by Patrick H. Moore
As if to remind us that we live in an overly violent nation, mere hours after Andrea Sneiderman was sentenced to five years in State Prison for perjury at the DeKalb County Courthouse, some miles away, a troubled man with an assault rifle fired off half-a-dozen rounds at law enforcement from inside the school but surrendered later after being coaxed back toward sanity by a courageous school clerk with the unlikely name of Antoinette Tuff. It occurred at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy, a local elementary school, just after 1 p.m. when 20-year-old Michael Brandon Hill came onto the campus armed with an AK-47 and other guns. His shots miraculously failed to hit anyone.
Bill Barrow and Kate Brumback of the Associated Press describe the drama:
A man with an assault rifle and other weapons exchanged gunfire with officers Tuesday at an Atlanta-area elementary school before surrendering, a police chief said, with dramatic overhead television footage capturing the young students racing out of the building, being escorted by teachers and police to safety. No one was injured.
Just a week into the new school year, more than 800 students in pre-kindergarten to fifth grade were evacuated from Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, a few miles east of Atlanta. They sat outside along a fence in a field for a time until school buses came to take them to their waiting parents and other relatives at a nearby Wal-Mart.
When the first bus arrived about three hours after the shooting, cheers erupted in the store parking lot from relieved relatives, several of them sobbing.
It was an odd situation. The suspect was inside the school firing shots at officers who were swarming the campus outside. Officers returned fire after the children were evacuated but they didn’t hit Hill who had somehow slipped through security. The gunman stealthily entered the campus but he never got past the front office where he held one or two employees captive for a time. Hill, who apparently lives about three miles from the school, is charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, terroristic threats and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Once the gunman was inside the office, he asked an office employee to call WSB-TV to say the gunman wanted to contact the Atlanta station and the police. According to WSB, shots were heard in the background.
Assignment editor Lacey Lecroy took the call and stated later:
“It didn’t take long to know that this woman was serious. Shots were one of the last things I heard. I was so worried for her.”
School clerk Antoinette Tuff told Diane Sawyer that she worked hard to convince the gunman to put down his weapons and ammunition.
“He told me he was sorry for what he was doing. He was willing to die.”
She told him her life story, about her marriage that failed after 33 years and the “roller coaster” of opening her own business.
“I told him, ‘OK, we all have situations in our lives. It was going to be OK. If I could recover, he could, too.”
She asked the suspect to put his weapons down, empty his pockets and backpack on the floor.
“I told the police he was giving himself up. I just talked him through it.”
Hill’s mother was contacted but got off the phone quickly.
DeKalb County Schools Superintendent Michael Thurmond was naturally very pleased by the way things were handled:
“It’s a blessed day, all of our children are safe. This was a highly professional response on the ground by DeKalb County employees assisted by law enforcement.”
The officials believe Hill may have been carrying explosives. They cut a hole in a fence to allow scrambling students to get farther from the building. SWAT teams then went from classroom to classroom securing the area.
The children were eventually transported to Wal-Mart where hundreds of people were anticipating their arrival. Relatives had to show ID, sign each child out and have their photo taken.
The school, which has about 870 children enrolled, is named after McNair, an astronaut who died when the space shuttle Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, 1986.
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Antoinette Tuff’s response to this emergency combined courage with savvy and miraculously helped avert what could have been another school massacre. She must have sensed that Hill was not 100 per cent convinced that he really wanted to be the next schoolyard mass murderer.