. “From a student’s perspective,” Chris Jackson recalled, “[life] has changed for the better.”
People talk to each other more.They’re more in synch. . . . Before this, . . . people weren’t supportive. But now . . . we’re like people grown up. . . . Like if something bad happens, then [kids] talk to each other and they support each other. Before [the shooting], we never really cared about nobody else. So we have changed for the better.
A Heath student, Albert Fisher, saw the same solidarity break down the walls that had separated cliques.
When I was in sixth [grade] there used to be like a lot of little groups together. . . . After the shooting, . . . everybody just kind of sat down and everybody gets along now. . . . I wouldn’t say there was much problem with groups nowadays like there used to be. . . . Like it’s a totally different school.
Initial media accounts placed the blame on bullying, which increased students’ feelings of guilt about their role in pushing the shooters toward mounting a rampage. The potential truth in that observation led students to work overtime to cut back on the harassment. Heath students, such as Rick Bowman, a senior, told us that fighting declined considerably. In the few months before the shooting, there was a fistfight about once a month; in the four years after the shooting, though, he estimated that a little more than one fight per year occurred. “People learned that if you’ve got a problem you can talk about it,” Rick explained. “You don’t have to keep everything in. Everyone has the same problems. . . . It’s better to go through it together than to just trying to go it alone.”
It didn’t last. As time passed, the atmosphere returned to normal and the good graces in which jocks and geeks held each other faded away. “People still make fun of other people,” Elaine Johnson, a Heath sophomore commented. “Kids put them down to make themselves feel better.”
It might have changed for a little, while but it’s back. . . . If somebody is a little clumsy and, like, drops their books on the floor, people aren’t . . . as mean as they were in middle school. . . . But they’ll still talk about each other behind their backs and make fun of people. Not in front of them.
Adolescent life may have been affected for the specific students who lived through the shooting, but enduring change is another story.
Community cohesion seems to have been short-lived as well. Even the Ministerial Alliance, a beacon of unity, tarnished as neighbors realized that the previous conflicts had been put aside but not forgotten. “It was, like, come on, can’t we just get along?” said one Jonesboro youth minister. “And all of a sudden, we’re together.We’re not together. No values changed, no convictions changed. Those things did not disappear when a bullet flies through the air.” A similar fate awaited Columbine. Tom Galland, a senior pastor in Jonesboro, described an interaction he had with a minister in Littleton, Colorado, who called him for advice after their shooting. Galland told the Littleton minister that for a period after the shooting, it would feel like everyone was coming together and people were very caring, but it would be false. Everything would fall apart and it would turn ugly. Six months later, the minister from Littleton called him back and told him, “Have you heard? It’s just like you said.We had a false sense of cohesion and togetherness, and now everyone is suing each other.”
Why did the togetherness fade? Old sources of friction, which predated the shooting, became sharper under the stress. Class conflicts that were already present in these communities were given new, dark meanings, driving wedges into cracks that already showed on the surface. The rampage created entirely new sources of division in the community as well. How people dealt with the shooting drove them into different emotional camps. Differing views of who was most affected spurred territorial battles over ownership of the tragedy.
Family Life Minister Ron Deal caught the dimensions of the aftermath with tremendous accuracy in his earthquake analogy.
Those closest to the epicenter . . . are going to be the ones who have the greatest psychological, emotional, social impact on their life. . . . Everything has been destroyed; all they have is rubble and ashes. . . . The trauma, the shock, once you get past that, then you still have to figure out how to go back in your house every day knowing “my daughter’s not going to be there.” And just living with that reality is just terrible. . . . The further you get away from the epicenter, the less impact there is. “Severe damage”: most everything destroyed, some things are salvageable, so the house is gone but the garage is still there.They’ve got something. “Partial damage”: the foundation’s been shook, there’s a few cracked walls, so they’ve definitely felt it and boy was that weird and, okay I think we’re going to be all right. . . . “Shaken, not stirred,” felt the ground move, but they’re back to life.
For those at the epicenter,moving on is exceedingly difficult.Their lives have been completely torn apart, and they seem unable to pick up the pieces. Denise Simpson, a Westside administrator, has been burdened by a heavy sense of responsibility, an inability to reach out to others, and exhaustion with the traumas that others lay at her feet, fairly or not. It was hard for her to talk about the shooting at all, but when she did, a dam of emotion broke open. “It’s been a life-changing event,” she said with a heavy sadness in her voice, “I feel like I’ve aged ten years.”
