DETROIT — The last lunch period had just ended at Oxford High School when the gunshots began.
Thirty of them rang out in all.
The blasts thundered through the hallways as spent shell casings cartwheeled across the floor.
Students and staffers screamed and ran, seeking refuge in barricaded classrooms, toilet stalls and anywhere else they could find it. Behind them, they left a trail of coats, books, backpacks, cellphones and overturned desks. In under five minutes, the shooting ended.
The damage was just beginning.
One arrested. Four dead. Seven wounded. Hundreds terrified.
Across Michigan and beyond, thousands more were rattled and anxious about school safety.
Nov. 30, 2021, will be forever stained in infamy, but it began as a cold Tuesday morning, with people in and around Oxford High School starting their day much as they had on Monday.
Rising early
Stephen Cumbey, 54, of Oxford, works odd hours in his trucking job. On Tuesday, he got up about 3 a.m. to reach his work assignment in Highland Park by 4:30 a.m.
A couple hours later, his sons, Zander, 17, and Nolan, 14, rose and headed to classes at Oxford High, while a third son, Ashton, 13, attended Oxford Middle School.
Oxford Township Supervisor Jack Curtis, 68, is an early riser, too. As he does most days, he got up at 4 a.m., climbed into his white GMC pickup and listened to classic rock as he drove the 5 miles to his office at the township hall.
Laura Lucas, 45, of Mayfield Township, woke up hungry that morning but couldn't eat because she had a stomach scope scheduled that day. Her 15-year-old daughter, Ashlynne Sutton, a sophomore at Oxford High, pleaded in vain for snacks to bring to her sign language club.
“I'm like, ‘Honey, it's 6:45 in the morning. What am I supposed to do?'” she said.
Isabel Rodriguez, a 16-year-old junior at Oxford High, is usually up by 5:30 a.m., but that morning, she missed her alarm, got up at 6:30 and hurried her routine to make it to school on time.
Bailey Ganey, a 14-year-old freshman, was on schedule. Her dad dropped her off at 7:30 a.m., leaving her enough time to circle the halls and chat with friends before classes started.
Dr. Tressa Gardner runs the emergency department at McLaren Oakland Pontiac Hospital, 18 miles from Oxford High. She got to work for a 7 a.m. meeting, then drove to Ascension St. Mary’s Hospital in Saginaw for a ceremony to mark the opening of a newly built emergency department.
7:48 a.m.
The first bell at Oxford High rang at 7:48 a.m. and by then, about 1,800 students were already in the building.
Among them was sophomore Ethan Crumbley, 15.
He'd gotten in trouble the day before when a teacher caught him using his cellphone to search for ammunition on the internet, investigators would later say. School officials reported the search to his parents by voicemail and email, but they never replied.
On Tuesday, according to prosecutors, Ethan Crumbley's first-period teacher spotted a note on his desk that was so troubling, she immediately photographed it with her phone.
The note included a drawing of a semi-automatic handgun pointing at several sentences: "The thoughts won't stop. Help me," investigators reported it saying.
But there was more. A drawing of a bullet next to the words: "Blood everywhere."
Still a third image depicted a bleeding person and a laughing emoji.
And more words.
"My life is useless.
"The world is dead."
Calling the parents
A school counselor came to the classroom a short time later and took Ethan Crumbley to the front office to await his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley.
School administrators had summoned them to a meeting to discuss the note, which by then had been altered with some words scratched out, investigators would later say.
School officials would later say the boy explained the drawing was part of a video game he was designing.
School officials showed the drawing to the parents and told them they needed to enroll their son in counseling within 48 hours or the school would contact Child Protective Services, School Superintendent Tim Throne said on Saturday.
But at the meeting, law enforcement officials say, the parents never mentioned that on Black Friday, James Crumbley had bought a 9 mm Sig Sauer SP 2022 gun that was a gift for his son.
Prosecutors would say they later found several worrisome social media posts. One from Ethan Crumbley with a photo of a gun that said: "Just got my new beauty today," along with heart emojis. Another from his mother read "Mom and son testing out his new Christmas present."
Investigators would say they found a text message Jennifer Crumbley sent to her son after he'd been caught searching for ammunition:
"Lol. I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught."
Throne said that at the meeting, counselors questioned him in front of his parents about whether he sought to harm himself or others. His answer satisfied them that he intended no harm. The Crumbleys "flatly refused" to pull Ethan Crumbley from school that day and they left without him, according to Throne.
"Given the fact that the child had no prior disciplinary infractions, the decision was made he would be returned to the classroom rather than sent home to an empty house," Throne said.
