Lock Down

Today at school, we had one of those lock down practice procedures-though it’s serious, it’s quite amusing; it brings back memories of the good old days.  I am a person who tends to repress memory that I am not pardon to-who doesn’t? And today, it brought back the memory floods of the homicide at Meany. Yes. I went to Meany for middle school and I don’t regret a thing. Washington was great-some parts, but what Meany taught me, cannot be learned any where else.

It was in the seventh grade, during my LA class when all of a sudden, a lady announced on the PA that a lock down was happening. We (the students) had no idea what was happening-we knew what a lock down was, but we never thought it would happen to us. We were going to school in a secluded area-we thought we were safe. Little did we know that as our teacher drew the shades, locked the doors, that outside a man was shooting his girlfriend to death. He shot her multiple times, near where we went every recess. The very same place where I had hung out with my friends, the place where I stayed after school for swim lessons. We didn’t know about the shooting until afterward. I remember walking down the hallways with my friend Lee and seeing barricades at all the entrances. Then, as we walked down toward the gym, we saw an empty chair stationed near the doors leading to the outside. Outside, there were many police cars-the most I’ve ever seen in my life. To this day, I still remember every detail about that day…I guess what stuck the most was that a girl had gone missing during all of this. They found her afterwards in another classroom…but the idea that one school might be teared apart because some narc went crazy-scared me the most.

This memory is not a very fond one…as other real lock downs-such as the one that happened a decade earlier at GHS.