She survived a school shooting. Now her children have, too

“Mom, there’s a shooter,” Michelle’s fifth grader said through the phone.

Something about her son’s serious tone was familiar.

“If you’ve ever gotten a call that a loved one passed away … that kind of tone,” Michelle explained.

The 40-year-old mother would later compare it to the sound of her principal’s voice echoing through the loudspeaker 25 years ago: “Lockdown! Lockdown!”

When she was in ninth grade, a former classmate opened fire at her high school in El Cajon, California.

Like then, she immediately knew in her gut the situation was serious.

And Michelle was right. A former student had just shot through the glass doors of her son’s school, Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, and opened fire on a special needs classroom, killing a beloved teacher and three students .

CNN has agreed to withhold Michelle’s last name and the names of her family members for privacy concerns.

Michelle told her son that she loved him, but that he needed to hang up immediately and remain quiet while she called 911.

As a school shooting survivor herself, she knew the importance of her son staying silent and not alerting the shooter to his location, she said.

She immediately fled the Olive Garden where she and her mother had been eating lunch and called 911 as she ran, her mother trailing behind her. Emergency operators in Bend always answered immediately in her experience – but that didn’t happen this time.

“It was just ringing, ringing, ringing, and nobody was picking up,” she said.

Courtesy of Michelle

Police cars and firetrucks crowded the streets as Michelle neared the school. Alarmed parents followed closely as she ran up to Silver Rail Elementary.

“What’s going on? Is someone hurt?” she frantically asked parents and police officers when she reached the front of the school. The police informed them that the shooter was dead, though this offered little relief.

Michelle saw a kindergarten class sitting on the ground near the teacher’s parking lot. “They were all crying, which was really hard to see because they are tiny,” she said.

Even though Michelle had heard from her fifth grader, her mind raced with thoughts of her first-grade son who remained inside the school. She texted her first grader’s teacher, but didn’t get a response, sending her “panic to 100.”

She had no other way to reach him.

Memories from her own experience of the shooting at Granite Hills High School in 2001 crept into her thoughts, including brief recollections of the shooter, a boy she had sat next to in physics class. But these flashbacks were overtaken quickly by the thoughts of her own children in their classrooms.

‘Were they safe?’ ‘What did they see?’ On a loop, her brain replayed ‘it was your kid’ who was shot.

Last Thursday “was just honestly the worst day of my life, much worse than when I actually went through it myself as a child,” she said.

At one point, she had to sit down on the pavement at her sons’ elementary school as she grew faint from the overwhelming emotions.

Michelle’s husband, alerted by her mother on the drive over from the restaurant, had arrived at the school and the family was redirected to Journey Church, where authorities sent everyone to be reunited with their children.

As petrified parents filed into the warehouse-like church nestled in a strip mall and took seats on folding chairs, Michelle noticed a woman near the front, sitting alone. The woman’s cell phone rang. She answered the call, and soon broke down in tears, collapsing out of her chair. Other parents rushed to comfort her. Inferring what news the woman had likely learned on that call, Michelle stared at the dark screen of her own phone for the next three hours, praying it wouldn’t ring.

Later that day, a childhood friend reminded Michelle of her own reunification process decades earlier. After the SWAT team methodically cleared each room, she and her classmates were let out in a single-file line with their hands over their heads to a park where parents waited. All the kids around her were screaming “mom” and “dad,” so Michelle screamed her mother’s full name to stand out in the crowd and find her mom.

“How can lightning strike twice? How can I go through this and then my children go through this?” she asked.

Knowing her oldest was safe, Michelle and her husband texted their fifth grader to see if he had seen his little brother. Communicating through the tiny screen on his Apple watch, he said he had. Michelle asked her son again, to which he confirmed his brother was alive, but Michelle’s thoughts still spiraled.

“What if he saw a kid in a blue shirt and thought it was (him)? I was still worried,” she said.

Finally, after three grueling hours waiting in the church, Michelle was reunited with her two sons. Her oldest heard the gun shots and the sound of people screaming in the school. As she picked him up and gave him a hug, the first thing he said, through tears, was “Mom, can I be homeschooled? I never want to go in that school again.”

Some hours after the shooting in the safety of their home, adrenaline waning, Michelle’s mother turned to her and said she better call the Olive Garden to pay the bill they ran out on.

“Mom, I think Olive Garden is gonna be okay,” replied Michelle.

