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 Investigation Deepens
Day 10. My phone buzzed with a news alert while I was eating breakfast. The school board had placed Ms. Brown on administrative leave pending investigation. Which sounded good until I read the teachers union statement underneath, calling it a rush to judgment against a dedicated educator with 25 years of service.
The comment section was already at 300 posts: half calling her a hero for maintaining order, half calling for her arrest. Mom shut my laptop and told me to stop reading, but I’d already seen my name mentioned 14 times.
That afternoon, Principal Foster showed up at our door looking like he hadn’t slept in days. He sat on our couch and stared at his hands while telling Mom about the complaints over the years. Parents saying Miss Brown was too rigid, too harsh, but she had tenure and her students got good test scores, so nothing ever happened. His voice cracked when he mentioned the two kids who didn’t make it out.
Day 11 started with my phone exploding at 6:00 a.m. because someone had leaked Jake’s manifesto to a news site before the FBI could lock it down. Three whole pages about Ms. Brown. How she failed him on his senior thesis over a missing footnote. How that one grade kept him out of his dream college. How she laughed when he asked for a chance to fix it.
The details made my skin crawl. Dates and times and conversations he’d recorded secretly, building his case for why she deserved what was coming.
Our lawyer Rebecca called an emergency meeting that night with all 23 families from Ms. Brown’s classroom crammed into a conference room at the Holiday Inn. She stood at the front with a stack of papers and dropped the bomb that the school district knew about Jake’s fixation on Ms. Brown because his therapist had sent a warning 2 months before the shooting.
The room erupted with parents shouting and crying and demanding answers while Rebecca tried to explain about mandatory reporting laws and liability.
The Media War
Day 12. I woke up to 47 Instagram notifications because Ms. Brown had gone on some podcast called Truth in Education and spent an hour painting herself as the victim of woke culture and teenage hysteria. She actually used my full name, called me a troubled student with attendance issues, twisted my grandmother’s funeral into me skipping class for fun. The host kept agreeing with her, saying,
“Kids today are soft, can’t handle structure, need safe spaces instead of real education.”
Rebecca filed a cease and desist within 2 hours, but the episode had already been downloaded 12,000 times. My Instagram filled with strangers calling me a liar, an attention seeker, a crisis actor. Someone found Mom’s work number at the hospital and started calling the nurses station, asking if she was proud of raising a daughter who destroys teachers’ lives.
It’s day 13. Tyler came over with his sleeping bag and sat up on my bedroom floor because neither of us could handle being alone anymore. We lay there in the dark at 3:00 a.m., both wide awake staring at nothing.
He kept going over that day. How he could have pulled the fire alarm from the chemistry room. How that would have evacuated everyone before Jake even started. The what-ifs were eating us both alive, but there was nothing to say that would make it better.
Ms. Brown’s husband, who sold real estate all over town, started a GoFundMe for her legal defense the next morning that hit $30,000 in 6 hours. The description called this a witch hunt against a dedicated teacher. Included photos of her at graduations with former students who became doctors and lawyers, carefully leaving out anyone who didn’t fit the narrative.
People from three states away were donating and leaving comments about how liberals are destroying education.
Day 14. Ben’s mom called to say they were pulling out of the group legal action, her voice shaking as she explained that Ben’s dad’s construction company had just lost three major contracts with no explanation. She kept saying they couldn’t prove it was connected, but everyone knew Ms. Brown’s brother-in-law ran the biggest development firm in town and golfed with half the city council.