The “ongoingness” of it is unbelievable. It was such a tragedy. A car accident, you have a wreck and someone will get killed and that was a very tough thing to go through, but eventually, over the years, time seems to come to heal those things. This one was not healing. This is just continuous. . . . There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Those closest to the shootings continue to suffer from nightmares or panic attacks. Children startle at loud noises. “We went to a Christian music concert,” a Paducah pastor mentioned, “and of course they bounce balloons back and forth.”
And somebody popped a balloon. And all of our kids started ducking, because that’s what it sounded like to them. And that was months after the shooting.
Westside children know exactly what he means. One of their teachers recalled a softball trip that students from Westside and a neighboring school, Middleton, took to Little Rock, Arkansas:
All the girls had been in seventh grade that year [of the shooting] . . . And a car had backfired and all the Westside girls got down. And the Middleton girls are sitting there looking at us, kind of crazy, but that was just our reaction . . . and we all started crying.
Many children are still in counseling several years after the shooting.
Teachers at the epicenter have been severely traumatized; even the simplest acts force them to relive painful memories.Watching movies with guns, violence, or death reminds them of what they went through. Jane Holden, a Westside Middle School teacher, was unable to continue her duties as a history teacher because she got too upset when the subject of the world wars came up; she is now a reading teacher instead. Some teachers find themselves becoming hysterical during routine fire drills. When they visit churches, walk down hallways, or enter auditoriums, they check for the exits and think about what they will do if someone starts shooting. On occasion, teacher Mary Curtis looks down the hallway of the middle school and still sees the blood on the floor.
Emotional problems led to illness as well. The Westside staff has seen some of its youngest members become quite sick or pass away. One person had an aneurysm; another—only forty years old—was diagnosed with cancer. Although these unfortunate cases might have come about anyway, teachers are of the opinion that the stress of the shooting was responsible. Burdens of this kind took their toll on the personal lives of teachers. Some marriages broke up, and other people rushed to marry for the emotional support, only to divorce shortly afterward.
The shooters and their families were caught in the middle of this earthquake, too. As much as anyone, their lives have been turned upside down.The experience was particularly hard on Monte Johnson, Mitchell’s younger brother. Gretchen had always known that the two boys were close and that Mitchell was protective of Monte, and suddenly that rock, that shield, had disappeared. “The first month was a living hell,” Gretchen recalled, sitting at her kitchen table, staring out the sliding door to the backyard. “The police wouldn’t let us touch anything in [Mitchell’s] room.”
Things had been scattered, but it was just that part of Mitch that was still there. . . .We couldn’t let loose of it yet. . . . After three weeks I looked at Terry and I said, “You know, I really think in my heart [we have to get back to] normal for the rest of the family. . . .
So I said to Terry [that Monte] doesn’t make his bed. I [told Monte “Look, the least you] can do is make the bed.” [Monte] give me this kind of funny look and didn’t say much of anything.Well, three days had gone by and his bed hadn’t been made, and so I had to call him on it. . . .
He got this sheepish god-awful look on his face, and he looked down on the floor, and he looked at me all apologetic, and he [whispers]: “I don’t know how to make my bed” . . . I said, “Monte, you’ve been making your bed since you were five years old.What do you mean you don’t know how to?” And [he said, “Mitch has been doing it for me] like that.”
Monte was scared to return to school after the shooting. Although many people went out of their way to welcome him back, his life at Westside would never be the same. Jane Holden had him in her class, and the resemblance between the two brothers made her squirm inside.
They said he was loud and wasn’t quite as polite as what Mitchell was, but just looking at his hands and knowing that the same hands exactly like that were the ones that shot Shannon and killed her, and then seeing him walk down the hall because he’s very similar in build and the way he walks to Mitchell.We got along fine, but I was always nervous about him.What if? What if?
Monte has since moved away to Minnesota to live with his father.4
Andrew’s parents, Dennis and Pat Golden, have also moved out of town, to another community in Arkansas, where they still work for the postal service. They lost many of their lifelong friends as a result of their son’s rampage shooting. Some describe the atmosphere after the shooting as so tense that some people were nervous about what kind of message being friendly to the Goldens would send to others. Ironically, those who were wounded or lost a relative were immune to criticism if they extended a hand to the Goldens. For everyone else, the rules were unclear.Was being civil to the Goldens betraying the victims?