Later that evening, Michelle spotted her 11-year-old on his iPad reading a news headline that several people had died at his school.

For the first time, she told her son about her own survival story.

“This happened to you?” he asked, his eyes wide, and wondered if anyone had died at her high school.

Three students and two teachers were wounded in the shooting at Granite Hills, but no one was killed.

Michelle reassured her son, but he didn’t want to talk about the incident. She told him she would be there to talk when he was ready.

In 2001, Michelle remembers hiding under her desk and hearing helicopters circling over her school. After roughly an hour, when the shooting was believed to be over, but still locked down in their classroom, her teacher put on a movie to pass the time. It was “The Karate Kid.” Then, cell phones were rare among students. Michelle recalls her teacher letting students use his computer to email their parents while they waited.

During a work-related meeting this past Monday, Michelle kept thinking of the 18-year-old shooter from her high school. The recurring image of his face clouded her thoughts while she tried to focus.

For Michelle, the trauma of enduring a school shooting has meant never feeling safe in her school or in public spaces again, finding herself always looking for the nearest exit in case of emergency, and later developing panic attacks. Well before last week’s shooting, she said she got a pit in her stomach every time she dropped her children off at school, which she previously chalked up to anxiety and her own trauma.

“What if that was just intuition? And I think that’s probably pretty ridiculous. But like, I was just in shock,” she said.

Now her son seems to be facing similar feelings of dread at the thought of public spaces. The Red Cross and other organizations held a gathering over the weekend for Silver Rail students and families.

“I don’t want to go because what if a terrorist comes and shoots us all?” her fifth-grade son told Michelle. They did not attend the event.

Though they’re not using many words to talk about what they witnessed that day, comments like these from her oldest, along with her youngest cuddling her “like a baby,” illustrate her children’s struggles, Michelle said.

Michelle doesn’t see a path forward at the elementary school at this point and is seriously thinking about home schooling both of her boys, and says other parents are considering the same.

“I feel like it happened to me twice. Who’s to say it’s not going to happen a third time?” Michelle said.

In the week since the shooting, she now avoids driving near Silver Rail and opts for different roads instead. She did go to the makeshift memorial on Saturday to put down flowers but tried not to look too closely at the school.

She said seeing the building brought back flashbacks of the excruciating helplessness she felt running up to the school last week but not being allowed inside, which triggered memories of desperately searching for her own parents in a crowd in 2001.

Earlier this week, at a secure FBI location, Michelle retrieved the belongings her children left behind at the school. The process for picking up the items was very well-organized and offered comfort items like therapy dogs, stuffed animals and snacks. Michelle told the FBI agent that they didn’t have anything like this after her experience in a school shooting.

“And then (the agent) kind of said to me, ‘Unfortunately, we’ve had 25 years to perfect this process.’”

But her family is also taking small steps toward healing, each processing the incident in their own way.

On Sunday, Michelle invited a therapist to their home to chat with her boys.

With the therapist and his mom present, Michelle’s 11-year-old finally started to open up about some of the questions on his mind. “Why did this happen?” he asked.

He also wanted to know who the victims were. After they told him, he got his yearbook out and looked at their pictures and explained some of his memories with them. Then he sat in front of the TV, the yearbook still in his hands, for “quite a while,” Michelle said.

He left the house on Monday for the first time since the shooting to get his favorite ice cream.

Michelle’s husband visited the memorial Monday night, after the kids were asleep, and found himself praying and processing his own grief surrounding the tragedy.

The family has set up a “free toys and books” bin in their yard where neighborhood kids could grab sensory toys and books, with a friend ordering books tailored to help children process this kind of traumatic event.

Her youngest rode bikes with some friends in the neighborhood and asked his mom to schedule playdates.

Michelle is working to cope with the recurring US epidemic of gun violence on school campuses. In the meantime, she’s focused on reassuring her boys.

“I went through this. I’m okay. You’ll be okay,” she told them.

