It has been nearly 10 years since a madwoman stepped into a 2nd-grade classroom in north suburban Winnetka, brandished two handguns and opened fire, killing one child and wounding five others.
Despite the passage of time, the effects of Laurie Dann’s twisted act still ricochet through this quiet Social Register town as if the fusillade of bullets had tarnished the community with an unbearable–albeit undeserved–stigma.
Victims, for the most part, refuse to be interviewed about the shooting and question the “breeding,” as one resident put it, of those who do. School administrators say the event, tragic as it was, should not be remembered and have forbidden teachers from talking about it.
Even the local high school newspaper’s attempt to deal with the approaching anniversary, on May 20, turned into a debacle, offending a number of students.
Here, if the name of Laurie Dann is spoken at all, it is in private, a reticence that perhaps speaks volumes about invisible wounds still beneath the surface.
“It is a painful experience that none of us wants to dwell on,” said George Fisher, the father of a student in the classroom that day who survived a bullet that went through her arm, lung, liver and stomach.
“You can’t have a life-changing experience like this without having a tremendous amount of anger and frustration,” he said.
Lindsay Fisher, now a senior at New Trier Township High School and who is active in the gun-control movement, recently wrote a critical letter to the editor of the school paper in response to the paper’s short article headlined: “Ten years later . . . The shocking Laurie Dann tragedy cannot be forgotten.”
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“How could you be so naive to the emotions of people you don’t know?” Lindsay questioned, adding that the article brought more pain to the anniversary.
And substitute teacher Amy Moses, who tried to wrestle the gun away from Dann and can still feel the clammy chill of the killer’s skin on her palm, remains haunted by a never-ending list of what-ifs and could-haves: “I’ve thought of throwing desks, chairs, kicking her, knocking her over . . .” It’s an infinite litany of scenarios–some plausible, some over the edge–that brings her no peace.
But the majority of people have refused to publicly discuss the 1988 tragedy–one that was gruesomely echoed less than two months ago in a school shooting in Jonesboro, Ark.–and that reaction is typical of victims of painful trauma, say psychiatrists. They add that one of the quickest routes to healing is by talking about the very event that makes them so uncomfortable.
There were more than 300 children at Hubbard Woods School the morning of May 20, and many of them are now attending New Trier and preparing for college.
And while it is unclear just how many of those children still carry the trauma or even remember the graphic details of the event, Moses, the only adult in the room that day, does remember every agonizing minute.
In a rare interview, Moses, now 39, talked about the emotionally complicated toll such an event– whether it be the Hubbard Woods shooting or the Oklahoma City bombing–can take. Talking publicly is an effort on her part to raise awareness about the long-term ramifications of such tragedies and to foster healing.
She longs to see the children that she wanted so much to protect but feels unwelcome in Winnetka.
The calm before
The 2nd graders had been working together in small groups, busily chattering over a bicycle safety test, when a woman Moses didn’t know walked into the room. Visitors and parents often dropped by the school to observe, and Moses assumed this was no different.
The woman picked up some papers and started looking at them, then got up and left, Moses recalled. When she returned, the woman pulled a gun.
Having never seen a real gun before, Moses experienced a moment of bizarre disbelief. After all, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen in towns like Winnetka.
Moses then tried to get the the gun away from Dann and simultaneously yell for help out the classroom door. But Dann opened fire, ultimately killing one child and injuring six others before fleeing the school and later killing herself.
It was a tragedy that perhaps forever altered the idea that a sunny suburban elementary school was immune from the violence of the outside world. Indeed, it ushered in an era of school security in which visitors are checked and given hall passes–at Hubbard Woods for a time visitor name tags were dubbed “Laurie Dann labels”–and panic buttons were installed in classrooms.
Acclaimed as a hero by some, Moses also has felt blame from others. She has been tortured by recurring nightmares and her own irrational feelings that she alone could have controlled a lunatic assassin whose mental illness had eluded the efforts of trained psychiatrists.
In one recurring dream, things are exploding all around her, but she can only watch the world disintegrate. Her body is miraculously and inexplicably unscathed.
In her waking hours, she is particularly torn by the notion that she could have done something to stop what happened, even feeling guilty that she emerged without a scratch. She has endlessly agonized over whether she did the right thing to leave the wounded children and run to get help.
Repercussions have echoed through Winnetka, as well, ever since.
“It’s the kind of subject . . . one that hopefully will just find its way into the deep recesses of history. It is a tragedy that just doesn’t need to be brought up,” said Henry Bangser, superintendent of New Trier Township High School.
But in the words of one teacher who along with many others asked not to be identified, the Hubbard Woods children are “the little ones who saw too much,” and this teacher worries about how they are doing today as teenagers entering adulthood.
Ripples of trauma
One can only imagine the shock to the children.
In the classroom next door to Moses’, also for 2nd graders, pupils were jolted from their desks by gunshots that they later described as bombs exploding, followed by the clamor of unknown things– children’s bodies and empty bullet casings–dropping to the floor.
In the pandemonium, several children were rushed home by their parents, contrary to a plan intended to keep the pupils in class until the regular 3:15 p.m. dismissal to give a crisis team of counselors time to assess the situation.
