Just after 7:30 on the morning of Nov. 14, 2019, students at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, were gathering before the end of their first period. That’s when 16-year-old Nathaniel Berhow drew a handgun from his backpack and began to fire into the crowds of his fellow students.
Five teens were shot that morning. Two of them, 14-year-old Dominic Blackwell and 15-year-old Gracie Anne Muehlberger, died at the scene before the suspect, Berhow, shot himself in the head. Kaylee Allen was just 16. A student at Saugus High School, Allen was standing in the way of a crowd of fleeing students when Berhow started firing.
“I heard the gunshots, but there was construction going on at the time and it sounded like it was coming from that,” Allen says. “But everyone from the quad started running right at me, because we were kind of near the exit. A voice came over the intercom telling us it was a lockdown and not a drill.”
The school in Santa Clarita trained the students in the method that’s now common parlance in the United States: Run, Hide, Fight. They knew the drill: to run, to get to a classroom or anywhere they would be safe. Allen says for her, safety meant getting off campus but she outran her friends and doubled back to get them.
“When I turned around, I saw