For those nearest the epicenter, life will never be the same. But for others who were further out on the fringes of the event, life goes on, and getting beyond the tragedy is a natural evolution.5 If healing were a purely private matter, this would not be problematic—but because there is a public element to the process, it is.Those who were badly damaged need the support of everyone around them, while those on the periphery cannot fathom why these neighbors are burnishing this awful memory. “At first [the community] lifted us up and held onto us,” Jane Holden, a Westside teacher, confided. “Now they got tired of hearing about it before we got tired of talking about it.”
The kids and the teachers needed to keep talking, because we were so hurt. But the people on the outside . . . didn’t want to talk about it, and so we ended up having to talk to each other [instead].
As the wider community retreats from the healing process, suspicion grows that there is something profoundly “wrong” with the people who are stuck, like broken records, rehearsing the shooting, month after month.To be thought of as a little unbalanced is hardly what the victims of the shooting need.Yet teacher Julia Sampson found, to her dismay, that she was being asked to smother her emotions in order to get along with her neighbors:
I don’t want to talk about it in gory details, but . . . I have flashbacks of the ambulances.When I heard the sirens . . . north of town last year and I fell apart, I want people to understand. . . . I’m not ready for [my friends] to forget . . . [because] I need to talk about it. . . . 6
The same disjuncture undid some of the victim families as well. Suzann Wilson lost her daughter, Britthney Varner, in the Westside shooting, and found herself divorced not long afterward. Speaking with newspaper reporters in Jonesboro on the five-year anniversary of the shooting, she explained that she and her husband simply couldn’t adjust to one another’s approach to grief. “He didn’t want to talk about it.That was his way of handling it.We stopped talking about everything. The house changed. It became empty. I stopped cooking and we didn’t eat together, and the house became a prison.” People in town “wanted to get on with their life,” she noted. “I wanted to dwell on my loss.”
Jonesboro residents find they have to tiptoe around trying to anticipate how the person on the other side of the table will react to a show of emotion. “You don’t want to bring it out unless you’re sure the person you are talking with wants to hear it,” Betsey Woods, a Jonesboro counselor, said. She needs to be sure that her conversation partners won’t think poorly of her.
The social norm is you don’t [talk about the shooting]. Or if you [do, you] get an attitude from people like, “What’s the matter with you? Why are you still talking about it?”
Those who lost their children, who desperately needed to be embraced by the community, found themselves losing again as the initial period of sympathy and support came to a close. “The people I work with avoid me because they don’t want to talk to me about it,” said the mother of one of the victims. “It’s almost like I have a contagious disease.”7
Support networks atrophy under these conditions. Beverly Ashford developed a friendship with a fellow teacher at Columbine High School by mail after the Littleton disaster. She is the only person Beverly can talk to, since no one else in her community can bear to hear it again.
We talked last night for about three hours. . . . But she’s about the only person— other than my therapist and my husband, she’s the only person I talk at all about the shooting because [people] around here want to pretend like it [didn’t] happen.
The fault lines splintered the ranks of teachers and students.With their prescribed exit routes for a fire drill, about half of the Westside teachers walked into the line of fire, while others were safe from harm’s way.Were they all victims? Mary Curtis, a teacher who was caught on the front lines, felt a deep division— and powerful resentment—between those who had and those who had not actually “touched a child” that day. Mary felt that some of her colleagues judged her unfavorably, even though they had not been forced to contend with the horror.She had had to make instant decisions over the life of a bleeding thirteen-year-old, while others huddled behind the protection of the building. How dare they criticize her now that she was having trouble coming back to work?
I heard secretaries [say,] “What’s wrong with her? She needs to get her shit together.”. . . Those remarks being made by people who never touched a child, who never had to make any decisions, can I really not feel a pulse or I just don’t know what I’m doing? Is this dangerous? Do I need to leave and go on? Some people didn’t have to deal with the little bleeding, the little breathing. . . . By the time I ran back down that same hall, there was so much blood on it that I was trying to hold on to the lockers. There are people that judge me that don’t know.
Some teachers who did go out the west exit managed to get back into the building to take cover.The shooters were still at large and no one knew whether the rampage was over or still in progress. Everyone had to decide whether they were going to stay at the scene with the wounded children or go inside and protect themselves. Staying outside meant risking one’s own life.
No response coming from teachers who had not “touched a child” came out right because—Mary Curtis felt—they simply couldn’t understand the emotional state of the teachers who had stayed with the wounded.A teacher who ran back inside the building would sometimes try to offer Mary her support, but usually pretended the shooting never happened. Mary resented both reactions.
