One Small Town’s Response to a School Shooting

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Darkness covered Mike Miller Park in Benton, Kentucky, on the evening of Thursday, January 25, but candle light illuminated the spaces between the children, teenagers, and adults singing songs, praying and holding one another.

A musician strummed a guitar and sang a worship song as the crowd of around 1,000 people raised their flickering candles to the sky.

Parker Jennings, a Marshall County High School senior, stepped to the microphone and addressed those who had gathered. “The past two days have been the hardest two days of my life,” Jennings said with a Southern twang, his breath clouding in the January air.

It had only been about sixty hours since the tragedy, and the memories were still fresh in everyone's minds.

At 7:57 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, January 23, students waiting for their first classes to start at Marshall County High School in the county seat of Benton heard gunshots ring out from the commons area of their high school. Two fifteen-year-old students, Bailey Holt and Preston Cope, were killed. At least eighteen others were injured by gunshots or the chaos that ensued. Their classmate, then-fifteen-year-old Gabriel Ross Parker, a sophomore, was arrested minutes later and charged with two counts of murder and twelve counts of first-degree assault.

“I’ve personally been through some dark days. But I can’t remember a day that I experienced that much fear.”

The first major U.S. school shooting of 2018, the event shattered this rural, tight-knit county of just over 31,000, and quickly made national news.

“I remember just laying in bed and just crying,” Marshall County senior Cameron King said later, reflecting on the first days in the wake of the tragedy. “Every little thing would make me so sad.”

Despite the 40-degree weather on the night of the prayer vigil, King said she and her friends stayed for about an hour after it ended, “hugging everybody, saying I love you and just crying on each other.”

Over the next few weeks, Marshall County residents saw their community come together in new ways.

Jason McKendree, president of a local bluegrass organization and a 1999 graduate of Marshall County High School, helped organize a benefit concert at the Kentucky Opry in Benton. At that show, volunteers took in more than $3,500 in donations for the families of the shooting victims.

“I think just everyone’s trying to think in what ways they could help out,” McKendree said.

Three weeks later, members of a worship band held another benefit concert and raised $6,000 for families of the victims.

Band member and Marshall County native Jake Petway told me the shooting at his alma mater was “the single worst day” he could remember as a Marshall County native.

“I’ve personally been through some dark days,” Petway said, “But I can’t remember a day that I experienced that much fear.”

Across town, reminders of the recent tragedy were easy to spot. Blue and orange ribbons were tied to mailboxes and the front doors of homes. Letterboard signs at schools and churches spelled out “Marshall Strong,” a phrase also painted on shop windows around Benton’s tiny town square.

Just after 4 o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, February 3, people filled The Pond, a family-owned catfish restaurant in nearby Aurora. Proceeds from the day’s restaurant sales were going to the victims of the school shooting, said Heather Wyatt, who co-owns the restaurant with her husband, Jeremy.

The Wyatts’ son, fifteen-year-old Kobe Wyatt, a freshman, had stood just 100 feet from the shooting, Heather Wyatt said. Unlike some students, however, Kobe walked away uninjured.

When asked about the day of the shooting, Heather Wyatt took a long pause, and tried to blink away tears as she looked at the ceiling. She wasn’t ready to talk about that, she said, wiping her face.

Administrators at the school and law enforcement officials were figuring out how to respond as well.

Six days after the shooting, the district had sent a message to parents, informing them that school officials would start limiting the number of ways students could enter the building each morning. Any student arriving after 8:03 a.m., three minutes after the school’s official start time, would be required to check in with the front office. On Tuesday, February 6, staff members started screening students with metal detector wands before allowing them to enter the building.

Marshall County Sheriff Kevin Byars had rushed to the high school on the morning of the shooting and ended up leading Gabe Parker, the alleged shooter, off the school property in handcuffs. As I spoke with him, even weeks later it was evident that he was still disturbed by what he’d seen.

“Here, we’re close knit,” Byars said. “I knew the families of the injured, knew the families of the ones that were killed.”

Following the shooting, Byars put a second officer on full-time duty at Marshall County High School at the request of school officials. He also began working on grant proposals to fund more school resource officers.

On February 15, only twenty-three days after Marshall County’s shooting, another candlelight vigil was held. This time, however, those who gathered in Benton’s town square were praying for another community’s tragedy. Seventeen people had been killed when nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire.

“We hadn’t even turned on the bells at school yet. You couldn’t go to the bathroom without being escorted there. We still had counselors at school. We haven’t even had time to heal, and this happens to someone else, and now they’ve gotta go through the same thing.”

High school student Cameron King was headed to speech practice when she saw a Washington Post notification on her phone.

“It was so soon,” she said. “I mean, we hadn’t even turned on the bells at school yet. We hadn’t turned the bells on. You couldn’t go to the bathroom without being escorted there. We still had counselors at school. And we were just like, we haven’t even had time to heal, and this happens to someone else, and now they’ve gotta go through the same thing.”

