Story by Blake Sandlin, Assistant Sports Editor
Story by Ashley Traylor, News Editor
“Everyday you get up and you can choose to be late to school, but this time it was in his hands. It’s either you get out and live, or you’re going to stay and die.”
Marshall County sophomore Kaden Chiles, along with hundreds of other students, were gathered in the Commons Area just outside of the school’s cafeteria at 7:57 am. Chiles was with friends on the far side of the room when a bang rang throughout the room.
“It sounded like a balloon had popped,” Chiles said. “I just thought it was a joke, like they were popping a bag of chips or something. Then two more went off and I looked over there and saw him holding his pistol with both hands, and I saw him shoot one more time and I actually saw the fire come out of the end of it. Then it was rapid; I heard like seven or eight more shots I think.”
The assailant was just a few short feet away from Chiles, standing near the school’s upper gym lobby, facing a crowd of vulnerable students.
“He didn’t know how to shoot the gun, I could tell by how he was moving and how he was holding it,” Chiles said describing the face-to-face encounter with the suspect. “His face, it wasn’t angry; it was almost determined. It was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Something changed when he had that gun his hands,” Chiles continued. “He looked like he wanted to kill a certain type of person, but I don’t think he had anyone in particular because I don’t think anyone has given him a reason.”
The seconds that followed prompted utter pandemonium for the students at the high school that morning. Chiles was forced to make a split-second decision; a fight-or-flight response that would prove imperative to his survival.
“I had no plan,” Chiles said. “It was just instinctive. As soon as I realized it was a gun, I thought ‘I have to get out of here’.”
As the 15-year-old attempted to navigate through the chaos, he was concurrently aware of the turmoil unfolding around him.
“At one point, everyone realized what was happening at the exact same moment and that they had to get out,” Chiles said. “It was just panic. Everybody hit the ground. I remember seeing everyone just ducking or hitting the ground and just laying down because it’s just instincts at that point. I remember everyone was running to get out and everyone was getting trampled.”
Chiles began to run toward the school’s office area, but quickly recalibrated and found a set of doors that led outside of the school. He managed to escape the chaos and found himself, like many others, running for his life.
Chiles said students sought refuge wherever they could – for some, it was local businesses like Defew’s Body Shop or Doss Dentistry; for him, he found himself sprinting towards King Brothers, a local supermarket located nearly a half mile away from the school.
“I ran out [the doors] and tripped at least four or five times,” Chiles said. “Everyone at that point was running out, and I probably got three-quarters of the way to King Brothers before I stopped and turned around because there was no point in me going all of the way there.”
He encountered his cousin while trying to escape the area, and the two of them slowly made their way back to the campus, where he saw administrators ushering students towards Marshall County’s Technical Center, a separate building located behind the school.
There, students were sent to separate classrooms as the school was put on lockdown. Students were instructed to sign in and were told to place their backpacks outside of the rooms.
While many students were isolated to the Technical Center, numerous others were left scattered all over the campus – several were lodged in the school’s weight room outside of the football stadium, others were hiding in the guard shack on campus.
The Marshall County school system has previously devoted time training students on how to respond in crisis situations like the one that occurred Tuesday morning, but Chiles said when confronted with the worst, those efforts went out the window.
“It’s good to prepare like that and it all makes sense to not let anyone in your room and locking your room and setting up everything, but at the end of the day, in that situation, it becomes real and doesn’t work,” Chiles said. “It was pretty much crap and didn’t help anybody because we’ve always done drills for when you’re in class. We did lockdown drills for when we were in class; we never did anything for when we were in the Commons.”
The Murray State News chronicled the accounts of several Marshall County students in the wake of the shooting. Read their stories below.