“妈妈，有枪手，”米歇尔五年级的孩子在电话里说。

她儿子严肃的语气中透着一丝熟悉感。

“如果你曾经接到过亲人去世的电话……就是那种语气，”米歇尔解释说。

这位40岁的母亲后来将之比作25年前校长通过扬声器传来的声音：“封锁！封锁！”

在她读九年级的时候，她的一位前同学在加利福尼亚州埃尔卡洪的高中开枪扫射。

就像当时一样，她立刻凭直觉就知道情况很严重。

米歇尔说得没错。就在不久前，她儿子就读的俄勒冈州本德市银轨小学的一名学生透过玻璃门向一间特殊教育教室开枪，造成一名深受爱戴的老师和三名学生丧生。

出于隐私考虑，CNN同意不透露米歇尔的姓氏及其家人的姓名。

米歇尔告诉儿子她爱他，但他需要立即挂断电话并保持安静，因为她要拨打 911。

她说，她自己也曾是校园枪击案的幸存者，所以她知道儿子保持沉默、不向枪手暴露位置的重要性。

她立即​​逃离了和母亲一起吃午饭的橄榄园餐厅，边跑边拨打了911，母亲紧随其后。根据她的经验，本德的紧急救援人员总是会立即接听电话——但这次却并非如此。

“电话一直响，一直响，一直响，但没人接，”她说。

图片由米歇尔提供

当米歇尔接近学校时，警车和消防车挤满了街道。焦急的家长们紧随其后，目送她跑向银轨小学。

她跑到学校门口，焦急地问家长和警察：“出什么事了？有人受伤吗？” 警察告诉他们枪手已经死亡，但这并没有让他们感到丝毫安慰。

米歇尔看到一群幼儿园小朋友坐在教师停车场附近的地上。“他们都在哭，看着真让人心疼，因为他们太小了，”她说。

尽管米歇尔已经联系上了她五年级的孩子，但她仍然牵挂着留在学校里的一年级儿子。她给一年级孩子的老师发了短信，但没有收到回复，这让她“恐慌到了极点”。

她没有其他办法联系到他。

2001年格兰尼特山高中枪击案的亲身经历涌上心头，她不时想起枪手——一个她曾在物理课上坐在他旁边的男孩。但这些闪回很快被她对孩子们在教室里的思念所取代。

“他们安全吗？”“他们看到了什么？”她的脑海里不断回放着“被枪击的是你的孩子”这句话。

她说：“上周四真是我人生中最糟糕的一天，比我小时候亲身经历的还要糟糕得多。”

有一次，她情绪激动得几乎晕厥，不得不坐在儿子们的小学的人行道上。

米歇尔的丈夫在开车从餐馆过来的路上接到她母亲的通知后，已经到达了学校，一家人被安排到旅程教会，当局在那里安排所有人与孩子们团聚。

惊恐万分的家长们鱼贯走进这座位于商业街内、如同仓库般的小教堂，在折叠椅上落座。米歇尔注意到前排附近坐着一位独自一人的女人。这时，女人的手机响了。她接起电话，随即崩溃大哭，瘫倒在椅子上。其他家长赶紧上前安慰她。米歇尔猜想那位女士可能在电话里听到了什么消息，接下来的三个小时里，她一直盯着自己手机漆黑的屏幕，祈祷着手机不要再响起。

当天晚些时候，一位儿时的朋友让米歇尔想起了几十年前她与家人团聚的经历。特警队仔细搜查了每个房间后，她和同学们举着双手排成一列，被放出教室，来到一个公园，那里有家长在等候。周围的孩子都在喊着“妈妈”和“爸爸”，米歇尔也大声喊出妈妈的全名，希望能从人群中脱颖而出，找到妈妈。

“为什么闪电会击中两次？为什么我经历了这一切，我的孩子又要经历这一切？”她问道。

得知大儿子平安无事后，米歇尔和丈夫给上五年级的儿子发短信，问他是否见过弟弟。儿子通过苹果手表的小屏幕回复说见过。米歇尔又问了一遍，儿子再次确认弟弟还活着，但米歇尔的思绪依然纷乱不堪。

“如果他看到一个穿蓝色衬衫的孩子，以为是（他自己）怎么办？我还是担心，”她说。

在教堂里苦等了三个小时后，米歇尔终于和她的两个儿子团聚了。她的大儿子听到了枪声和学校里人们的尖叫声。她抱起他，紧紧地拥抱他，他哽咽着说的第一句话是：“妈妈，我可以在家上学吗？我再也不想去那所学校了。”