Divisions like this did not erupt at Heath, partly because of the differences in the shootings. At Heath, the shooting was over in seconds. Michael Carneal was in full view the entire time, and there were no questions about the shooter’s identity or location. After firing eight shots, Michael put his gun down and was taken to the principal’s office. At Westside, by contrast, eighty-nine students and nine teachers were in the line of fire.They could not see the shooters and were not even sure where the bullets were coming from at first. A full ten minutes passed between the end of the firing and the capture of Johnson and Golden, and more time passed before word got back to the school that the shooters were in custody. During those intense moments, teachers faced crucial decisions about where to go and what to do.That was the center of the lasting trauma, and it fueled subsequent moral critiques and mental health problems.
A parallel divide erupted among the students at Westside. The summer after the shooting, sixty-eight Westside students attended Ferncliff, a residential camp for children affected by violence and war. Another camp was held the spring before we arrived in Westside, but only twenty students attended.The kids who continued to attend were sometimes mocked by classmates.Who was and who was not “over” the shooting became a public label.
Minister Ron Deal’s account of the way these fissures developed over time recounts how solidarity collapsed as conflicts gathered force and moral judgments hardened. Differential rates of healing were causing the community to come unglued:
The first three months after the shooting, unbelievable support, unbelievable outpouring of love, compassion, money, time, volunteerism. . . . Phase Two:We set it aside. School got out . . . and everybody went on an emotional vacation. . . .There was also a growing saturation. . . . It was just ongoing, and you get to a place where you just hate to hear another word about this. Phase Three: . . . With the onset of school came back all the emotion, and a lot of the fear, security, safety issues. But also . . . we began to have a little bit of the splitting. . . .
You start hearing talk about “moving beyond this.When are we not going to hear about it anymore?” . . . The further we went in time—six months, nine months, twelve months—the more that polarization just began to show itself. . . .
Phase Four: “Don’t forget our losses” . . . nothing has changed, when will they ever get over this? Those were kind of the polarizing messages that I’d hear.
Mental health counselors believe that denial and survivor’s guilt are at the base of the division. Perhaps.Yet from our perspective, the hostility derives at least as much from a concern over what the shooting represents. Its very mention reminds residents of their vulnerability. “We certainly don’t want to have it happen again,” noted a Westside administrator, “but at the same time there is no assurance that we can keep it from happening again.” Putting the shooting behind them helped assuage that anxiety and guilt, and those who insist on remembering for the sake of their own mental health force those emotions onto those who want the subject to disappear.
The civil suits in Paducah dredged up similar emotional aftershocks. Long after peripheral bystanders were ready to move on, the suits kept the shooting on the front pages of the local newspapers. While the victim families thought of their legal actions as a means of getting at the truth, holding people accountable, and achieving closure, their neighbors rejected this motivation altogether. Helen Banning, a Heath High school teacher, broke down in tears as she told us about how the lawsuits attacked the very people who had come forward to help the wounded. “That [plaintiff’s] attorney has no idea what it’s like, . . . how he’s making me feel . . . being sued. ’Cause he didn’t know what it was like for me.”But it was not simply the civil suit defendants who were upset by the cases.The legal maneuvers touched raw nerves far and wide. Books that had been closed and shelved were opened to scrutiny again, leaving the community feeling unsettled and insecure once more.
Much as they hated the shooting, groups that had been affected fought over who had the right to authentic victim status. As some parts of the community tried to use the shooting to their advantage, others drew lines in the sand. It took a more distant set of eyes to see how this unraveling developed. Betsey Woods works at Arkansas State University as a professor of social work and is not from the area originally. Her outsider eyes picked up on the tensions emerging from the wreckage of the shooting as the months wore on and the divisions became sharper:
Who owns this problem? Who owns the solution? Who did it happen to? . . .Who is “us”? . . .A lot of people wanted to say they helped but not all the people [would agree that] they helped. But it seemed important to people to be able to say they did something. And so there was a debate over who is allowed to say that and who isn’t allowed to say that.
Initially, Jonesboro and Westside came together as one. City residents rushed out to the Westside area to help with counseling. They volunteered their time, gave generous donations to the victims’ families, and genuinely felt as affected by the shooting as their Westside counterparts. Over time, though, the connections dwindled and residents began to distinguish more sharply between the two places as a way of clarifying where the shooting really happened.
