It is the four-year anniversary of the Oxford High School shooting, and TikToker Avery (@averybleuey) was there to experience the horrific event. She is now sharing the story of what happened to ensure that the victims of the shooting are not forgotten.
On November 30, 2021, Avery had just finished eating lunch with her friends. They usually took a second lap around the hallway after lunch every day, but for some reason, they did not do so on that particular day.
Approximately a minute and a half before class started, she was about to ask the teacher if she could use the bathroom when the sound of gunfire rang through the hallway.
“I immediately knew what it was because there were rumors around the school that there was going to be a school shooting at the time, which just makes it all that much more of a slap in the face, and that more wasn’t done to prevent it,” said Avery.
She stood there in shock. Someone came up behind her and pulled her toward the back of the classroom, where they were supposed to hide.
There was also music playing throughout the hallway as the shooter blasted his gun, which made the situation even more surreal. Typically, a song was played over the announcements in the minute before class started so that was why there was music.
Avery felt that she was the most hysterical out of all her classmates. She didn’t think she had a chance of making it out alive. She texted her whole family goodbye because she thought they were never going to hear from her again.
“A lot of people say that the shooting happened for like five minutes,” Avery said. “I’ve also heard some reports of up to like eight minutes.”
“So, it started at 12:51 p.m. and then went on until around 1 p.m., but we were stuck in the class until around 2:30 p.m. because we were right there. It was all happening exactly on the other side of the door from where we were, and it was looping around the school.”
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The shooter only made it through about a quarter of the way through the school. Eventually, the police came to Avery’s classroom to let them out.
By then, the school had run out of buses to transport all the students to a nearby grocery store to get them off school grounds. So, Avery and her classmates had to ride in police vehicles.
They had to put their hands up and make sure not to look down in order to get out of the classroom. They waited in the area near the office to be taken to the grocery store. Avery was able to get out of the school an hour and a half after the shooting.
To this day, loud noises still make Avery jumpy and take her back to that traumatic time years ago when she was 14. There were four victims who lost their lives in the shooting: Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Madisyn Baldwin, and Justin Shilling.
According to Avery, there were countless adults who failed them, leading to the deaths of these four individuals. She thinks that it is necessary for adults to pay attention to signs of distress to prevent tragedies like this from occurring.
“It is our job, as I’m now an adult, to work to make school shootings stop and end because it’s too much,” concluded Avery. “No one deserves this, and it is important to me that the story of Oxford High School lives on and people remember what happened.”
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
