After school shootings, portraits of victims emerge
Rome Shubert was sitting in his first-period art class shortly before 7:30 a.m. Friday when another student barged in and threw something on the desks behind him. Rome heard three loud pops and dropped to the ground, flipping his desk in front of him to shield himself.
Then, he said, he ran for his life. Out of the art room. Out of the building. Up over a wall, and into a Santa Fe High School parking lot. The loud blare of fire alarms swirled in the air around him as his classmates flooded out back, hurrying to a nearby gas station. Adrenaline coursed through his veins.
As he ran, he didn’t notice blood pouring onto his shirt. Or the wound on the back of his head where he’d been shot.
The Friday morning routine of the Galveston County school — a week after prom and just two weeks from graduation — had been shattered by a gunman who opened fire with a shotgun and a .38 caliber revolver. Police said 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis killed 10 and injured 10 others.
One shot had broken fellow student Clayton Horn’s arm above the elbow; another went clean through Clayton’s upper thigh. The 17-year-old managed to flee the art room and jump a fence before calling his mom from the back of an ambulance to tell her he’d been shot but expected to survive, relatives said.
“Mom? I’m fine,” he told her. “I got shot.”