枪击事件发生几个小时后，在安全的家中，肾上腺素逐渐消退，米歇尔的母亲转向她，说她最好打电话给橄榄园餐厅，付清她们欠下的账单。

“妈妈，我觉得橄榄园餐厅应该没问题，”米歇尔回答道。

当晚晚些时候，米歇尔发现她 11 岁的儿子正在用 iPad 阅读一条新闻标题，称他的学校里有多人死亡。

她第一次向儿子讲述了自己的幸存经历。

“你遇到过这种事吗？”他睁大眼睛问道，想知道她所在的高中是否有人去世了。

格兰尼特山枪击事件造成三名学生和两名教师受伤，但无人死亡。

米歇尔安慰了儿子，但他不想谈这件事。她告诉他，等他准备好了，她会随时和他谈谈。

2001年，米歇尔记得自己躲在课桌底下，听到直升机在学校上空盘旋。大约一个小时后，枪击事件被认为已经结束，但教室仍然处于封锁状态。老师为了打发时间，放了一部电影——《龙威小子》。那时，学生中很少有人用手机。米歇尔回忆说，老师允许学生们用他的电脑给父母发邮件，一边等待。

上周一，在一次工作会议上，米歇尔脑海里一直萦绕着她高中时那名18岁枪击案凶手的身影。他的脸庞反复出现在她的脑海中，让她无法集中注意力。

对米歇尔来说，经历校园枪击案的创伤让她再也无法在学校或公共场所感到安全，她总是习惯性地寻找最近的出口以防万一，后来还出现了恐慌症。早在上周枪击案发生之前，她说每次送孩子上学都会感到一阵莫名的紧张，她之前一直把这种感觉归咎于焦虑和她自身的创伤。

“如果那只是直觉呢？我觉得这可能很荒谬。但当时我真是震惊了，”她说。

现在，她的儿子似乎也对公共场所感到类似的恐惧。红十字会和其他组织周末为银轨学校的学生和家长举办了一场聚会。

“我不想去，万一恐怖分子来把我们都杀了怎么办？”她五年级的儿子告诉米歇尔。他们最终没有参加那个活动。

米歇尔说，虽然孩子们很少用语言来描述他们那天所目睹的事情，但她的大儿子说的这些话，以及她的小儿子像抱着婴儿一样抱着她，都说明了孩子们所面临的困境。

米歇尔认为目前在小学没有出路，她正在认真考虑让两个儿子在家接受教育，她说其他家长也在考虑同样的做法。

“我觉得这种事已经发生在我身上两次了。谁又能保证它不会发生第三次呢？”米歇尔说道。

枪击案发生后的一周里，她尽量避免开车经过银轨附近，而是选择其他道路。周六她去了临时设立的悼念点献花，但尽量不去看学校。

她说，看到这栋建筑让她回想起上周跑到学校却被禁止入内的那种极度无助感，这又让她想起了2001年在人群中拼命寻找自己父母的情景。

本周早些时候，米歇尔在联邦调查局一处安全地点取回了孩子们留在学校的物品。领取物品的流程组织得井井有条，还提供了诸如治疗犬、毛绒玩具和零食等慰藉物品。米歇尔告诉联邦调查局探员，在她经历校园枪击案之后，他们从未提供过这样的服务。

“然后（经纪人）对我说，‘很遗憾，我们已经花了 25 年的时间来完善这个过程。’”

但是她的家人也在慢慢地走向治愈，每个人都以自己的方式消化这件事。

星期天，米歇尔邀请了一位心理治疗师到家里和她的儿子们聊聊。

在治疗师和母亲的陪伴下，米歇尔11岁的儿子终于开始敞开心扉，问出一些困扰他的问题。“为什么会发生这种事？”他问道。

他还想知道受害者是谁。在他们告诉他之后，他拿出毕业纪念册，翻看他们的照片，并讲述了一些与他们的回忆。然后，他手里还拿着那本毕业纪念册，坐在电视机前“好一会儿”，米歇尔说。

周一，枪击事件发生后，他第一次出门去买他最喜欢的冰淇淋。

米歇尔的丈夫在周一晚上孩子们睡着后去了纪念馆，他独自祈祷，并努力消化这场悲剧带来的悲痛。

这家人在院子里设置了一个“免费玩具和书籍”箱，邻居家的孩子们可以在这里拿取感官玩具和书籍。一位朋友还订购了一些专门帮助孩子们应对这类创伤性事件的书籍。

她最小的孩子和邻居的一些朋友一起骑自行车，并要求妈妈安排玩耍时间。

米歇尔正努力应对美国校园枪支暴力事件频发的现状。与此同时，她也专注于安抚儿子们的情绪。

“我经历过这些。我没事。你们也会没事的。”她告诉他们。