Posted on 01/07/2013 2:30:19 PM PST by marktwain
The following incident happened at a high school only minutes from my home in East Tennessee. I am sure that no one outside of our immediate region has ever heard the story, because the only person who was shot-and killed-was the gunman. These types of stories don’t fit the narrative of those who want “gun-free zones” and so are ignored by the national media. In this case an armed Security Resource Officer, Carolyn Gudger, became a local hero and saved an unknown number of lives by holding the gunman at bay until backup arrived. The text below is drawn from a local news website, Tricities.com. The story is not viewable on mobile devices, probably because it is so old. If you wish to view it on your PC, here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/ckqfcvf Security Resource Officer Carolyn Gudger
“On Monday morning, August 30, 2010, Thomas Richard Cowan loaded 13 bullets into two handguns, left his German shepherd chained to the fence and drove eight miles from his home in Kingsport to Sullivan Central High School. Whatever his mission, it was the 62-year-old Vietnam veteran’s final drive. For about an hour, Cowan’s armed invasion spread panic throughout the school before a burst of officers’ gunfire brought him down. No others were injured.
No one knows why Cowan pointed his Honda in the direction of the Blountville, Tenn., high school, where his brother is a janitor. He is described – in court records and interviews – as a peculiar man with a history of erratic, sometimes criminal, behavior and a deep suspicion of the government. He parked his car Monday morning in a handicapped space just in front of the school’s main entrance. Second period was just getting under way at 9:10 a.m. when Ashley Thacker, a junior, arrived at the main entrance of her high school. Thacker, 16, had been at a doctor’s appointment and was on her way to a music theory class as she approached the locked doors.
She noticed a man standing in the 10-foot waiting area between the two sets of doors, waiting to be buzzed in. His bald crown was framed with brown hair. He had a mustache, she remembered, and he was holding a cane. He told her to go on ahead of him. But she never made it through the doors. Instead, Melanie Riden, principal of Sullivan Central, came striding through the locked doors. “He pulled out his gun and started pointing it at people,” Thacker said. Cowan trained a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol at Riden’s face, said Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson.
Carolyn Gudger, the school resource officer, drew her gun, then shielded the principal’s body with her own.
Thacker remembers Cowan shouting something – possibly including the words “10 years” – but she isn’t sure. She turned and ran out the set of public doors to the mulch pile in the front of the school, and hid behind bushes. “He might shoot someone,” Thacker remembered thinking. “I just wanted to get out of there.”
Riden fled and Gudger inched back into the school, leading Cowan through the scattered pastel chairs in the empty cafeteria. It was a tactical move, meant to lure the gunman into a more contained place, Anderson said. Sullivan County dispatch sent out a chilling alert: “Man with a gun at Central High School.”
Gudger told him to drop his weapon; he demanded she drop hers. Once, he tried, unsuccessfully, to lunge for her gun. Cowan repeated one thing only, Anderson said. That he wanted to pull the fire alarms. “I don’t know why, we can only speculate about that and I think everyone will speculate why he wanted to pull a fire alarm,” Anderson said. “Either to get the kids out of class or, I don’t know. We don’t know.”
Flattened against the bushes, Ashley Thacker waited two minutes, she thinks. “I didn’t hear anything else, so I thought Officer Gudger had arrested him.” She was wrong. As she approached the school, two assistant principals opened a window and yelled at her to run away. Crying and shaking, Thacker ran to her car and drove a half-mile to her parents’ business.
The view from the classroom
At about 9:15 a.m., a shaken voice came over the intercom. “Code red. Lockdown.” There was profanity in the background. This was no drill, students realized. With the announcement, teachers sprang into action – locking doors and papering over windows, turning off the lights and closing window blinds. Students huddled in the corners of classrooms, sitting in the darkness and searching for information with a storm of text messages.
Casey Deel, a 17-year-old senior, was on his way to a doctor’s office when his girlfriend, Alicia Edwards, sent him a text at 9:15 a.m. “There’s a code red lock down. im scared,” the 16-year-old junior texted from her government class. “r u serious?” Deel texted back. He skipped his appointment. In Kayla Nichols’ cosmetology class, students squeezed into a storage room the size of a parking space, and locked the door, the 17-year-old said. Ryan Kendrick was in algebra class, just off the main office. The 17-year-old senior thought he heard the gunman making threats – about not leaving the building alive and taking others with him – and Gudger urging him to calm down.