He returned to class with his backpack, which likely contained the handgun, authorities said.
Feeling normal
Other students were in class in what they said seemed like a normal Tuesday.
Bailey Ganey was sticking to routine, hoping to earn her way back into the good graces of her father. He'd taken away her cellphone two weeks before, when she was caught skipping a class.
First hour was a biology test and then came English, a class she shared with Hana St. Juliana.
“For some reason in that class I looked over at Hana," Bailey said. "I had seen her that morning … laughing and talking to her friends.”
Isabel Rodriguez enjoyed her morning, renewing her daily habit of snapping a fun photo with friends. She decorated posters for Oxford’s upcoming charity week.
As lunch ended and fifth hour was about to begin, Isabel said goodbye to her friends and repeated another daily habit.
“I always give my friends hugs before I say goodbye to them,” she said. “And so I gave them hugs and said goodbye and walked to the bathroom.”
The bathroom was crowded so she waited her turn for a stall. Then she washed her hands.
As she reached for her backpack, Isabel heard a sound that didn’t fully register. It was the same sound that would prompt dozens of people to call 911 about a possible school shooting at Oxford High.
Shocking sounds
At first, they were like the loud clangs of locker doors slamming shut, part of the daily din in Oxford’s halls during class changes.
Isabel stepped out of the bathroom and into a central hallway to head to algebra class.
Then she froze.
Screaming students were running past her with horror on their faces. She heard more loud clangs and realized they were gunshots echoing through her hallway.
Isabel and her classmates had gone through active shooter drills before. But this was really happening. As she stood in the middle of it, her mind struggled to process her next move.
“I heard more gunshots, and I was just kind of frozen,” Isabel said.
Two screaming girls ran toward her, directing her back into the restroom. The three girls hid in one stall — Isabel on one side, freshman Julia Begley on the other. The third girl, another freshman, crouched behind them on the toilet.
Isabel’s head rested on Julia’s shoulder. Julia clutched hands with the third girl, her close friend.
Julia said her mind cycled through all the unknowns: Where was her brother? Where were her friends? Were her history classmates already in the classroom, barricaded against the gunfire? Or were they in the line of fire?
Julia called her mom to say she loved her and confessed her fear that she wouldn't leave that bathroom alive.
“We heard another gunshot, which was in the boys bathroom directly next to us,” Julia said. “I thought, ‘They're coming in next.'”
Isabel estimates the three students stayed in the stall for 10 minutes before a man found them and asked them to come out with their hands up.
At first, Isabel didn't believe the man was a sheriff's deputy. She wedged her foot in the stall door to secure it. She bid goodbye to her mom on the phone as she peered through the side of the stall door.
There she saw two older men in uniform with guns and realized they were cops.
The deputies escorted the three girls out.
In the hallway, they saw bodies lying on the floor, with someone crouched over them administering CPR.
“I knew that there were people dying, I heard a little bit of screaming but I just finally comprehended that people were hurt when I saw that,” she said.
Isabel yearned to help the ones who weren’t getting CPR. The terrible image of students on the floor cemented her plans: She wants to become a nurse.
12:51 p.m.
Ashlynne Sutton also was hiding inside a bathroom when she called her mother, Laura Lucas, just before 1 p.m.
Ashlynne whispered for her to be quiet and told her about the shooting. She asked her mom not to hang up.
“I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” the teen whispered.
Lucas recounted that her daughter was alone when she heard the loud noises. When Ashlynne started to leave the bathroom, she saw people lying on the ground.
That’s when she ran back in, headed for the last stall and positioned herself on the floor between the toilet and the wall. Over and over, Lucas remembers, Ashlynne told her mother she was all alone.
Back at home, on the other end of the call, Lucas began pacing the room while hushing her preschool-age son, Dylan.
Lucas turned back to her daughter on the phone, trapped inside Oxford High, trying to reassure her: “I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.”
As she scrambled to get to the school, Lucas could hear other voices in the background on the call. She said she could hear screaming too.
"We need help. We need help over here,” she heard someone say.
Her daughter wanted to offer that help, but Lucas cautioned her.
“Honey, you don't have medical training, you stay right there,” Lucas said.
Things grew worse when the screaming stopped and the silence came. Then the call dropped. She didn’t dare call back.
“I knew I could get her killed," Lucas said. "There was no way I was going to call back or even text because if it makes a noise and her volume was on — I wasn't going to do it.”
Ashlynne called her mom back, but the line kept dropping. In between, Lucas would try to reach family members, only to hang up to answer her daughter’s rings.
