If you can bear to do so one more time, revisit Jonesboro, Arkansas, on March
24, 1998. Go to Westside Middle School. Let your mind be there in the early
morning. Children are laughing, making excuses about homework, eating lunch. But
you are there before the fire alarm is pulled and children walk outside into a
hail of bullets.
There is a 32-year-old English teacher doing the one job above all others she
had aspired to in life. Shannon Wright had attended Westside, earned a college
degree, and dreamed of teaching in the school she had once attended. And there
she is Tuesday morning with her pupils. Explaining nouns and verbs. Correcting
grammar. Trying to teach 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old students to use language
correctly.
After a full morning, she enjoyed her lunch break. It was a time to be still, to
relax, to refocus for her afternoon classes. She had just finished lunch and
moved her students back to the classroom when the fire alarm sounded. She knew
what to do. The school periodically rehearses. In fact, she probably told
herself there was nothing to worry about. It's just another of those required
drills. They get us ready -- just in case there should ever be a real emergency
at Westside Middle.
But that Tuesday turned out to be that dreaded real emergency. No sooner had
Mrs. Wright gotten outside than the pop-pop-popping sounds started.
Firecrackers? No, bullets! And to her horror she saw children being hit. They
were screaming, falling to the ground, bleeding! Then she saw a 13-year-old girl
directly in the line of fire. So she did what her relatives and co-workers said
they would have expected of her. She selflessly put her own body between the
little girl and the deadly missiles. She was hit by two bullets. She died from
her wounds.
"She loved kids," said her husband, Mitchell. "I'm sure that if she thought
someone was trying to hurt one of her kids, she would try to protect them."
Rubel Shelly The FAX of Life
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