Witnesses to deadly shooting at Ohio school describe chaos

 Witnesses to deadly shooting at Ohio school describe chaos

CHARDON, Ohio – As they huddled in locked-down classrooms waiting for a nightmarish shooting to end Monday, Chardon High School students did what teenagers everywhere do when they're looking for answers: They texted, tweeted, phoned and Facebooked.

They learned the incident was not a drill and kept in touch with parents, but they also got misinformation that made the tragedy sound even worse than it was.

Authorities said a teen gunman opened fire inside the school cafeteria around 7:30 a.m., fatally wounding one student and seriously injuring four others. The suspect was taken into custody near his car a half-mile from the Cleveland-area school of 1,100 students.

• MORE: Listen to audio from emergency responders

• PHOTOS: Shots fired at Ohio school

• BLOG: Latest updates on the situation

Heather Ziska, 17, said she was in the cafeteria when she heard popping noises in the hall. She said she saw a boy she recognized as a fellow student enter the cafeteria and start shooting.

"Everybody just started running," said 17-year-old Megan Hennessy, who was in class when she heard loud noises.

Hiding in classrooms, frightened students spent more than an hour trying to communicate with the outside world and get reliable information, said senior Matt Goergen, 17, who was in first-period English class when the school went into lockdown. Many in the room didn't believe there was a shooting until "a girl sitting next to me got a call from her dad saying it was real," he said in a text message interview.

Sophomore Trevor Miducki, 16, was in the hallway next to the cafeteria when he saw two girls "running down the hallway, just, like, sprinting" from the cafeteria.

Locked into his first-period English classroom, Miducki heard sirens outside but wasn't sure what was going on.

"We were all wondering what happened," he said. "We were all frantically texting our parents … We were keeping calm, but were all so scared."

Miducki said the atmosphere during lockdown was calm at first, but as the morning wore on, "it started to get more frantic and panicky."

After police confirmed that a shooting had taken place, "it was pretty panicked. Girls shaking, guys shaking, people calling their moms. It got pretty intense pretty fast."

Senior Seanna Sicher, 18, was in physics class.

"My class assumed that it was just a drill and drifted towards the back wall. Lights were turned out, the door was locked, the window covered," she said. "It was maybe five minutes later when our teacher received an e-mail and people started checking their phones. We realized immediately that it was serious and the whole room fell silent."

Sicher described the scene as similar to "a 9/11 movie" as students tried desperately to reach loved ones.

"It was almost impossible to send a message, too, because so many of us were trying," Sicher said by e-mail. "We were confused because everyone was hearing a different story: The shooter was caught, there were two shooters, six people shot, one person shot, shooter still on the loose — nobody knew what to believe. We had calls and texts from friends and family across the state and even country asking if we were OK and what was going on." 

Miducki and other students said social networking was helpful — except when it wasn't. Rumors flew on Twitter. "We heard so many different stories — it was crazy what we heard," he said.

Five students, including Daniel Parmertor and Demetrius Hewlin, were taken to local hospitals. Metro Health Medical Center later identified Parmertor as the lone fatality. But by then, a Twitter user had created an #RIPDemetrius hashtag mistakenly identifying Hewlin as the victim.

The school used a phone-alert system to tell parents about the shooting, and hundreds of parents rushed to the school Monday morning, where police, FBI, SWAT team members, ambulances and other officials were on the scene.

FBI agent Scott Wilson would not comment on a possible motive. Freshman Danny Komertz, 15, said the suspect was an outcast.

Junior Nate Mueller, speaking to The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, identified the alleged gunman, but USA TODAY is withholding the name because he is a juvenile and no formal charges had been filed.

The attack occurred amid a steady drop in school violence. After peaking in the 2003-04 school year with 49 fatalities, the number of students killed on campus has steadily declined.

Miducki, speaking by phone around 2 p.m., said he was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the shooting.

"It's so hard to grasp," he said. "This is literally something you would see in a movie or a video game."

Toppo reported from McLean, Va. Contributing: Alicia McCarty in McLean; Associated Press

 Source: UsaToday