During one disconnection, Lucas would learn, Ashlynne tried to leave the bathroom. Someone screamed at her daughter to stay back.
Crying, praying
Bailey Ganey's lunch hour was earlier. The clock was approaching 1 p.m. when she'd left math class and headed to history, where she dropped her backpack and hoodie at the desk.
She and a friend walked down the hall to the bathroom. She knew she had time before the bell rang, but she was mindful not to be tardy. Dad had warned her about missing class again.
She left the bathroom and rounded the corner with her friend. Suddenly, she heard about a dozen gunshots. Then screams. She dared not look behind her.
“Everybody started running, like the people in front of me starting running,” she said. “I heard some screaming. And it was like the gunshots were so loud because this guy (the shooter) was 20 feet behind me.
“I was thinking, if we would have left that bathroom 30 seconds to a minute later than we did, then we probably would have ran into him."
The two girls were near their classroom when Bailey's history teacher, Jacob Trotter, grabbed them both and pulled them inside. They would be the last ones in before Trotter secured the door.
They joined between 20 and 30 students crouched in the corner. There wasn't enough room on the floor for Bailey, so she stood behind a bookcase.
After locking the door, Trotter began barricading it with student desks, but he kept one near him. Bailey thought: That's to throw at the gunman if he breaches the door.
They heard noise outside the door and assumed it was the shooter.
“The energy in the room, everybody just held their breath," Bailey said. "People were crying and praying. … They had their heads down praying.
“I was trying to be calm. I was trying to calm my friend down … at the same time in my head, I was, like, preparing. I was, like, in my head saying, ‘How bad is this going to hurt?’ I was like, 'What does it feel like to get shot?' and basically preparing to die.'”
The banging sound got farther away and then fell quiet. Another student, offering to give hugs, started telling classmates that it was going to be OK and that cops were on the way.
Then a woman's voice came over the classroom speaker, announcing the school was in an ALICE lockdown, a reference to the active shooter training the school had practiced in the past.
“You could just hear in her voice, she was just terrified,” Bailey said.
Soon the teacher started distributing phones that had been put away in a cubby, per classroom rules, back to students. Bailey borrowed a friend’s phone to text her own dad.
“I texted him that there is a shooter at our school and I love you,” Bailey said.
He texted back his assurance: You'll all be OK.
Driving frantically
At about 1 p.m. Stephen Cumbey's cellphone pinged with a text from his middle son, Nolan.
"He said, 'There's a shooting at the school. I'm safe,'" Cumbey said. "He gave me his room number and he said, 'I'm in there.'"
But what came next was even more shocking.
"He couldn't get in touch with his brother, my older son, Zander, the junior," Cumbey said.
Cumbey was 40 miles away in Highland Park. He grabbed his things and raced to his car.
Once he made it onto northbound Interstate 75, he stomped the accelerator of his Kia Sorento. He was out of Highland Park in no time and the city limits now clicked by like fence posts: Detroit, Hazel Park, Royal Oak, Madison Heights, Troy.
"I was just hightailing it back to Oxford as quick as I could," he said.
Nolan texted again to say he'd reached Zander, who was OK. Then Zander texted too.
But Cumbey wasn't going to slow down.
"It was still an active situation at that point and they were still locked or barricaded into their classrooms," he said.
It was probably around Bloomfield Township or maybe Auburn Hills when Cumbey noticed the cop cars. Dozens of them, from a bunch of different cities, lights flashing and sirens screaming.
"They were just flying up the freeway and I knew they had to be going there," Cumbey said. "They were already way out of their jurisdiction and they were heading north so I just kind of floored it and tried to keep up with them."
He followed them all the way into Lake Orion, where traffic backed up on M-24. Cumbey took back roads the rest of the way into Oxford.
Oxford Township Supervisor Jack Curtis was on M-24 that afternoon, too, returning from a car dealership, when he saw emergency vehicles start flying by.
“The worst thing I could think of wrong was there was an accident, and I'd have to find a different way to get back to the office," he said.
As more and more blaring law enforcement cars zoomed past him, he realized something awful sinister was taking place in his township.
“As I was continuing my roll north, there were 14 police cars from different municipalities, and when I looked at the last one and saw ‘Southfield,’ my heart sank," he said of the squad car so far from home.
He would spend the next eight hours at the township hall, helping out as best he could. He helped parents and relatives of the victims who came to the office to be debriefed by deputies.
"I met a grandmother at the door and didn't know it was the grandmother of one of the victims," he said "My heart was torn out of my chest, immediately torn out of my chest.”
