1978, a teen opened fire at Lansing Everett. It has lessons for Oxford.

“It just puts you as a parent on high alert about how easy that can be,” she said.

A shock on the school grounds

When the Everett shootings happened, Murray said the shooting seemed surreal to students and staff. Unlike today with the gloomy standard procedure, Everett had no lockdown exercises, no active shooter training. No mass exit practice. And no armed officers in the corridors. You were completely unprepared.

What would be the point?

“People didn’t know what to do. We never had drills for that. It was never brought up because it had never happened before, ”said Murray, who retired from Lansing Everett in 2015 after 38 years of career.

“We knew there were shootings at the time, but that didn’t happen in schools. It just didn’t happen. ”

In the aftermath of the Oxford shootings, authorities commended students and staff for their disciplined response, including barricading classrooms and reducing the number of people exposed to the shooter.

In 1978 Everett students had no such education. Becky Qashat remembered a swarm of students who used the same exit to escape.

“It was like a herd of animals running down the stairs. I remember a girl falling down the stairs because she pushed and pushed so much, “she said.

“Then we stood outside and tried to find out what was going on.”

By that afternoon, Everett was best known as the school that produced college and future NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who graduated the year before.

The shootings gained new, unwanted notoriety.

After Needham’s arrest, the police searched the teenager’s bedroom, where they discovered a hiding place with Nazi literature, Nazi armbands, a Nazi flag and extracts from “Mein Kampf,” a Needham diary named “My Struggle,” named after Hitler’s book.

In one of the entries Needham wrote: “I almost abandoned Hitler last night – because my colleagues pushed me too far. Without my Nazi pin in my jacket, I almost went to school. But luckily I had another attack of courage and will never again think about giving up Mein Führer and National Socialism. “

The entry was written two days before he shot Draher and Jones.