Zack McMillin: They came floating through her Chicago office, two words transmitted from a news alert on Dec. 14, two words conjoined to form the awful phrase that has become all too familiar to 26-year-old Mary Hollis Inboden: “School shooting.”
As the details began to emerge from the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., the professional actress recognized well what was happening to her even as she struggled to control it — her breathing was increasing, the panic starting to rise.
Again.
Some part of her was back on that playground, a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Westside Middle School
outside Jonesboro, Ark., the pop-pop-pops not firecrackers but bullets — one of them exploding into her best friend, Paige, standing right next to her.
As Inboden puts it: “When a school shooting happens, it always feels personal. It feels like I am being attacked.”
But in the minutes and hours that followed, something else happened, too — messages began arriving, many of them from the 870 area code of Northeast Arkansas, from the twenty-somethings who experienced the March 24, 1998, tragedy that resides in America’s troubled cultural conscience as, simply, Jonesboro.
They now refer to one another as the Warriors, after the school’s mascot. Four of their classmates and an English teacher died in the shootings perpetrated by Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, 13 and 11, who had pulled a fire alarm to lure their classmates outside.
As word of the tragedy in Connecticut began to spread, the Warriors were reuniting.
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