One child was led through the halls and out the front door by her well-meaning mother, only to witness wounded schoolmates in agony, other children in shock and blood-soaked teachers.
“It was a mistake to take her home, because she saw a lot on the way out,” said one teacher.
Police records show that it was about this time that Robert Trossman, a 1st-grader whom Dann shot in a washroom, staggered through the hall and into his classroom, pleading in terror to teacher Alice Horevitz:
“I’ve been shot by a crazy girl. Am I going to die?”
Perhaps not by chance, one young witness, today a senior at New Trier, has mapped out a course that will take her to medical school and a planned career as a pediatrician.
Although she declined requests for an interview, the student was described by one educator as an independent, goal-driven teen who, rare for her age, “is in touch with her own mortality.”
“I have no doubt that her desire to help sick and injured children is at least partially a response to the Laurie Dann attack,” the teacher added, describing a young woman who has spent thousands of hours over the last four years working at a toy store just so she could be around children.
In all, six people were wounded by gunfire, including an adult at a nearby house.
They were Lindsay Fisher, 8; Robert Trossman, 6; Peter Munro, 8; Kathryn Miller, 7; Mark Teborek, 8; and 20-year-old Philip Andrew, a returning college student whose house Dann stormed after the shooting. Killed was Nicky Corwin, 8, whose legacy is a nearby park that bears his name along with friends’ and relatives’ memories of a precocious, athletic boy with a gap-toothed grin.
Fighting back
The Hubbard Woods tragedy propelled the Fisher family and others into activist roles. George Fisher, publisher of a financial newsletter, sits on the board for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. Lindsay started a similar organization for classmates called Teens Against Gun Violence.
And although Lindsay declined to talk to the Tribune about her organization, her letter to the editor of the New Trier News in mid-April was a vivid expression of her views:
“It is hard enough for me and others I have talked to, to deal with this upcoming big anniversary,” she wrote. “This article was the last thing I needed. Tears came to my eyes when I read the title of the article. How could you be so naive to the emotions of people you don’t know.”
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Indeed, it’s during the anniversaries that the memories can be the most painful, say survivors.
“The first anniversary and the next few springs after the attacks . . . whoa! They were just awful. The children associated the arrival of the warm weather with the shooting, and they’d make Laurie Dann bombs in the classroom with little rubber bands,” said one former Hubbard Woods teacher. “It’s just what you did. You protected yourself in the spring.”
One girl, in an essay last year, recalled putting her head between her knees and wedging her 5-year-old body into a cabinet after her teacher herded the class into a closet upon hearing gunfire.
“The number of people affected (by such a tragedy) is more widespread than you think originally,” said Donald Monroe, former superintendent of Winnetka School District 36. “Every time an event like this happens, it brings it all back again. Every time an anniversary comes around, you’re reminded.”
Even experienced police officers and doctors choke up remembering vivid details.
“It’s very frightening for law enforcement and public safety personnel,” said Herbert Timm, then Winnetka’s police chief. “It takes your breath away for a while. You don’t think that you will heal at first–it takes time.”
Dr. Jeff Graff, then and now the director of the emergency department at Evanston Hospital, said, “I remember every second of that day. Because a lot of us had kids that age, it was horrifying.”
For Amy Moses, the trauma essentially derailed her career as a teacher by making it difficult for her to make decisions. Though she already had a teaching certificate and was working on a master’s degree in education, after the shooting she went to work editing educational materials. She now is a free-lance writer.
And though she wanted to move on, she couldn’t. Once she bought herself a pair of bulletproof, wraparound sunglasses to wear while riding her bike, and for months was afraid to stand on street corners waiting for traffic lights in case someone started firing.
The recovery
Today, Moses works on her recovery in a variety of ways, including time with a psychologist who specializes in trauma and a holistic therapist who specializes in Hakomi, a method to help one’s body rid itself of the symptoms of trauma.
Dr. Eitan D. Schwarz, a Highland Park psychiatrist, was a member of the crisis team brought to Hubbard Woods school.
“That kind of event sends off enormous shock waves and affects the whole community, and the closer you are to the center of the trauma, the more you are likely to be affected,” he said.
In a study of 66 adults and 64 children connected to the Hubbard Woods shooting, psychologists found that between 20 and 30 percent of them developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.
Psychiatrists also fear the long-term effects on children, many of whom often have an unreasonable fear of dying young and of disasters.
“We have to worry about this,” said Dr. Lenore Terr, a San Francisco psychiatrist and expert in child and adolescent trauma and author of “Too Scared to Cry,” a book about the long-term effects on the 26 children in Chowchilla, Calif., who were buried alive in a 1976 school bus kidnapping.
“Pessimism in kids causes them not to advance themselves or to understand that living long lives is normal. It causes them to make big mistakes like marrying too young” or making poor choices when it comes to careers and education, she said.
When all is said and done, there are no neat explanations to help us comprehend the incomprehensible, say doctors.
At New Trier High School, the ramifications show up occasionally in classroom assignments, in the form of essays or in poetry.
Contained in an unsigned booklet of verse put together by a recent sophomore English class is a piece titled “Gunshot.”
It begins,
A classroom of tension, some children hiding, trembling, others lined up like a line of soldiers, are about to meet their fate . . .
It concludes,
All the suffering because of one woman. Laurie Dann.