The national media had dubbed the rampage the “Jonesboro shooting.” Residents were quick to correct us on this point: the rampage had not happened in Jonesboro.8 Underlying this distinction were more serious sources of division about whom the shooting belonged to: who had to deal with it, and who got to claim whatever positive came of it. Jonesboro residents tired of the negative associations the rampage attached to their city, especially because it had not really happened there.Westsiders thought Jonesboro courted the attention on purpose.
After the shooting, a number of schools in the Jonesboro school district won a Federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students Grant, which provides some important services, including security measures, educational reforms, teacher training, and mental health services. New case managers were hired on the strength of these resources for several schools to work with kids who need counseling or therapy. Westside was written into the grant and receives important benefits as a consequence. Yet as Denise Simpson, an administrator at Westside, noted with grim irony, the Jonesboro school district rode in on the popular misconception that they had been victims of the shooting.
We’re a school outside of Jonesboro, it’s not a Jonesboro tragedy. It’s a Westside School tragedy. . . . Everybody wants to lay claim now after the fact that this happened to them. It didn’t happen to them.
Tussles over who could legitimately claim “credit” as victims continued for months. Denise was infuriated by the efforts of uninvolved parties to benefit from the grief of real survivors:
A lot of people trying to get on the bandwagon. And the people that were actually . . . in the middle of it, they don’t want the glorification. . . .We resent the fact that someone else is taking any type of credit for anything they had done. . . .You’ll find most resistant to talking about it will be the people that were involved directly. . . .
Some people . . . wanted to take ownership of what’s happened and they had nothing to do with it.They showed up two days later as a counselor and learned what they learned from somebody who told them their experience. And so a lot of people were interviewed on television. . . .They were never even here. . . .
One man that knows nothing about what happened at the school . . . came in as a person who was supposed to reassure the staff, and he had no feelings for us.And he walked away from here and he wrote a book. . . . He writes this book like he’s Mr. Somebody. . . . He wasn’t on this campus thirty minutes and he writes a book as if he knew what all happened.
The first day after the shooting, all Westside students received a flower.The second day they were given little golden angels, or gold rings.The next day they received teddy bears. After that, they received little poems. Bills for medical services, coffins, ambulances, funeral expenses—all of it was covered by loving friends and neighbors, as well as complete strangers. One Westside student who was shot lived in a house trailer that lacked sufficient furniture; a local business came in and furnished their home for free.9 Heath High School received $72,000 in the immediate aftermath from people as far away as New Jersey. Gifts, good wishes, and money poured into both communities—over a half million dollars to Westside—from around the world, and it still does.
But every silver lining seems to have its cloud. In both communities, victims’ funds were established.The issue that loomed over them was one now familiar to those who have had to administer disaster relief funds to victims of the World Trade Center attack: who was and was not a victim, an issue that played directly into the conflicts of who “owned” this tragedy. In Westside, the funds were given to the families of those who were shot.This strict definition did not sit well with everyone. Jane Holden was worried about students whose problems surfaced years down the road. How would their needs be supported if all the funds were doled out immediately to the wounded and the families of the dead?10
They only counted . . . the ten who were injured and five that were killed. . . . But . . . that day there were 89 kids on that playground and nine teachers, and they were all victims too. . . .They’ve overlooked them. I think it’s sad. . . .They’re going to have some problems later. . . .They should’ve used [the fund] for counseling. These are babies. These are sixth-graders. They’re little. And they watched their friends die.You don’t get over something like that.
In Heath, too, there was conflict over how narrowly to define the category of victim. The kids who were shot? The ones who witnessed bloodshed, but emerged physically unscathed? Holly Gates, now in her senior year at Heath,was part of the prayer group in the line of fire at Heath. A thin, fidgety young woman, Holly looks deeply sad, perpetually on the edge of tears. She escaped unscathed physically, but her mental state is another matter.A wider definition of “victim” would be needed to take Holly into account:
I was diagnosed back in October with [Raynaud’s] syndrome,11 posttraumatic stress syndrome and panic disorder. I ended up having to quit [sports] because of these things, because it brought my immune system down so low, I was so weak all of the time, I lost a lot of weight. . . . In class . . . I got to a point where I couldn’t concentrate, because there were so many other things in my mind. . . . I actually failed Algebra III last semester because after I was diagnosed with some of this stuff, I couldn’t do anything.
My doctor . . . and my mom [wrote] . . . and called the school board several times.We haven’t had any cooperation with them. . . .My mom had to fight in order to get help with psychiatrists and medications and stuff, which is what that [charity] money was for. . . .
