We all read or watched the Jonesboro tragedy when several little girls and a teacher were gunned down by two young boys acting as snipers in the woods. Watching the news at home over spring break, I sat there with my family in horror. Although what I saw was nauseating, Arkansas is very far from my Pennsylvania home.
Recently, however, I received an article over blitz from a friend. After reading it several times in disbelief, what had happened finally hit me. Several miles from my home in Albion, Penn., a 14-year-old boy, Andy Wurst, opened-fire on an eighth grade graduation dance at a local restaurant. The man who he shot in the face at point-blank range was football coach and science teacher, John Gillette. He was shot in front of hundreds of students while dancing to the last song of the night.
I know that these names mean nothing to those of you reading this column, as happens so often when reading tragedies on a daily basis. But this hits too close to home for me. Gillette had a daughter, Abbey, with whom I grew up playing basketball with at the Albion Park and in various mini-leagues. For years I took riding lessons from a woman a mile down the road from my house, Ginger Wurst, the young killer's aunt. Every name in the paper was familiar, every street was a few miles from my own -- I have never felt terror accompanied with reality as I did while reading the article.
Hysterical, I called home immediately to see if everyone was okay, especially my sisters, because they have been having problems at school. My 17-year-old twin sisters have been receiving anonymous death threats at school ever since they protested against racist behavior by hundreds of students that went unrecognized and unchecked by the school's administration and faculty this past fall. Despite these immature, yet terrifyingly explicit death threats, I had never considered their lives seriously endangered until now.
My sister's boyfriend, Brad, has a sister in eighth grade who organized the graduation dance on Friday. Gillette was the class advisor and was acting as a chaperone for the children. Brad's mother, on hearing of the shooting, immediately got into the car and went to the building where the dance was being held to search for her daughter. Mrs. Wurst, the shooter's mother, also searching for her son, was afraid he had been shot and kept frantically yelling "Where's Andy?" She had no idea it had been her son who did the killing. All I could think about was my 10-year-old sister and how feasible it was that in a few years she would be at a similar eighth grade graduation dance.
In my hysteria, I told my mother that I wanted my family out of rural Albion. I told her there was no way she could let my twin sisters go to the prom in three weeks. She quietly said "Ainsley, it's not just Albion, it could happen anywhere, even in Hanover." She's right. Get out? Get out where? To the next state over? Perhaps it is safer there -- but I doubt it.
That's the hard part -- it could happen anywhere -- and the sadness that accompanies the tragedy is unbearable. It is so easy to blame the town, the financial stability of the family and the educational background of the child and so on. It is easy to place blame -- especially in our Dartmouth microcosm of the world where we have some sort of inherent right to delegate reasons and theories to situations we study and read about.
Each one of us goes to class in order to gain some insight and heightened level of awareness of the world and existence in general. What about the awareness level of this 14-year-old boy? Why does he call himself "Satan" and blow the face off of a well-loved, respected teacher and football coach?
Films of Andy as he was being driven away in a police car showed him grinning, sticking out his tongue and giving the camera a thumbs up sign. OK, great, so let's lock him up and try him as an adult and wait for the third-part sequel of the children who like to murder. Jonesboro, Edinboro, ...?
If you are reading this column, and you know me, perhaps that makes it more of a reality for you. But if you have no idea who I am, I still hope that this hits something inside of you that is perhaps more personal than a random news wire, and that you'll understand that it can indeed happen anywhere, in backwoods Arkansas, the northwest woods of Pennsylvania -- and sadly, even in your hometown.
