Crime That’s Too Close to Home

At one point in time, school children used to hide under desks in preparation for potential nuclear threats during the Cold War. But nowadays, students in grade school have drills where they hide in the corners of their classrooms in order to take cover from a threat that is far too close to home: school shootings. 

Unfortunately, this topic is nothing new with the recent tragedies at Uvalde and another school in St Louis, leaving one too many lives taken for no reason at all, other than pure evil. Although mass shootings always bring me to tears, it is nothing like the fear I felt knowing that a shooter was lurking at Brookwood High School (located in Lawrenceville, GA), where I just graduated in the Spring of 2022.

Ironically enough, I had a dream about a school shooting at my high school the night before. So to wake up to the news that my younger friends were in what we refer to as a “hard lockdown,” was outrageously frightening. A picture had spread amongst the student body of a young man, in the student parking lot, carrying a large rifle. I may be mistaken, but I’m quite sure that he was a current student at Brookwood. 

As my college friends reached out to our high school friends, checking on them and their siblings, I couldn’t help but cry. All my mother has ever taught me to do in tough situations is to pray, and the best name I know to call on is Jesus. According to a few of my friends, who are currently seniors at Brookwood, they were required to stay in lockdown for quite a while, and they had to stay in their third period classrooms for even longer. 

By the grace of God, the threatening young man was caught, and he was escorted off of school property. No one was hurt, physically. But I can only imagine the emotional damage that these experiences must be causing the high school students and their families. And all this comes not even one month after a shooting threat was written in a bathroom stall, at my same high school in Lawrenceville, Georgia. This first threat was met, the following day, with hardly any students showing up to school. But the threat I described above came with absolutely no warning. 

All I can hope is that everyone will truly stop to think about how outrageous it is that going to school has become such a threat. A place where students should thrive, learn, and live has now become a location of stress, worry, and danger. I know that we can all fall deaf to the tragedies we hear and see on the news a lot of the time because they are so rampant. But all I ask is that in the moments we let crime go over our heads, we stop to think about what it would be like if such tragedies got too close to him. Like it did for me, this past week.