This conflict also grew over the issue of who would be invited to the Fern-cliff camp.The organizers of the camp invited the 89 Westside students who had exited the West door on March 24 and walked into the hail of bullets.The camp’s own resources were limited, and funds to run the camp had to be raised from national church organizations and foundations.12 This turned out to be but one example of a larger tendency to single out only those directly in the line of fire and to ignore everyone else. Either explicitly or implicitly, every service and every program defined who were the victims, and however those lines were drawn, some people who saw themselves as victims were left out.
Community leaders had to tread lightly around questions of “ownership” to make sensitive decisions about who should receive charitable donations. Similarly, in the midst of emotional turmoil, school administrators, ministers, and town officials had the job of their communities back on track, which could not be set aside. It fell to them to figure out how to get the schools running again, what to do about memorializing the dead—problems that had an effect on everyone. Each decision directed how community-level healing was “supposed” to take place.With people recovering at different rates, this process pitted the needs of some against the desires of others, making community-level healing more and more elusive.
The first judgment call involved the school day itself. Should students be asked to come back right away, or hold off and recover at home? A consensus emerged that students should return to normal routines quickly.13Teachers and administrators responded to that call, with little thought of their own traumas. This plan took a toll on some of the teachers, though. Later on, resentment built up over this decision. “After being shot at, after having our friends and students killed, not getting sleep, . . . ” complained one teacher, “we had to go back to school the next morning and act like everything was okay.” Another teacher said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over the fact that I needed a day to just roll in the fetal position and cry.”
Of course, not everyone wanted to stay home. Some were distraught when they were alone and wanted more than anything to be with fellow victims at school. “I had to go back,” Julia Sampson recalled. “While I was at home, I was miserable. When I was at school, I was better. . . .The place I wanted to be was with the people I experienced [the shooting] with.” People grieve in different ways, which complicates the task of those making decisions that affect everyone.
In the aftermath of the shootings, the Westside and Heath communities were clearly in need of counseling services, but rather than face an insufficient supply, they had to contend with the opposite problem: an inundation of support. Handling the massive influx of offers and volunteers—from as far away as Lockerbie, Scotland—was a full-time job that school staff could not manage. These offers were made out of kindness, but the schools eventually closed the gates, excluding “outsiders” and turning inward.
Principals and their assistants did not know how to separate the well-meaning professionals from the attention-seeking busybodies, and their insecurity grew because they had lost control of the grounds and property.Was it a good idea to have so many strangers on-site when students and teachers already felt anxious and vulnerable? Westside administrators were forced to weed out some bad eggs, grandstanders who were looking for a little notoriety for themselves.
NOVA—the National Organization of Victims Assistance—which was invited by both schools to help students, ended up attracting some criticism in Westside.A documentary about the organization was being filmed for the television news magazine.They decided to film some of the group’s activities in Westside for the program, without properly informing the students’ families and teachers of the purpose. The Jonesboro prosecutor had to call the show’s network to try to get the footage removed, an effort that succeeded at the last minute. Even those who arrived with noble purposes, it seemed, could not be fully trusted. Outsiders got a bad name as a consequence, a sentiment we encountered in our initial forays into the Westside community as well.
After experiencing an invasion of helpers and the extra burden of having to pare down nuisance volunteers and grandstanders, the communities quickly reached a saturation point.
[Schools] feel very protective of their students. You have to understand there’s a book this thick of offers . . . everybody wants to come and help. . . . I think the longer it went, the closer the circle became of who they would trust then to intervene. It became, I think, an atmosphere of circling the wagon and saying, “We’re opened up during this time of crisis, now we’ve got to close back down and get control of our situation.”
—Thomas Gardner, professor of social work, Arkansas State University
Self-reliance is a virtue, but not an uncomplicated prescription in a community with such high levels of social capital. Even though therapy was formally encouraged, some who needed help were reticent when it became clear that their main options were closely tied to the social networks “on the inside.” Counseling or therapy is a stigmatized enterprise in these culturally conservative communities. 14 A Westside staff member told us, “I think . . . people here wouldn’t suggest that they get counseling.A lot of times they’re not open to it, because they see it as a sign of weakness.”The worry that neighbors could find out that a child was in therapy was enough to discourage parents from it. “I don’t know that I would have [my child] go to the school counselor,” one parent told us.
Because they are going to be seen, . . . and that’s probably going to make it a little bit worse. Not that the school counselor couldn’t help. . . . I just mean that being visibly seen going in would probably hurt the situation a bit more.
