Michelle has shared the text messages she exchanged with her fifth-grade son while he hid from a gunman inside his Oregon elementary school.
The boy, a student at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, was calling from a classroom on Thursday afternoon when his mother answered at a nearby Olive Garden. Michelle, who did not give her last name, was eating when her Apple Watch showed the incoming call from her child. She picked up and heard him whisper that an active shooter was in the building. She told him she loved him, urged him to stay quiet, then disconnected to dial 911 herself.
What made the moment almost unendurable was that Michelle had lived through the same terror herself. She was a student at Santana High School in Santee, California, in 2001, when 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams killed two people and wounded more than a dozen others in a shooting there. That attack came roughly 25 years before her own son found himself hiding from gunfire.
“I was like, how can this happen? How can lightning strike twice?,” she said in an interview after Thursday’s events.
At 1:01 p.m., two minutes after police received the first 911 call about a man approaching the school, throwing a long gun over the fence and climbing after it, Michelle began texting her son. She wrote: “Baby I love you don’t call anyone please be quiet as possible.”
“If you can safely, text me, that’s OK just don’t make any calls,” she continued in a follow-up message. “The police are coming to help you. I love you so much. Do you know anything that’s going on?”
Later, at 2:24 p.m., Michelle sent additional messages asking whether her son had seen a particular individual, whose name was redacted from the screenshot she provided to CNN. The boy replied in two separate texts: “Yes, I’m not trying to lie. Yes.”
Police identified the attacker as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, a former student at Silver Rail Elementary. Authorities said all victims were shot inside the same classroom.
The teenage suspect’s mother, Shauntai Nickerson, spoke to reporters outside her apartment near the school. “I miss my boy,” she said, sobbing, according to multiple news outlets. She added: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could have done something. I’m sorry for their loss.” Nickerson described her son as a “good boy” as she tearfully apologized to victims and their families.
The 2001 Santana High School shooting in Santee, California, occurred when Charles Andrew Williams, then 15, opened fire on campus, killing two students and injuring more than a dozen others. Michelle was present during that attack as a student, making Thursday’s events at her son’s Oregon school a devastating echo of her own adolescence.
The first 911 call to police came after a witness reported seeing a man approach Silver Rail Elementary with a long gun, toss the weapon over the school fence and then climb over it himself. Michelle’s son called her moments later, beginning the exchange of whispered phone calls and urgent text messages that would span more than an hour as the situation unfolded.