valerie and victoria

School Shooting
March 25 1998
Jonesboro Arkansas

No, it was just fake, it was a play

Victoria: "I was in music class. The fire bell rang, and we all went outside. None of the fire marshals knew anything. The doors we went out, you can get out of them from the inside, but you can't get in from the outside; so once we let the doors close, that was the end of it. I had gotten lost from my class. Then you could hear the gun shots. We weren't too sure what they were because we had construction going on in the school, and then we thought it was fireworks. The first person I saw go down was Natalie Brooks and she was shot in the head. I didn't know what to do after that. There were a lot of things going through my mind. One, what can I do to help her? Another, where am I going to go to get away? I was scared. I ran over to a couple of classes. There were two teachers and forty students in the group and I was telling them, `Natalie Brooks was just shot in the head.' And the teacher said, `No, it was just fake, it was a play, we were supposed to have a play against gun violence.' I told her it wasn't a play because you could see the blood coming out of Natalie's head. The teacher said it was just a paintball.

I had to go over three people to get to the gym wall

"You could see a bunch of students running for cover and you could hear the cries of the students who were shot and already laying on the ground. I think there were three people shot that I had to go over to get to the gym wall. We got safety inside the gym. I couldn't find my sister anywhere. Me and my sister are twins, we've been together all of our life, I can't imagine if she had been killed. There was a bunch of people crying, a bunch of people looking for their friends, making sure who'd been shot, who hadn't been shot. Two of the people who were killed were my best friends; I was upset that I wasn't ever going to get to see my friends again and they would never get the joy of doing what I got to do."

He was a good boy

Valerie: "I didn't understand a lot of stuff. I didn't understand why they would want to take lives; I didn't understand who made them mad. The thought crossed my mind that, Maybe it's my fault? What did I do wrong? Could I have done something that could have helped some of those people who were shot? I didn't think they were right when I found out it was Mitchell. I didn't really think that Mitchell would do anything like that because he was a good boy. He was in choir, he had good grades, he always kept out of trouble, until the day before he had come to school with a knife and threatened somebody with it. The only violence that I knew he had was hunting. I don't sleep very good since 1998. I'm just learning to live with it. I try not to think about it anymore. It's a big part of life, innocence. I've got to respect how my body deals with losing it, I've got to respect the way I feel."