Circling the wagons helped some people gain control over the situation; the unfortunate result for others was to cut them off from help they really needed.
Among those who rejected psychological treatment, the view was that the only way to get over a tragedy of these dimensions was not to talk about what had happened, since revisiting trauma just makes it worse: Best to just get on with life.15Teachers were aghast at this attitude. “We still have kids that freak out on a fire drill,” Beverly Ashford pointed out.
We still have kids that don’t sleep at night. . . .The least little thing like the slamming of a locker door or the dropping of a book just [sets them off].. . . You’re dealing with parents that want to shove things under the rug.You’re dealing with the school that [doesn’t know what to do about that] since it is really the parents’ choice.
Emotions that are swept under the rug at home bubble up in the classroom, where children turn to the faculty, and teachers who cannot find a sympathetic ear for their own fears lean on one another. Some students complained to their teachers that their parents would not listen to them, saying instead, “It’s time to get over it.” Teachers understood their dilemmas, because some of their husbands were losing patience with the subject as well.Westside teachers had one another.Their students had no one.
[One student] was talking to me . . . she was crying, upset. We . . . were sitting outside talking. The first time she’d been out [in the courtyard] since the shooting had happened. She was hit and it had glanced off of a rib. . . . It was just a flesh wound. But . . . people had told her that the bullet that went into her probably had [killed another child] first. . . .
Well, she’s looking at me and she said, “You think maybe that bullet should’ve gone into me first, that maybe [the other child] would have lived . . . ? She was just hurt so bad. She needed somebody to talk to about that, somebody besides me. . . . I didn’t know what to say to her. I did the best I could do without having any counseling [training] at all. But they just, all the parents felt like these kids will be okay, they’re young, they’ll bounce back. And I don’t think they will.
—Jane Holden, Westside teacher
Some parents may not recognize how much their kids need mental health services16 or may be understandably wary of local stigma. Their own desire to return to normal may cause them to push their children’s problems away.Yet parents are also reacting to the legitimate fear that therapy will do their children more harm than good. Rehearsing a traumatic incident can be harmful,17 and parents who are concerned about this possibility are simply trying to shield their children from repeated injury. Thomas Gardner, an Arkansas State University professor of social work who lives in Jonesboro, knows that the fear of retraumatizing is real, but he tried to persuade Westside parents that professionals knows how to avoid “volatile kinds of questions” and instead let natural reactions to tragedy seep out. It was an uphill battle. “There is such a desire . . . to get back to normal,” he sighed. “This is not us, this is not real.”Talking about the shooting, even in therapy, would keep those unhappy memories alive.
If mental health is not an exact science, ritual observance is even less so. Questions that arose about the wisdom of counseling surfaced all over again in discussions of memorials. Should an annual observance of the deaths be held? For how long? Is this a healthy remembrance or a morbid reminder?
The initial memorial service at Arkansas State University’s convocation center a week after the Westside shooting embraced the entire Jonesboro area. After that, public memorials contracted in scope, and soon faded away. The school itself was particularly silent: memorials were confined to the one-year anniversary, which was a small service, mainly for the staff. Fear of a media circus impelled Westside leaders to close ranks and make sure it was tightly controlled. The result was a memorial that seemed to many too minimalist, and when that anniversary passed, no further services were held at Westside.18 On the two-year anniversary, a group of teachers and students who had been at the shooting scene and knew of each other’s desire to keep talking, gathered informally. They met for dinner at a restaurant and then all went out to the cemeteries together.
A memorial garden created to honor those who had been killed was planted by a group of volunteers, but six months after their labors were finished, it still had not been dedicated. As one minister pointed out, the garden has “never been recognized by the Westside School. . . .”19
That is a telling illustration of where we are as a community.We have tried to forget.We have tried to pretend. . . . I don’t even think the community at large knows it’s there. . . . It certainly has not been able to provide the kind of healing that it was meant to provide, a ritual if you will, to help people pass from one phase to another. And they don’t even know it’s there. . . . I just think that’s so sad.
Why would the garden be ignored? Westside wanted to distance itself from tragedy—a mistake in the minister’s view, because “the whole idea of anniversaries . . . these ritual rites of passage, is to help people heal.” Reminders of tragedy, through memorials, tributes, and anniversary ceremonies, bring back unwanted memories.20 The concrete path where the students and teachers were mowed down was relaid to remove bloodstains; the fire drills were replaced, at least for a time, with bells that had a different tone. After the shooting, a portrait was drawn for the school of the five victims who were killed.Three years later, when we arrived in the area, the drawing was hanging in one of the conference rooms of the Jonesboro District Attorney’s office.The school didn’t want it.