Then he heard a volley of gunshots. Kendrick and his friend, Andrew Ray, began to pray. Landon Sillyman was in his honors biology class, where the teacher had instructed students to put their heads on their desks in the darkened classroom. The 14-year-old freshman estimated the suspense lasted about an hour. But it was all over in minutes, Anderson estimated.
One hundred and twenty seconds after Cowan drew his gun, two deputies, Lt. Steve Williams and Sam Matney, arrived. They entered through separate doors and met Cowan and Gudger – still in a moving standoff – as they reached a science pod behind the cafeteria. Cowan wavered; he jerked his gun from Gudger to the other deputies then back again. The three officers told him, again, to drop his weapon. He wouldn’t. So they opened fire. Some students counted five shots, others counted six. Anderson would not say how many rounds hit the gunman.
Cowan fell to the ground, his shoes just feet from door to the library full of teenagers. The pistol in his hand had seven bullets in the magazine and another in the chamber. He had a second handgun in his back pocket, loaded with five rounds. “That’s how close he was,” Anderson said. “We all know this could have been much more dangerous.”
Yes, it could have been much worse. It could have been another national headline about multiple deaths, sparking a national outcry for stricter gun laws. But it wasn’t. Why? Because the good people of Tennessee have enough sense to place armed officers inside of our schools to protect our children.
ALL IT TAKES TO STOP A BAD GUY WITH A GUN IS A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN.
Guess this proves it. Suck on it libtards. AND IN A GUN-FREE ZONE TOO.
45-50 years ago you could target practice with your 10/22 at the public school range.
The security resource officer was much more talkative than I would have been with that wacko. Bang, bang, bang!
That should be their mission when confronted with an armed gunman in a school. Dead, dead, dead! ASAP
Kindof sounded like the creep was doing suicide by cop.
I think the bad guy wasn't out to shoot anybody but wanted to comitte suicide by cop that is why he never fired.
I can’t help but wonder if the guy was there on a mission to save the kids from whatever danger his delusion convinced him was about to happen. That’s why it was all about pulling the fire alarm.
Which is why he didn’t pull the trigger, he wasn’t there to kill, but to save. Not all delusional crazies are homicidal and sometimes even the homicidal ones are convinced they are saving the world, destroying demons or aliens.
It’s totally real to them, while the rest of us are totally clueless to what they are perceiving.
First thing I learned in working with schizophrenics, what is perceived as real; will be real in it’s consequences. Do not dismiss their delusions.
This wacko had serious spiders in his head, and he was known to the authorities for years as a loose cannon, but nobody took the initiative to *make* him get psychiatric control, because it is likely he would have been institutionalized.
More information. I mean, seriously, this guy gave a ton of warning before he went off.:
http://www.tricities.com/news/article_0cddce37-1170-5c05-bb7b-4403b4151448.html
Could be. On the other hand, maybe his plan was to pull the fire alarm so all the kids would run between him on the officer, and he was fixated on it.
Yup and it's more than the Teacher's Union that feels that way.
bkmk
Maybe so, or maybe she was trying to keep anyone from dying that day. One thing is for sure...she put her ASS on the line. That gun of his is trained on her and not kids; and no kids were harmed, so I would say a job well done.
I think actually they are trained to engage and keep the person talking (especially if they feel they are suicidal). because when they are doing that, they may not be shooting.
it seems she did the right thing, the guy never fired a shot.
30 years ago rifle was a varsity sport..
It still is in some states.
The Leftwing faction of media is the Country’s greatest threat.
Says “article no longer available”
Did you save a copy?
(Why did it disappear?)
Don’t remember this being in the news. Must be because the school had an armed Resource Officer and that prevented the killing of anyone and the media did the bidding of their masters and didn’t report it. Interesting.
Uh, it happened in 2010? It’s in the article.
He should have died between the doors.
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