Two days after a shooting spree by a troubled woman in a North Shore suburb left one 8-year-old boy dead and five of his grade school classmates injured, religious leaders in Winnetka on Sunday offered prayers and counsel to children and families still reeling from the violence.
Religious leaders scheduled a special interfaith prayer service Sunday afternoon at St. Faith Hope and Charity Catholic Church, 200 Ridge Ave., Winnetka.
And a group of parents and children gathered earlier in the day at Sacred Heart Catholic Church for a special mass that turned into a counseling session to help some children still frightened by Friday`s violence.
”My kids are preoccupied with this, and the fact that it was a baby-sitter,” said one parent, Karen Ward, whose children are 5 and 8. Her children do not attend the Hubbard Woods Elementary School, where Laurie Dann, 30, barged into the school Friday and shot 6 children before eventually killing herself. But Ward`s children, who attend another Winnetka school,
”very much want to talk about it and the person who did it and why,” she said.
The shots killed Nicholas Corwin, 8, of 700 Locust St., Winnetka, and wounded five others, all from Winnetka. Reported in serious condition late Saturday at Evanston Hospital were Robert Trossman, 6; Kathryn Miller, 7; and Mark Tebourek, 8. Lindsay Fisher, 8, was reported in critical condition at Evanston. The condition of Peter Munro, 8, was upgraded Sunday from serious to fair by officials at Highland Park Hospital.
Laurie Dann arrived at the school about 10:30 a.m. Friday, after leaving the house of Padraig and Marian Rushe, where she had set a fire that briefly trapped Mrs. Rushe and two of the couple`s children in the basement.
Two schoolboys said Saturday that they had seen Dann outside the school, looking through a classroom window-perhaps seeking out another Rushe child, Richard, one of 100 children on a field trip to Chicago.
Dann walked through the main entrance of the gabled school and went into a boys` restroom. Robert Trossman, 6, was inside. She shot him in the chest. She dropped a .357 Magnum revolver on the restroom floor, and the wounded child dragged himself down the hall to his homeroom. He looked at his teacher and said: ”I`m shot. Am I going to die?”
The teacher covered his wound and told her pupils to lie on the floor.
Two other boys saw the shooting and ran to their classroom to report it. Their teacher rushed to the principal`s office.
Meanwhile, Dann had gone to Room 7, where substitute teacher Amy Moses, 30, was in the middle of a bicycle-safety lesson with the 2d graders.
For an adult who was not a teacher to walk into a classroom was not that unusual.
”This is a very open school,” a parent who did not want to be identified said Saturday. ”Parents do that all the time. You just go in and observe the kids any time.”
The children are not certain what happened after they saw the woman with the gun.
”This gun is real,” some students say Dann told them. ”I have a real gun,” others remember her saying. And she ordered the teacher to gather the children in one corner of the room.
”What are you talking about?” Moses asked, and then she grabbed the hand in which Dann held a gun.
”What are you doing?” Dann asked. She grabbed a second gun, a .22 caliber automatic weapon, and started shooting.
Dann ran out a side door to her car. She left chaos behind. Two horrified children hid under the teacher`s desk; the rest followed Moses to the principal`s office. At the sound of gunfire, teachers in other classrooms told the children to lie on the floor.
Within minutes, the drama moved to a large house in a heavily wooded area only a few blocks from the school. After leaving the school, Dann crashed her white Toyota Cressida into a tree at the dead end of Hamptondale Road. In the car or in the woods at the end of the street, she changed clothes. During the shooting, she had worn a tan T-shirt and white drawstring pants.
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When she emerged from the woods, she was wearing beige shorts and a pink sweatshirt. She ran up to the white stucco house at 2 Kent Rd., the home of Raymond and Ruth Ann Andrew, and went into the kitchen with a gun in one hand. In the other she held a plastic bag with her third weapon.
”She seemed confused,” Mrs. Andrew said. ”She said she had been attacked, that someone was after her. But she wouldn`t put down the gun.”