“It was like we were in day one again from our own tragedy,” said Ethan May, an English teacher.

In the days following the shooting in Parkland, the high schoolers in Marshall County observed as Stoneman Douglas High School students began making headlines. Within four days of the Florida tragedy, a group of Stoneman Douglas students announced plans for March for Our Lives, a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest gun violence and advocate for reform.

For some Marshall County residents, the Stoneman Douglas students’ activism seemed futile.

At a car show in March—another fundraiser for shooting victims—fifty-two-year-old Lisa Tally criticized the Parkland community for not coming together

“They’re not doing near what our small community has done,” she said. “They’re just pointing the finger at each other. It’s crazy. And the kids are marching against guns and stuff. Why are kids marching against guns? That doesn’t make sense to me. It just doesn’t.”

Nearby, Kaitlyn Roberts, Sherry Roberts, and Kimberly Duncan stood around a bright orange Ford Mustang with strips of blue painter’s tape running down the middle. They agreed that school shootings shouldn’t lead to increased gun restrictions. 

“Why are kids marching against guns? That doesn’t make sense to me. It just doesn’t.”

“I don’t think it’s the gun’s fault,” Duncan said. “I think it’s the same as people who drive drunk. It’s not the car’s fault. . . . I don’t think there’s a bill that you could pass that’s going to fix the problem. Gun control is just a diversion away from the issue.”

Their conversation echoed comments by Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, who, the week of the Marshall County shooting, had said that school shootings were “a cultural problem,” spurred on by video games, movies, TV shows, and song lyrics.

But others feel differently.

Sixteen-year-old Keaton Conner, a junior at Marshall County High School, said the Stoneman Douglas students’ advocacy forced her to start rethinking how she’d reacted to the shooting at her own high school.

“It was terrible and the worst day of my life, but immediately after, my response wasn’t what I wish it had been,” Conner said. “The way these students in Florida have taken all of their grief and pushed it into making a change is something that I can’t help but think, if we would have done that would [a school shooting] have happened to them?”

“Here, a lot of people have just gone with the flow. They’re just like, ‘Oh, we’re a small town. We can’t do anything.’ ”

Sitting at a hi-top table at the local bakery in Benton, Conner recalled her evolution since the shooting. Within weeks, advocacy had become her focus. “I don’t think that I’ll be happy until I know that I’ve done all that I can do,” she said.

Conner’s friend Cameron King echoed her sentiments. King was a proponent of gun reform even before January 23, she said. Another school shooting on the heels of theirs seemed to wake a lot of people up.

“I think that’s kind of what we needed here to jump start a lot of things too,” King said.

But still, she added, Marshall County is not Parkland.

“They’re in a bigger community,” King said of the students at Stoneman Douglas. “They’ve got more diversity, more people willing to break the boundaries and step forward. Here, a lot of people have just gone with the flow. They’re just like, ‘Oh, we’re a small town. We can’t do anything.’ ”

On March 13, Marshall County Judge Executive Kevin Neal had released a plan calling for increased security at Marshall County High School. It included hiring six school resource officers and building a new sheriff’s office on the school’s campus so law enforcement officers would be on hand in the event of another school shooting.

But students like King and Conner want more. They already felt safer in their school than they had before the shooting. Now, they wanted to see gun laws change.

“We need to make sure nobody can get their hands on these types of weapons,” Conner said. “You can only do so much as far as security things. There has to be some sort of law in place that makes sure this never happens again.”

Heather Adams had watched her son, Seth, a freshman at Marshall County, struggle with anxiety and panic attacks after he witnessed the shooting at his high school back in January.

“And then, that shooting happened at [Stoneman Douglas], and that was enough,” Heather Adams said. “We had to do something.”

This led her to join a group planning a March for Our Lives event in Marshall County, one of over 800 “sibling marches” to the one Stoneman Douglas students were organizing in Washington, D.C.

At daybreak on Wednesday, March 14, a group of Marshall County High School students climbed into a charter bus and headed toward the state Capitol in Frankfort. Seth Adams, Keaton Conner, and Cameron King were there, joined by more than thirty-five of their classmates.

In Frankfort, they joined hundreds of students from high schools across the state, gathered to lobby for increased safety in schools. In the minutes before the rally was set to begin, the students fielded questions from reporters, held their signs high and occasionally broke out in chants—repeating phrases like “No more silence, end gun violence.”

As the demonstration officially got underway, Conner stood on a platform with several friends and other speakers.

“Our teachers, they prepare us for a lot of things—college, the ACT, going into the workforce,” Conner said when it was her turn to speak. “Our parents, prepare us for life in general—if we make it past high school.”

Later, Keaton walked down a few of the steps to where her father, Troy Conner, stood among other demonstrators. He wrapped his arm around his daughter and pulled her in close—something he knew some parents could no longer do.

Helen Gibson is a freelance writer and editor based in western Kentucky. You can read more of her work at helenmgibson.com.