20 Years Later, Jonesboro Shooting Survivors Conflicted Over Parkland
Twenty years ago Saturday, two middle school students outside Jonesboro, Ark., lured their 11- and 12-year-old classmates out of school and opened fire from across the playground. They killed four students, all girls, and a teacher, wounding 10 others.
When the Columbine High School shooting occurred the following year in Littleton, Colo., the horror at Westside Middle School was, in effect, superseded. As the years passed, Columbine became the touchstone, the school shooting everyone remembered. And it left the survivors in Jonesboro feeling forgotten and even more bereft.
"It feels like we're lost in a sea of shootings that came after," said Mary Hollis Inboden. She was a student at Westside Middle School who saw her best friend die that day — in sixth grade.
The Westside Middle School survivors have banded together in recent years, with the help of a Facebook
