SANTA FE HIGH’S YEAR OF FEAR
Before shooting, students endured flooding, climate of dread
SANTA FE, Texas – The school scared them now. ❚ One terrible day had passed since the shooting, but Reagyn Murphy and Kalysta Dodson had to return to collect the purses and car keys they’d left inside. The best friends, both sophomores at Santa Fe High School, boarded a yellow bus and rode through their shattered small town. ❚ Nobody on the bus spoke. Ten students stared through hazy windows that framed their town’s panic. They passed the flashing lights and plastic flowers, the memorials that had appeared in the day since a gunman opened fire, killing eight students and two teachers.
Santa Fe’s 1,400 students staggered through a year of vigils and extended school closings. Normalcy never arrived.
Murphy and Dodson dreaded the sight of their school, fearing the tears that would surely come. The drive through small-town Santa Fe was short. Before they were ready, the bus turned off Highway 6, pulling into the parking lot that still held cars of the dead.
The bus stopped, the door opened, and a police officer led them back into a school frozen in time.
The girls stepped over broken glass and door handles that had been ripped off. They read posters that hung halfway off the walls, pulled apart in the rush to escape. They stared through the gate that blocked their wing of the school from the art complex hallway.
“Everything was just untouched,” Dodson said.
They walked upstairs and shuffled into their geometry classroom, where textbooks and math assignments were spread across the desks, sprinkled with the last crumbs of breakfast. Backpacks covered the floor. The projector screen was still on the same page it showed when the armed attacker downstairs threw Santa Fe High School into the center of another national nightmare.
Even before the shooting, Santa Fe’s 1,400 students had staggered through a year of vigils and extended school closings. Normalcy never arrived.
Two weeks after classes started, Hurricane Harvey crashed into southeast Texas. The storm flooded Santa Fe’s main road and gutted dozens of homes.
Panic arose again in February, when reports of popping sounds sent the school into lockdown. Students hid behind desks and pressed tight against classroom walls, hiding from a gunman who never arrived.
Then one did.
This week, instead of printing prom pictures and planning graduation parties, this small city held free community dinners and formed prayer circles. A florist was busier than ever, building bouquets for funerals she wouldn’t have time to attend. The baseball team voted to play without its best pitcher, who was shot in the back of the head but survived. The district attorney warned graduates that they were entering a “spiritual war zone,” full of death and evil. Some residents blamed the shooting on a decision to stop holding prayers before each school day.
The high school became the scene its students had long feared. Yellow police tape blocked gawkers from the brick building. A horde of news trucks covered a nearby field. The school’s sign flashed reminders of graduation, even as students tried to decide if they ever wanted to return.
Dodson swore she could never feel safe there again. Already, she said, the school felt like a sad museum.
A police officer kept watch as they found their desks and slid papers into their backpacks. Dodson picked up her purse. Murphy reached for her car keys with a shaking hand.
“What grade are you in?” the officer asked them.
“Sophomore,” Murphy replied, trying not to cry. She wanted to see clearly, to remember everything about the school that had endured so much.
Without another word, the girls slung bags over their shoulders and walked back outside. Another yellow bus pulled up. They climbed the steps and sat in the sticky seats, feeling themselves crumble inside as the school in the window shrank away.
August: Hurricane Harvey
They thought Santa Fe would be safe. Stuck in a patch of nothing between Houston and Galveston, it’s the kind of place where most students complained that little ever happened. Excitement came at football games Friday nights and $10-a-plate barbecues on the edges of Highway 6.
It was a town that believed in its people, who almost all shared two bedrock beliefs: faith and firearms. If one couldn’t protect them, the other would.
Four days after the school year began in late August, as Hurricane Harvey swirled through the Gulf of Mexico, most Santa Fe residents assumed they could withstand the storm. Larger cities across southeast Texas evacuated. Santa Fe never did.
Most of its 12,000 people huddled in their homes as the Category 4 storm swept over the city. They watched as Highway 6 filled with water, and they prayed that leaky roofs would hold.
“That was the first bang of this school year,” Santa Fe High junior Verity Latham said. “We didn’t really know how to handle it.”
Latham, 17, started the school year with music on her mind. Her interests at Santa Fe High revolved around the choir. She was vice president, an alto destined to finish well in a statewide vocal contest, hoping she could spend her junior year singing and meeting the new students who seemed to come every few weeks.
She liked the high school. Maybe sometimes the athletes were too competitive, the town too focused on its football and baseball teams. She didn’t want to play sports, but “I feel like it’s a pretty OK town,” she said. “I just love the people here. I haven’t really had any problems here.”
On what should have been the fifth day of school, Latham tried to stay calm as rain slammed against her house. She wanted to call her friends, to make sure they were safe, but there was no time. She helped her family pick everything off the floor to save it from flooding. Later, she found her dogs swimming in the waters rising outside her house.
The next day, Santa Fe was unrecognizable.
The school district canceled two more days of classes, then the rest of the week. It called off the entire next week, too. Latham and her friends stayed in their homes, stranded by floodwaters that refused to recede.