The Andrew family, including Mrs. Andrew`s father and her son, Philip, 20, was nervous. Philip persuaded Dann to use the phone, to call someone.
Dann telephoned her mother. ”I`m sorry,” she said. ”I shot someone.”
During the phone call, Ruth Ann Andrew slipped out the door. Philip tried to talk Dann into going to the police, then struggled with her. The next to last bullet Dann was to fire came from her third gun and struck Philip in the chest. He staggered out to the driveway and collapsed. He was reported in serious but stable condition Sunday at Highland Park Hospital.
Police cordoned off the house. Inside, Dann was alone. At some point, she shot herself in a bedroom in the home. Police found her body at 7:20 p.m.
In the meantime that afternoon, schools in the area reacted to the horrifying events of the morning. Officials at Hubbard Woods Elementary School kept the children inside until about 3:15 p.m., despite droves of anxious, weeping parents who showed up outside. While the parents waited, social workers and psychologists talked with the children about the tragedy.
”The school couldn`t have handled it any better,” said Blanche Romey after she picked up her daughter, Katie, a 1st-grader. ”The kids have done a lot of listening, and the school officials told us to take them home and let them talk.”
Up and down the North Shore, school officials acted to protect their own students, not knowing whether a killer was still loose.
In Glencoe School District 35, Supt. Charles R. Young ordered all 925 students bused home, even though about half of them normally walk.
”We didn`t want to take a chance of putting kids on the street when we were uncertain what was out there,” he said.
John Sloan, superintendent of Avoca Elementary School District 37 in Wilmette, said when the shooting at Hubbard Woods took place, the police called his office ”almost immediately and advised us to lock down. That`s what we did (at the district`s two schools), and put our custodians at all accesses.”
The doors of the Hubbard Woods school were open again Saturday. But this time, instead of an armed woman, they admitted the confused parents and frightened children whose lives were so dramatically affected by what that woman did inside the school.
It seemed appropriate that in the genteel community of Winnetka-more of a quiet, isolated village than a suburb of a major American city-school officials were so concerned about the mental well-being of students and parents that they held a session to counsel and comfort them the day after Laurie Dann had shot the children at the school, killing one and seriously injuring the others.
”Right now we`re focusing on the feelings of the children in relationship to the school,” said District 36 Supt. Donald Monroe. ”We wanted to get them back in the school, let them know this is a safe place.”
Back at the Andrew home, police kept watch rather than rush the house because, as Winnetka Police Chief Herbert Timm said, ”We`ve had enough violence today.”
Near the end of the vigil, Dann`s father, Norman Wasserman, could be heard pleading through a bullhorn:
”Please come out of there if you can here me, please. Laurie, please come out. Laurie, pick up the phone. Laurie, pick up the phone. Please . . . please.”
At 7:20 p.m., a police commando unit from the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System entered the house, bringing Laurie`s father, Norman Wasserman, along in a final effort to get through to her.
They checked the basement, then the first floor. And then, in one of the children`s bedrooms on the second floor, they found the crumpled body of Laurie Dann, who had shot herself in the mouth with a .32 caliber pistol.
At Saturday`s counseling session, attended by about 500 parents and children, officials briefly outlined the support programs available for the families. Then the group broke up into smaller groups presided over by social workers.
Walter Rest, director of Family Service of Winnetka-Northfield, said that when the meeting broke into the smaller groups, ”there was a lot of hugging, a lot of solidarity.”
”This is a small community, and it`s a close community,” said Police Chief Timm. ”So that when some tragedy occurs, it`s like a sense of extended family.”
Fearing the psychic reverberations of Laurie Dann`s acts, the school will hold a weekly meeting for discussion and counseling at 7:15 p.m. every Wednesday.
School will be closed until 1 p.m. Monday so children can attend the 10 a.m. funeral service for Nicholas Corwin at Temple Jeremiah, 937 Happ Rd., Northfield. At 2:30 p.m., a memorial service will be held at the school.