Here we are, approaching the one-year anniversary of the killing of Josselin Corea Escalante at Antioch High School. I just want to say, in order to honor Josselin with the truth, that she died for nothing. Her death was utterly preventable, and there are important lessons we can learn about school safety, effective changes we can make, ways we can prevent her fate from being the fate of others, and we have done nothing as a city but played Cover-Your-Ass.
It's bullshit.
There are still so many things we don’t know. How did the shooter, Solomon Henderson, get a gun into the school? What adults were present in the cafeteria when he drew his gun? How was he even in that school after pulling a box cutter on another student earlier in the same school year?
I got a tip last year that someone at Metro Nashville Public Schools had been in contact with someone in the Davidson County Juvenile Court repeatedly intervening on behalf of Henderson, trying to get him back into Antioch High School after the box cutter incident. Wanting to confirm the tip, I asked an MNPS spokesperson for a copy of the correspondence going from MNPS to the court regarding Henderson. The spokesperson declined to share it with me, citing student privacy concerns. I responded that the dead have no rights, and that any student privacy laws were intended to protect the student, not the people who failed him and his victims — and that's who is being protected, in my opinion, in this case. I also offered that I didn’t even need the contents of the emails. I just would like to see who from MNPS emailed the court about Henderson and when. Obviously I didn’t even get that, and I’m still salty about it.
But there is a big difference between Henderson was kicked out of school for pulling a box cutter on a student, but ended up back at Antioch when the student’s family refused to press charges, and, After repeated calls and/or emails from MNPS to the courts and the victim’s family abruptly deciding not to press charges, Henderson ended up back at Antioch. We don't know if that's the case, but as a city, we should know if someone at MNPS was putting their thumb on the scale on Henderson’s behalf.
Go back and read what Gregory Lerime, the uncle of the girl threatened with the box cutter, told WKRN the day after Josselin was killed: “[The girl in the box cutter incident] called me and asked me do I think she should press charges for it. I was like, ‘I don’t think you should press charges for it.'” Later he says, “I have a kid in school. The mother of my child is an educator in school.”
Somebody with this direct connection to MNPS felt like it was a waste of time for his niece to press charges, and that didn’t bring anyone up short? Raised no concerns anywhere? I’m all for finding ways to put juvenile offenders back on the right path, but not at the expense of other students. He pulled a box cutter on a girl and he got to go back to school with her. Nashville, that is fucked-up.
Teen threatened student with box cutter in months prior to shooting
Kelly Latham, an assistant principal at Antioch at the time, is now suing Antioch’s executive principal Nekesha Burnette and the city over what happened to her in the wake of the shooting. You can read the filing over at what is basically Tennessee's Daily Wire for old people, Steve Gill’s TriStar Daily. This is the first public account we have from an MNPS administrator about what happened that day.
Her account is chilling. She says she heard calls for help and ran toward the cafeteria, heard gunshots and kept running. Latham says that when she got to the cafeteria, she saw Solomon Henderson shoot himself. The filing doesn’t say where she was running from, so we don’t have a sense of how long it was, but there was some length of time between when students knew they needed help and when Henderson fired his first shot.
There might not have been anything that anyone could have done in that moment, but every decent adult at Antioch has probably spent a year asking themselves what they might have done, had they been in the right place. And then Latham witnessed a child kill himself as she, herself, according to her filing, was trying to save children. It’s gut-wrenching to think about.
But man, put yourself in the shoes of those kids. Someone pulls a gun. You call for help and ... what? How long does the time before anyone responds stretch out? You watch a fellow student die. You see another student die. Maybe then you realize an administrator is there, but it’s too late. You can’t ever unexperience that. You can’t unknow that no one stopped Henderson except Henderson himself. Then you learn that he pulled a box cutter on a girl a few months before. You learn about the child sexual abuse material he downloaded. You learn about the guns police had previously found in his house. Maybe you too hear rumors that someone in MPNS intervened on his behalf, to make sure he was able to come back to your school. If the experience wasn't enough to show you that adults will let you down, learning about all the red flags Henderson was flying, and learning that adults knew about them before the shooting, has to be.
And now, a year later, how are you?
I’m a strong believer in the importance of public schools. My mom was a teacher, my uncle was a teacher, my grandma was a teacher. I know the transformative work that happens in our public schools. I see how Republicans are working hard to dismantle the public school system in our state, and I am appalled. I will always be Team Public School over Team Private School.
But this isn’t a sport. A girl is dead because she was forced to go to school with a deeply troubled boy who wasn’t getting the help he needed. A boy with a deeply troubled history known to MNPS is dead instead of getting the help he needed. What a waste. What a terrible, terrible waste.
Someone apparently made the decision, more than once, to keep Solomon Henderson at Antioch and not place him in any of the facilities set up to get aid to troubled kids. This is a failure of judgment so severe that it cost a young student her life. And that person has never been publicly identified, so we don’t know if they’re still in a position to make more decisions like this.
School board OKs $300K agreement following July lawsuit claiming MNPS failed to protect students from harm
Does saying so make public schools look bad? Is it furthering an argument for private schools? Is it bringing too much heat on an already beleaguered system?
So what?
Josselin Corea Escalante’s life mattered. The lives of the children who have to now live with witnessing her death matter. Even Solomon Henderson mattered. This tragedy happened in public, in a taxpayer-funded school. But all the resolutions so far have been private, ostensibly to protect the rights of the dead, but in effect protecting the reputations of the living.
As taxpayers, we paid for the killing floor. We paid for the settlement with Josselin’s family. We might also end up paying for the settlement between Kelly Latham and the city. We’re paying for all the ways our school system screwed up, but we don’t get to know what those ways are? We don’t get to know if the people responsible for the screw-ups are still in charge? How is this OK? Why are we accepting this?
There is no way to give Josselin what she deserves: her life. But we can act like we understand that her life mattered and was stolen from her on our watch, and we can take accountability for what went wrong and change. That would honor her.
We’re not doing that. We’re failing, yet again, to act like she matters. It’s obscene.
