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?
The Smoking Gun
Day four changed everything. The prosecution had enhanced the security footage audio using some FBI tech and you could hear stuff we couldn’t make out before. At timestamp 9:47 a.m., right after the first shots, Misty Brown’s voice came through crystal clear saying,
“If this is real they deserve what they get for not respecting me.”
A juror actually gasped out loud. Even her own lawyer looked shocked because this wasn’t in any of the discovery materials. The judge had to call a recess when parents in the gallery started yelling.
Day five Miss Brown decided to testify against her lawyer’s advice. She sat in the witness box insisting she maintained perfect order, that we were never in real danger, that she was being persecuted for having standards. She said she was protecting us from panic and that running around would have been more dangerous.
The prosecutor let her talk for 20 minutes then asked one question that made the whole courtroom go silent.
“Did you recognize Jake Wilson’s voice when he was in the hallway outside your classroom?”
Ms. Brown froze completely. Her mouth opening and closing like a fish. After maybe 15 seconds she whispered, “Yes.”
The courtroom exploded with people shouting and crying and the judge had to bang his gavel over and over to get control. The prosecutor stood up slowly after things got quiet again and walked right up to Ms. Brown’s face. She asked the question everyone was thinking but nobody wanted to hear out loud.
“Did Ms. Brown know it was Jake Wilson in that hallway? The same Jake Wilson who filed three complaints against her last year?”
Ms. Brown’s hand started shaking and her face went from red to white to gray in about 5 seconds. The whole courtroom held its breath waiting for her answer. Finally she cracked and started yelling about how Jake needed to learn respect just like all of us did. The jury members looked at each other with their mouths open and one lady in the back row started crying.
The Verdict and Sentencing
3 weeks later we all came back for verdict day and you could feel the tension like electricity in the air. The jury took 6 hours to decide but when they came back they found her guilty on everything. 23 counts of putting kids in danger plus something called depraved indifference that sounded even worse. Ms. Brown fell down in her chair when they read it and for the first time she looked scared instead of angry.
The judge said she could get up to 25 years and the families of the three kids who died started sobbing.
2 weeks after that I had to read my victim impact statement at sentencing. My hands were sweating so bad I could barely hold the paper but I made myself look at her while I talked. I told her she taught me that being in charge without being smart about it was dangerous. That trying to control people without caring about them was just being mean. I said I’d carry those 47 minutes with me forever but she’d have to carry what she chose to do.
The judge gave her 18 years with a chance for parole after 12. When the guards put the handcuffs on her she turned to all of us and said she was just keeping standards. Even then she didn’t get it. And that was maybe the worst part of all.
