My Teacher Threatened To Expel Us If We Hid From A Shooter. I Disobeyed Her And Saved My Classmates. Now She’s Claiming She’s The Victim?
Dealing with Grief
Day 47 was my first good day since the shooting. I went six whole hours without thinking about it while helping Mom reorganize the garage. Then the guilt hit me like a truck. How could I forget, even for a minute, when two kids were dead?
Dr. Patel said healing isn’t linear during our session, but it felt more like betrayal. It felt like I was abandoning the kids who didn’t make it out.
The state board held their hearing on day 50 to revoke Miss Brown’s teaching license. She showed up in a black suit claiming this was a lynching of a dedicated educator. When they showed her testimonials from 37 former students describing her behavior, she called them weak children who couldn’t handle high standards. Several board members visibly pulled back from their microphones. The woman running the hearing had to call for order twice when Ms. Brown started yelling about cancel culture.
They voted unanimously to revoke her license permanently and referred the case to the attorney general for additional charges related to child endangerment spanning her entire career.
The next few weeks passed in a blur of legal meetings and therapy sessions until Detective Santos called me on day 52 with news that made my hands shake so bad I dropped my phone. She’d been digging through old personnel files at the district office when she found a sealed folder from 2009 about Ms. Brown’s transfer from Westfield High.
A student there had tried to kill herself and left a three-page note naming Ms. Brown specifically for the daily humiliation and mind games that pushed her to that point. The school quietly moved Miss Brown to our district rather than investigate because the superintendent’s wife was Ms. Brown’s cousin.
A Wider Conspiracy
Within hours of Detective Santos leaking this to a reporter friend, my phone started blowing up with notifications from a Facebook group called Survivors of Patricia Brown that already had 200 members. Former students from three different schools were sharing stories going back 25 years about her tactics. The public shaming. The way she’d give contradictory instructions then punish kids for being confused. How she’d gaslight students about things she’d said minutes earlier.
One girl from 1998 wrote that Miss Brown told her she was too stupid for college in front of the whole class then denied it when her parents complained. Another kid from 2003 said Ms. Brown made him stand in front of the class while she listed everything wrong with his essay including mocking his stutter.
The pattern was always the same. Always protected by administrators who found it easier to transfer her than deal with complaints.
Two days later my mom drove me to meet the Johnsons and the Garcias whose kids, Michael and Sophia, died in the shooting because they stayed at their desks following Ms. Brown’s orders. Mrs. Johnson held my hand while tears rolled down her face and said she didn’t blame any of us survivors.
Mr. Garcia’s voice cracked when he told me, “We fought to save ourselves while their children never got the chance because they followed the rules.”
We sat in their living room crying together for an hour, looking at photos of Michael and Sophia at prom just 3 weeks before they died.
Rebecca called that afternoon with updates on the prosecution strategy and what she told me made me run to the bathroom to throw up. They had evidence Ms. Brown knew Jake was likely targeting her based on previous incidents where he’d confronted her after class, but she deliberately kept us exposed as a form of psychological torture.
The prosecutors were going to argue she used us as human shields for her ego. That she’d rather risk our lives than admit she was wrong about the lockdown. The truth was more horrifying than any of us imagined. That she saw us as props in her power game even with a shooter in the building.