Santa Fe High stayed closed until Sept. 11, more than two weeks after Harvey raged through.
When the doors opened again, Latham said, everything felt different. Classes moved more quickly as teachers who missed two weeks of lessons rushed to catch up. New friendships had to start over. Latham heard friends talk about living in RVs and hotel rooms, pushed out of soggy houses. Other students never came back. They were replaced by refugees from nearby places: Lamar, Galveston, Texas City.
“You could just see a dramatic difference, before it happened and after,” Dodson said. “Everybody was just not themselves.”
They kept going. They had seen the worst, Dodson thought, and somehow they survived.
February: Lockdown
The alarm shrieked, teachers slammed shut their classroom doors, and Kayte Alford stood stranded in the hallway.
A voice came over the school’s announcement system, something about a situation and a lockdown. The school launched into the active-shooter procedures it had practiced.
Alford, a senior, panicked. The thought of school shootings had lodged in her mind. It had been two weeks since a student killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and two days since one of her own classmates allegedly posted threats on social media.
Somebody reported hearing a popping sound, and Alford pounded on the door to her English classroom. “Let me in!” she screamed. Finally, it opened, and she tore into the dark room, throwing herself behind the teacher’s desk. Around her, students squeezed themselves out of sight.
Alford called her mother, who was already rushing toward the school. “I just want to tell you I love you,” Alford said over the phone. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
In her bedroom a few miles away, Latham’s phone lit up. She paused the Glee marathon that carried her through sick days and opened a group text with her choir friends.
What’s happening? one friend asked. We’re in a lockdown, another responded.
Like a shooter lockdown?
Stuck in her bedroom, Latham scrolled through rumors that came from Snapchat and in frantic texts: Shooters were running rampant, some students claimed. Others declared that somebody found a bomb. Everybody had seen police officers exploring the school, searching for whatever had set off the panic.
They never found the source of the popping. An hour later, the lockdown lifted. Administrators called it a false alarm that spiraled out of control.
Again, they thought, Santa Fe had avoided disaster.
“In light of recent tragic nationwide events, we realize this incident was especially concerning for our students, staff and parents,” Santa Fe Independent School District Superintendent Leigh Wall said in a statement. “We appreciate your support as we continue to focus on providing a safe environment for all our students and staff.”
April: Walkout
The school’s illusions of safety were gone. The school district’s police de- partment offered a free course on how to respond to active-shooter events, but the invisible barrier that blocked Santa Fe High from the shootings on TV had been pierced. Dodson took off the rest of the week, trying to convince herself it had just been a scare.
When she walked back through the doors, she felt tension everywhere.
“Everybody was sensitive to sounds,” she said. “If someone was slamming a book, they would jump.”
Suddenly, Santa Fe High had become another American school waiting for another American school shooting.
The hallway discussions transformed. As student-activists from Parkland demanded the nation’s attention, some students in Santa Fe started to talk about gun control and school safety. One wondered why students didn’t have to walk through metal detectors, like at airports and county courthouses. Others asked for fewer guns.
Their calls were drowned out in Santa Fe, where guns dangle from hips across the county. They bounce off the legs of lifelong Texans everywhere from the sermon at Arcadia First Baptist to lunch at Kat’s Barbecue. Fences and front gates announce their owners’ right to bear arms. One sign read, “We don’t call 911,” right above an engraving of a revolver.
Santa Fe’s new activists protested carefully. Most of their classmates didn’t know they participated in the National School Walkout on April 20. Parents who heard about it scoffed, then swore their child would never participate.
A dozen protesters gathered before the morning bell, making sure not to disrupt anybody’s attendance. They stood in the cool morning air, read a poem by a Parkland survivor and held a homemade sign, scribbled as if in a hurry: “Santa Fe High School says #NeverAgain.”
For 17 minutes, they stood in silence, honoring each of the victims a thousand miles away. Then they put away their sign and walked back into the school where they no longer felt safe.
May: The attack
From her floral design class, across the school and up a staircase from the art complex hallway that echoed with gunshots, Alford heard only the fire alarm. Her classmates were confused. Nobody could remember seeing a fire drill on the schedule.
As the teacher hurried her class out the door, Alford searched for flames and smelled for smoke. She found nothing. Her class dashed along their preplanned exit route, past a principal who urged them to “go go go” and into a field that surrounds the school. She looked back. Still, she saw no flames, only the principal chasing them, waving for them to flee.
Around town, police officers sprinted to their cars and headed toward the school. Screens across the country began to flash with the news that most of Santa Fe High’s students hadn’t yet heard.
Alford couldn’t figure out what was happening, even as her classmates formed single-file lines and held their hands high.
Then a truck pulled up. Her best friend lay in the back, clutching at her leg with shaking hands. Alford had never seen her so pale, had never seen her shake with such intensity.
“What is going on?” Alford asked as the school year plummeted into its darkest moment. “What is wrong with you?” Her best friend looked up.
“I’ve been shot.”
Santa Fe High School became the scene its students had long feared. Already, for some, it felt like a sad museum.