Looking for the gun
The world began to learn about what was happening at Oxford High around 1 p.m. that day.
Prosecutors would later say the Crumbleys immediately linked the unfolding tragedy to the possible actions of their own son.
At 1:22, Jennifer Crumbley sent an urgent text to her son: "Ethan, don't do it."
Minutes later, at 1:37 p.m., James Crumbley called 911, reporting that a gun was missing from his house and he believed his son may be the shooter, prosecutors say.
After the shooting, Ethan Crumbley surrendered to deputies in the school and was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and related charges, authorities said. A plea of not guilty was entered on his behalf during a court hearing Wednesday.
James Crumbley had been storing the gun that prosecutors say his son used in an unlocked drawer in the bedroom he shares with his wife, according to prosecutors.
By Friday, the Crumbleys themselves would face involuntary manslaughter charges for their connection to the gun. They failed to appear for an expected arraignment, a massive police manhunt ensued, which ended with their arrest inside an east-side Detroit warehouse early Saturday during the dark of night.
Later on Saturday morning, both Crumbleys pleaded not guilty to the charges, remaining in jail pending posting a bond of $500,000 each.
Preparing for disaster
By 1 p.m. Tuesday, Dr. Tressa Gardner was back at McLaren Oakland Pontiac Hospital, where the emergency room was packed as never before.
Every bed was filled as Michigan’s fourth coronavirus wave rises and other sick people streamed in for medical care they'd been postponing.
Then came the call about 1:08 p.m.: A gunman firing inside Oxford High School, about 18 miles north. Emergency medical services rushed to the scene.
"The minute that the sheriff's department called, the next step was to empty our trauma bays," Gardner said.
She triggered McLaren’s disaster protocols, a series of moves to create space for an unknown number of gunshot victims in an already crowded emergency room. An alert notified the entire hospital staff of what was coming.
“Nobody will ever forget it,” said registered nurse Courtney Berry, the hospital's trauma program manager.
Berry helped write the hospital’s disaster preparedness manual, but this was the first time it had been used for a school shooting, she said. Many of her colleagues had children and grandchildren who attend Oxford High. They felt “fear, absolute fear” as they waited for the patients to roll in, she said.
"I've been trying to call my son. He's not answering," one staffer said, according to Berry. Another remarked, "My son is a high school-aged kid."
Putting the kids first
Staff members wheeled extra gurneys into the emergency room while waiting patients were moved elsewhere in the hospital. Discharges were expedited and elective surgeries postponed to free up operating room space and staff.
Employees cleared two trauma bays and created a third, stringing curtains around a gurney in front of a supply closet. The whole preparation took about seven minutes, according to Gardner.
Nurses and doctors who were off that day called, offering to come in and help.
Gardner knew her staff couldn't fail their own community. “We may be under extreme amounts of stress on a daily basis due to the COVID crisis and everything that we're dealing with from a staffing perspective, but this was above and beyond. And the team knew. They knew that they would be needed. There was no hesitation. None.”
Gardner walked through the ER to inventory the patient needs when the TV in the lobby aired a local news bulletin with reports of the shooting. She was stunned by what she heard next.
She was checking on other waiting patients, but "they were like, ‘Don't worry about me. You take care of the kids.' " Gardner said, adding the compassion moved her to tears.
Berry recalls standing in the trauma bay, waiting and taking a deep breath to prepare.
"I chose this. This is where I want to be," she remembered thinking. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than here with this team.”
1:28 p.m.
The first ambulance arrived at 1:28 p.m. carrying Elijah Mueller, a 14-year-old boy who had been shot in the jaw and hand. He was stabilized and hurried to another unit to make room for more patients.
Two others arrived seconds later. One was a 17-year-old girl with a gunshot wound to the neck. The other was Justin Shilling, 17, who had been shot in the head.
Justin would die at 10 a.m. the following morning. At his family's request, his body remained on life support until Friday so that his organs could be donated to patients in need.
After Justin Shilling's parents chose to donate his organs to Gift of Life, the community gathered for an honor walk at McLaren Oakland Pontiac Hospital.
"His potential was boundless in life and yet in death he continues to give of himself as an organ donor," his family said. "We feel the world can’t have too much of Justin."
Justin's death was the fourth death related to the shooting.
Tate Myre, 16, died in a squad car that was racing him to the hospital before the first ambulances arrived at the school, according to the Oakland County sheriff.
Also killed were Madisyn Baldwin, 17, and Hana St. Juliana, 14, whom Bailey Ganey remembered laughing and smiling in their second-hour English class.