What some saw as denial, administrators saw as a necessary attempt to carry on with the school’s purpose. Community attempts to memorialize conflicted with the administration’s judgment of how to get the school back on track. “Just when is it going to end?” asked Susan Miller, a Westside administrator.
The first-year, the third-year, and it will be the fifth-year anniversary. . . . People donating things to you that you don’t even want, huge cemetery-looking stuff.They want you to put it in your playground.With names on it. In memory of . . . whatever. It’s not that we want to forget those kids.We can’t have a cemetery-looking playground.
Wallowing in painful memories, Miller believed, was self-destructive for staff and students. “We have a school to run,” she reminded us.
Taking the position that the school has to, almost willfully, push beyond the shooting has hurt many Westside teachers we interviewed.The school did not do enough to provide counseling or compensation for those who needed to take time off. One middle school teacher who ministered to children at the scene of the shooting told us that her pay was docked for days when she simply did not have the emotional wherewithal to fulfill her duties. At the same time, she was told to “forget it,” when she wanted to file a workers’ compensation claim, because it would not cover PTSD-related problems.21
Morale sank to an all-time low. A new superintendent arrived, a former military man who made no allowances for teachers’ emotional frailties. His rigid, severe management style was difficult for the emotionally scarred teachers to handle, as it reinforced the view that emotional weakness should not be tolerated. Teacher turnover rose sharply in the wake of his arrival. Some estimated that half of the teachers who had been there on March 24, 1998, had left Westside by the summer of 2001.
Administrators burned out on the stress as well.The leadership was trying to do the impossible: keep the school afloat under the hardest of circumstances, and deal with the anger and criticism of teachers and parents who felt they hadn’t done enough. It was a no-win situation.Westside administrators had their own memories to live with but found themselves on the receiving end of constant and bitter criticism. “One of the teachers that . . . was in the shooting . . . said, “I want you to know that I’m having a real hard time,” one administrator told us.
“I might not be back next year,” [she told me]. I said, “That’s a shame.Why?” She said, “I’ve been in therapy for two years . . . because of you.” I’m like, “What in the world did I do?” She said, “I just keep going through my mind that the day that this happened, you didn’t come check on me . . .” I’m like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I only had 250 kids and 30 teachers and 5,000 parents and the media and policemen and . . . ”
Good grief, who came to see about me? . . . I’m telling you, that was a blow. As an administrator, I’ve been hit from every angle and every side, and I’ve seen angry parents who lost their kids, who thought the world of me before, because I didn’t protect their kid they’re mad at me.22
Some of these same issues arose in Heath, yet the conflict was minor by comparison, and the urge to memorialize was respected. Quilts, one for each girl who died, were hung in the local quilt museum, each square denoting a special passion or event in the lives of Kayce Steger, Nicole Hadley, and Jessica James. A memorial fountain was placed behind the school. A large rock in the fountain cites a Biblical passage, and smaller rocks are engraved with the names of each of the shooting victims.There is also a memorial in front of the school in the form of an engraved stone; some claimed this looked too much like a tombstone.
The observations of sociologist Kai Erikson on catastrophes give us some purchase on the different responses of these two schools.23 He contrasts “individual trauma” that arises out of exposure to death and devastation, with “collective trauma,” which is “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together.”A traumatic event can send individuals at the epicenter into a lifetime of fear and anxiety but leave most of the community untouched and therefore able to reach out to their damaged members. A collective trauma, which emerges when the damage affects everyone, shatters the very structure of the community, leaving no one able to help. The flood at Buffalo Creek, which Erikson studied at close range, left no one unscathed, no one stable enough to help other survivors. Everyone was a victim. Although the circumstances and the scale are not comparable, the scope of those affected in Westside was nevertheless fairly broad, as eighty-nine people had been in the shooters’ target area and fifteen had been struck by bullets, with five killed. The Heath shooting, terrible though it was, had a more delimited impact, and the community’s social structure was in better shape.
In both Heath and Westside, however, communities where people share a history, the conflicts that developed from public tragedies had particularly destructive consequences. In small, densely interconnected communities, it is harder for groups with warring emotional needs to coexist peacefully.There are fewer escapes for people who need to heal in their own way or whose own needs do not coincide with those of a surrounding culture.