A year later, remembering a school shooting

A year ago today, the unthinkable happened in St. Mary’s County. On March 20, 2018, there was a fatal shooting at Great Mills High School.

On that cold, rainy Tuesday morning, the safety and security of that school — and for a time, all of Southern Maryland — was violently shaken. Austin Wyatt Rollins, 17, brought a Glock pistol to school that day. Just before 8 a.m., he shot Jaelynn Rose Willey, 16, with whom he had been in a relationship. The single round he fired at her also struck another student, 14-year-old Desmond Barnes, in the leg.

Very quickly, Deputy Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer for Great Mills assigned by the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office, moved down a parallel hallway and briefly tried to talk with Rollins, urging him not to do any more damage. According to the agency’s reports, Rollins turned the gun on himself and fired simultaneously with Gaskill’s single shot at the pistol in the teenager’s hand.

Rollins died later that day of his self-inflicted wound. Barnes was treated and released the next day. Willey died the day after that, following her parents’ decision to remove her from life support.

It made regional and national news in a way St. Mary’s never wanted publicity. We had joined an awful club — the club of communities where gun violence in a school had taken young lives. A lovesick teenager had killed his former girlfriend, and then himself, with an available handgun, a pistol legally owned by his father. How Rollins would have dealt with his broken heart had he not had access to that Glock pistol is something we’ll never know.

But as terrible as this was for the families whose children died or were injured, in terms of public safety the facts of the case eventually brought a strange kind of relief. This wasn’t a mass shooting by an unbalanced person with an arsenal and a global agenda, as had occurred in Florida just a month before. This shooting was specific, and it was over.

That’s one of the big takeaways of this scenario. It was not Columbine. It was not Sandy Hook. It was not the mosque shooting in New Zealand. But that’s no comfort to two families who had to bury their teenagers, and a third who dealt with the physical and emotional scars of gun injury.

In the days and weeks after the shooting, numerous school marquees proclaimed “We Are … Great Mills” and #HornetStrong trended on social media. Such an outpouring of assistance was exactly what you expect of St. Mary’s County, with its well-earned reputation for mobilizing when circumstances call for empathy and action.

And now, a year later, students and staff at Great Mills are still getting back to life as normal, or maybe a new normal, hopefully forged in greater unity. But sadly, they know that “it can’t happen here” just doesn’t apply anymore.

So are St. Mary’s schools any safer than last March 20? It depends. Great Mills now has a safety vestibule at its main entrance through which students and visitors are funneled each day, and the other two high schools are expected to follow suit. The sheriff’s office already has one resource officer at each of the high schools, and two covering the four middle schools. The school system has added 14 safety and security assistants at the high schools, while another six are at the middle schools. Handheld metal-detecting wands are ready for use, and more security cameras are in the works, as well.

Charles County schools have stepped up similarly with additional security measures, and continue to develop longterm plans for more. Recently, the school system entered into an agreement with the College of Southern Maryland to use the La Plata campus as a re-unification site for family and students during such a crisis.

And in Annapolis, legislation that has languished to varying degrees for the past decade has gotten a new push from the Great Mills tragedy.

Will all of that be enough? There’s no telling.

Today, Great Mills is hosting a number of activities aimed to soothe anxious souls, foster even more school unity and continue the healing — but those are for the school community only. A public vigil is scheduled at Chancellor’s Run Regional Park at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 22.

Here’s hoping as we mark March 20 in future years, we can commemorate it as yet another one without gun violence in any of our schools.