USA TODAY International Edition
Church, friends help Texas student cope
She urges teachers to arm themselves
SANTA FE, Texas — Ever since a gunman killed her classmates, sent friends to the hospital and upended her quiet hometown, Erin Werner has kept busy.
She’s volunteered at her local church, had long talks with friends and baked batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, a favorite hobby. Nights have been filled with community dinners and church gatherings.
Erin, 16, a National Honor Society student, science club officer, longtime Girl Scout and varsity soccer and basketball player, knows there are hardships ahead: It will take awhile for the student body at Santa Fe High School and the community at large to face down their fears and heal from last week’s shooting that left 10 dead and 13 injured.
Like other students, Erin is learning to live in a new reality.
She also has a few ideas about how to prevent future school shootings — arm teachers, an opinion shared by many of her friends.
“If you can’t trust the teachers with a way to protect us, who are you going to trust?” Erin said. “Even with the best police force ever, you can’t get there fast enough.”
For now, everyone’s focused on next Tuesday, when classes are set to resume at Santa Fe High. Teachers and staff returned to work Wednesday.
“I have friends who were in that classroom,” Erin told USA TODAY. “They are going to have a hard time of it for a while.”
Police said suspect Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, opened fire with a shotgun and a .38 caliber revolver in an art complex located at the rear of the school around 7:30 a.m. Friday. Law enforcement agents engaged the shooter four minutes later, but the gunman stalked the two-classroom area for 30 minutes, killing students and two teachers, before surrendering to police.
It was the deadliest campus shooting in Texas since a sniper in a clock tower killed 16 people and injured 31 at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
Santa Fe, located 30 miles southeast of Houston, is a small town where families leave front doors unlocked and teachers know generations of family members. “I’ve had teachers tell me, ‘I had your sister and your dad’s such a nice man,’” Erin said.
That tranquility was shattered Friday and Erin has replayed the events of that day repeatedly.
How her aunt drove her to school that morning. How she handed out homemade chocolate chip cookies to friends before class. How she was working on an essay on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why
the Caged Bird Sings in advanced English when the fire alarm rang.
How her friend Clay Horn, a football player and pole vaulter, was shot twice but still scaled a seven-foot wall to escape the killing. How another friend, Zachary Muehe, fled the art complex, ran halfway around the school and went back inside to alert teachers.
How Kim Vaughn, a friend from Girl Scouts, never made it out.
Raised around guns, Erin said she doesn’t think it’s fair to just blame them for the shooting. She favors strengthening mental health background checks for gun owners. But an even better idea would be to train and arm teachers, making sure the weapons are stored in a safe place, she said.
After a vigil for shooting victims Friday evening, she approached Gov. Greg Abbott and told him how she felt.
Her mom, Marisa Werner, a native of Monclava, Mexico, supports her daughters’ ideas.
“I’d expect to see this in a bigger community. But us?” she said. “We do the right thing here. We know each other. We’re low-key. Bad stuff doesn’t happen in our town.”
For now, Erin has mostly stayed off social media and instead busied herself with friends and family. She spends most of her days at friends’ houses or meeting with youth ministers at her church, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in nearby Hitchcock, Texas.
She’s been moved by the outpouring of support from people from around Texas and across the country.
The next big challenge will be Tuesday, when classes resume.
“There are no words that can express the overall grief we all feel as a result of this horrific event,” Santa Fe Independent School District Superintendent Leigh Wall said in a statement. “While we are anxious to have our students back in our schools, we realize that there are students, staff and families who need time for grieving and mourning.”
Erin knows it will be hard for some people to show up to school and others might not make it through the day. But she plans to be there.
“We want to go back, and we need to go back,” she said. “It’s part of our healing and part of our closure that we go back through those doors.”
“If you can’t trust the teachers with a way to protect us, who are you going to trust?”
Erin Werner