[Photo by Daniel Parks]
Amber Hensley rushed from Thurston High School’s cafeteria to meet her mom in the parking lot. She’d forgotten her orchestra uniform and needed it for a concert that day — May 21, 1998.
As she walked through a breezeway between buildings, the high school junior brushed by her classmate, Kip Kinkel. He was headed into the school. Their eyes met. Hensley smiled. He stared blankly.
“I was like, ‘OK,’” she said. Something seemed off.
A few seconds later, Kinkel pulled a gun from beneath his trench coat and shot two classmates, killing one.
Hensley turned around to see two boys lying on the pavement, shot and bleeding. The shooter headed for the cafeteria where students had gathered for breakfast. She saw the door close behind him.
Just inside, Joshua Pearson and his friends were gathered at long tables. Kinkel approached Pearson’s best friend and fired another bullet.
“He had walked all the way right up and pretty much stood over Mike (Nickolauson) and shot him in the head,” Pearson recalled of his friend’s murder, “and I was right on the other side of the table.”
Pearson saw one of his friends tackle the shooter and ran to help. They struggled to take his gun. Kinkel fired another shot, which pierced a student’s finger and continued through Pearson’s buttocks and lodged in the wall behind him. Pearson said it felt like he got punched.
Recovering from a gunshot wound would be the easiest part.
Pearson and Hensley narrowly escaped death and witnessed horrific scenes that day in Springfield, Oregon: The shooter killed two students and injured 25 others.
[For more of this story, written by Tara Bannow, go to http://www.bendbulletin.com/ho...r-a-school-shooting#]
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