In a mass casualty situation, Gardner said, all the area hospitals go on alert, prepared to take patients.
“There was a lot of congestion coming south,” Gardner said. “So the next two patients went to the north” to McLaren Lapeer Hospital.
One of them was Oxford High School teacher Molly Darnell, whose shoulder was grazed by a bullet.
The other was a critically wounded 14-year-old girl with chest and neck gunshot wounds. She underwent surgery and was placed on a ventilator, then transferred to Hurley Hospital in Flint.
Another wounded 17-year-old girl was taken to St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital in Pontiac. A 17-year-old boy with a bullet wound to the hip was treated at Ascension Hospital in Rochester Hills.
Finding a new reality
Gardner directed patient traffic in the emergency department when she saw a 15-year-old boy whose parents had driven him to the hospital with a gunshot wound in his left leg.
“I will not ever forget his face,” she said. “It was the look of anguish and confusion and shock. I don't even know how to put it into words. I just wanted to grab him and hug him and make all of this be just a dream, a nightmare. But that's his reality now. He lost friends.”
The orthopedic team quickly treated that boy and he was soon released, though some wounds will take far longer to heal, Gardner said.
Gardner said that between 3 and 3:30 p.m., word came to McLaren Oakland that it could finally stand down. All attention turned to the critically injured already in the hospital’s care.
Elijah Mueller, the 14-year-old boy with gunshot wounds to his jaw and hand, was released from the hospital Wednesday. Both of his parents teach in Oxford.
Reuniting with loved ones
Back up in Oxford on Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Cumbey edged his car into the crowded parking lot of the local Meijer store, a pickup point for fleeing students.
"The kids were just being basically fed into one door by the pharmacy," Cumbey said. "They were all going through a checkpoint there, checking in, I guess, so they could account for everybody. Once they passed through that, they let them out the main front doors of the store. And that's where I saw them come out and I just ran up and grabbed them."
Cumbey drove his boys to the middle school to collect their brother before heading back to his apartment. He'd been up since 3 a.m. and so, by about 11 p.m., he finally went to bed for a fitful night of sleep.
"I think I was just so emotionally exhausted at that point that that's what allowed me to fall asleep," he said.
Township Supervisor Jack Curtis' long day also ended in tears.
He said he had kept his emotions in check all day, but when he made it home about 9 p.m., the floodgates opened inside his own garage.
"Nobody can see me, I can let out the tears," he recalled thinking. "Then my wife comes out and says, ‘Are you OK?'’'
He sobbed in her arms and replied: "Yeah, yeah, I'm OK. I'm OK, I just dealt with this tragedy in our community. And everybody is trying to help, and I can't help them enough.”’
Gardner, the emergency room doctor from McLaren, said she herself has sometimes fallen into a trap health care professionals face, believing they have no right to grieve patients they couldn't save.
“I didn't lose my son. My child wasn't injured, so I don't have a right to grieve," Gardner said. "I don't have a right to have any emotion about this because it's not personal to me. I'm the physician taking care of this patient.”
But Gardner said the conversation in health care is starting to change, acknowledging that while doctors and nurses are professionals, they’re also human.
“You’re a mom. You’re a grandma. This is personal to you, too,” she said. “You have to allow yourself to recognize it and work through it. … We're getting better in our profession because we never used to talk about these kinds of things. We never shared emotion about it.”
Berry, the registered nurse and Gardner's colleague, felt grateful, days later, about the team’s quick response to Tuesday’s crisis, though that pride is tinged with guilt.
“I feel a little guilty that I feel so proud of Tuesday because it was such a tragic event,” she said. “But it was really, really impressive to see the team come together and just get it done.”
Back in Oxford, Bailey Ganey was outside school waiting to board a bus to Meijer to reunite with her dad, when she spotted her history teacher in tears as he hugged another teacher.
“That was probably the saddest thing I have ever actually seen in my life,” Bailey said of her teacher.
“I am grateful … how he handled the situation. I mean he saved our lives. If he wouldn’t have pulled us into the classroom, I don’t know what would have happened.”
Contributors: Dana Afana, Lily Altavena, Elisha Anderson, Dave Boucher, Brian Dickerson, Jennifer Dixon, Paul Egan, Joe Guillen, Clara Hendrickson, Phoebe Wall Howard, David Jesse, Gina Kaufman, Georgea Kovanis, Miriam Marini, Mick McCabe, Jeff Seidel, Nushrat Rahman and Niraj Warikoo.
