[/media-credit] Students gather throughout the day to share messages of hope, love, and encouragement for the student body and faculty of Mountain View High School.
On the morning of November 15, five students were stabbed at Mountain View High School by a 16-year-old. His actions have no explanation at this time. There are several eyewitness accounts of what happened that day.
Joe Felix said that the attacker “walked in with a stick or a staff and started beating a dude.” He then stabbed other students around him.
“I walked into the locker room to change, and right when I walked in, I heard and saw a stick break and thought it was just some kids messing around . . . I started unlocking my locker when I saw, on my left, a teacher and student backing away from where the stick was broken, then saw the stabber with a knife walking the way the student and teacher were backing up to. I realized all of this is real and backed up from my locker only to find [a student] lying on the floor with blood all around him. I was with Erik and Hyrum and had to get out of there. I ran around [the student] and right out the back door of the locker room. I ran as fast as I could to the front office to tell the administrators what happened,” said Parker Smith.
Smith wasn’t the only one who helped, a student from Mountain View said “I know many kids that were in the locker room and how they helped bleeding victims.”
Robbie Miller said, “I saw the blood all over by the gyms and I saw the victims but I didn’t see the actual stabbing . . . I was so close to going into that very locker room right when it was going on. I ended up going to my class because I was running late, but it was a close call.”
Although these students saw it, most were in the dark about what happened. Josh Cragun said, “One person in my class described that before class started she noticed that basically as the bell rung all these people started running out of the men’s locker room. They were very concerned . . . soon after class started a lockdown was initiated.”
The students didn’t know what was happening, only that something was happening. Most student found out through texts, Cragun said.
Others found out through people who had been there or near the incident. One Mountain View student said “a girl in my class said she just helped someone with a stab wound.”
Eventually, once things were more under control, administrators made a statement over the intercom about what had happened.
They remained in a soft lockdown into second period. Robert Stoddard, a teacher at Mountain View described a soft lockdown. “We keep teaching as normal and lock the doors. If anyone was in the hallway we drag them into the classroom. We keep them there and nobody goes out to go to the bathroom.”
It was a hard situation for many of students, both at Mountain View and Orem, because they know the people involved. It will not be something that is forgotten or ignored. Dr. Chun, Mountain View’s principal, said in a letter to the students. “We are not going to hid from or minimize what happened yesterday. We are going to talk about it, we are going to learn from it, we are going to let this trial pass through us and we will become closer as a community. . . as we band together to recover from this trial.”
Tiger Times Staff
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