Friday May 18 was a normal school day. Tyler and I woke up early to go to work. Kimberly got to sleep in a bit and caught her bus from home. I lined up with the other buses at the high school and she walked by my bus as I was unloading my kids. I saw her walk by and I flashed a quick ASL "I LOVE YOU" to her. I last saw her at about 6:45 am. That little interaction was the only way I knew what she was wearing when the time came, when the FBI started asking the tough questions.
I started my elementary route and picked up my last student. A weird request came over the radio and routing told us to pull over in a safe location and wait for further instructions. We needed to keep our little kids safe. So I did what I was told to do. I pulled over and gave them a pep talk about the end of the year and they could behave for two more weeks. I KNEW they had it in them. We got it all clear to proceed. I went to the next major roadway and turned right. There were TONS of police flying toward the highschool. My military training was kicking in. I knew something was wrong, and I thought of an accident at the HS. Maybe someone needed a life-flight or something like that.
I got to my first school and all the gates were closed but one. The top principal was on duty and she NEVER did morning bus duty. At the second school, the teacher's eyes were as big as dinner plates and they were pacing. I proceeded to the HS. I was one of the last buses to arrive. It looked like a war zone. Fire, police, ambulance, helicopters. I KNEW something was wrong.
My co-workers were looking on social media and they found out there had been a shooting, but they thought it was the social studies room. I went to the perimeter to talk to law enforcement about Kimberly, and nobody could tell me anything. She wasn't answering my text messages, and it was about 8 am.
Somehow I made it away from the HS, we were cleared to move away from there. I clocked out (yes, for the first few hours of this I was still on the clock as an employee. It was bizarre). I went to the reunification point. Nobody there could tell me anything either. I got tired of sitting. I swore at the FBI and the Texas Rangers. My friend and I drove to the local hospitals looking for Kimberly and she wasn't there. We went to AT&T to try and have her phone pinged from a tower. That's not as easy as they make it seem in the TV shows. Instead we ended up with a list of numbers to call and see if these people had heard from Kimberly. No luck there either.
Another friend texted me and said I needed to come back to Santa Fe because there was some news, some kind of advancement or something. I was kind of in the League City area, and I really didn't want to go back down there, I wanted to go home and see if she was at the house. It was getting kind of late, 5 pm or so, and I STILL hadn't heard from her. Not even a goofy emoji like a whale fart or anything. She was really good at sending those. I was starting to feel in my mom's heart that something wasn't right. I had been waiting in a room with a few other folks and they brought us all out of that room into the foyer of the old building we were in.
A tall Texas Ranger had us form up into a U shape and he said "well there's no nice way really to say this, so I'm going to start reading some names" Then someone said "no, no, give them somewhere to sit..." and they moved us into a hallway. There were lockers on one side. I remember vividly my knees gave out about this point, and someone had to haul me up. I was looking at my bosses across this hallway. Dr. Wall, Patti Hannsarrd. They all knew my kid, and they all knew me. There was a little side room across from me. The FBI started to leave that room and they started calling names. Kimberly was like the second or third name called. They led me and my friends into an old room that was painted like the ground and sky. The chaplain of the Dickinson PD was there. They sat me down in a high-backed teacher chair. He kind of counted to ten to wait a minute.
During that little pause is when the screams started from the other side of me. I will never, ever, for as long as I live-forget that scream. It came from my left. And it was the scream of another family who just found out their kid had died too. That's when he told me that Kimberly had died and I started screaming too. It was awful. I couldn't believe it. It was just Friday, we were going to go to the mall and have dinner in ASL later that night. Nope, not anymore.
