After the Shooting

Before Virginia Tech, before Columbine, there was Paducah, Ky. A 1997 school shooting there left Missy Jenkins Smith paralyzed, but not without hope. She has a husband, a baby on the way and a message on how to stop the violence.

MURRAY, Ky. — The massacre at Virginia Tech seemed more like a memory than news to Missy Jenkins Smith.

"When something like that happens, it's almost like re-living it again," she says from the kitchen of her house in Murray, Ky.

It should. The details of the Virginia Tech tragedy are strikingly similar to the Dec. 1, 1997, school shooting at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky., that turned Jenkins Smith from a member of the marching band into a T4 paraplegic — paralyzed from the chest down.

Every morning she would meet in the school lobby with 30 to 40 other students to say a prayer before the start of the day. That morning, freshman Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old outcast often bullied because of his small frame and clownish behavior, brought a loaded .22 handgun to school.

Missy Jenkins Smith discusses how her life has changed since being paralyzed in a 1997 school shooting » View

"After we said 'Amen,' he pulled the .22 out of his backpack and started shooting at us," she says. "And the very first thing I saw was someone get shot in the head."

Like student accounts from Virginia Tech, Jenkins Smith says she thought the violence wasn't real — that it was just an elaborate prank.

But then a bullet entered her left shoulder, pierced her lung and severed her spinal cord. She fell to the ground, but still didn't realize she had been shot until her twin sister, who protected Missy's body with her own, told her what had happened.

She had not seen the shooter, but her sister had. The name Michael Carneal shocked her almost as much as her wounds. He had been a friend.

"Whenever there was a class trip, I always wanted to get on the same bus as him because I knew he would make the ride fun," like when he made a cape out of a "Twister" game board, she recalls.

But others were laughing at Carneal, not with him — something he shrugged off on the outside, she says. But on the inside, he seethed.

Carneal fired eight rounds into the group of praying students, but when he saw he had hit some of his friends, he put down his gun and surrendered to the principal.

When the shooting stopped, he had hit eight students, killing three and wounding five.

He received three consecutive life sentences. Soon after the shooting he wrote to Jenkins Smith to apologize, but she wasn't ready to deal with him yet.

He even called her family home. When her father answered, Jenkins Smith recalls, Carneal just said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," until her father hung up the phone.

In the letters he wrote, Jenkins Smith says, Carneal talked about his problems, including feelings of paranoia — again, similar to the persecution complex expressed by the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho.

Jenkins Smith says now, 10 years later, she's ready to speak with Carneal and ask him questions that have bothered her for a decade.

Missy Jenkins Smith, her husband Josh
and an ultrasound image of their child

She would like to know what he was thinking when he brought the gun to school. "What was going through your mind when you did this?"

She says Carneal's answers would help her in the work that she's taken up since the shooting: speaking to school students about preventing the kind of violence that changed her life. It has become her purpose in life, she says.

"I need to warn people about what I've learned from the school shooting," she says. "About the importance of treating others the way you would want to be treated."

She says bullying and treating other students with disrespect can push social misfits on the edge to murder. She says it's also critical to read the warning signs; students that do resort to violence will usually give off indications of what they're about to do.

"I always try to tell people about the importance of speaking up when they see these signs," she says. "I'm a pretty good visual about what violence can do."

Despite what was taken from her, Jenkins Smith didn't surrender to her circumstances. She went to college and earned a degree in social work. Now, fittingly, she has a full time job working with emotionally disturbed students.

She also got married last year to a man she met in college, physical education teacher Josh Smith.

But perhaps the most appropriate and symbolic representation of her sense of hope is the fact that she is now four months pregnant.

"We weren't sure it would happen," says Josh Smith, tossing a stuffed animal around with their dog Charlie in their living room. "But obviously everything works," he says with a smile.

"Just because I'm in a wheelchair and paralyzed," says Jenkins Smith, "doesn't mean I can't do things anyone else can do."

She says that she will teach her child about the dangers of life; it indeed can be a violent world. She is a perfect example. But she'll also teach that showing a little respect and kindness could be just what it takes to disarm an angry soul.

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