271: Point Blank #3: What if you shielded your students?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Today's episode is part three of our limited series, Point Blank, featuring five stories of people impacted by the spree killing of Rancho Tehama, California, in 2017. There, a lone gunman killed his wife, then his neighbors, and then began a shooting spree, attacking eight different locations in the span of only 25 minutes, ending at an elementary school, leaving six people dead and 18 wounded.

In our last episode, we heard from Sissy Feidelberg, whose grandson Gage was at Rancho Tehama Elementary School when the shooter, Kevin Jansen Neal, arrived intent on murdering him. Today's storyteller is Ken Yurs. Ken was a 4th and 5th grade teacher at Rancho Tehama Elementary, knew Gage and Sissy, and was there as Kevin's rampage descended upon the school. We'll hear him speak about the horror of that day and the long tale of trauma in today's episode, What If You Shielded?

your students. One technical note to mention. The only way we were able to record this episode was using Ken's phone, so please forgive some of the sound quality issues on this episode.

It was just extremely challenging how overwhelming it was on my central nervous system, my mind, realizing what was coming. And while you're trying to process this overload, having to be conscious and mindful that you've got 18 kids in your classroom and they're looking towards you. You have to keep your cool. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening with our special limited series, Point Blank.

Episode 271. Point Blank, Part 3. What if you shielded your students?

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My father grew up on a working wheat farm in Saskatchewan, Canada.

and my mother grew up on a working farm in County Donegal, Ireland. And they immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s and they met in Oakland, were married there. I was born in the late 60s and they moved to the suburbs at that point. And so I was raised in a middle-class lifestyle. My father, welder, and mother, homemaker.

So my mother, being from Ireland, was raised an Irish Catholic, and she raised me as such. My father was agnostic. He was an old-fashioned disciplinarian. You better not get in trouble at school. Otherwise, it'd be worse when you get home. But loving mother, hardworking father, just kind of a typical Norman Rockwell-type upbringing.

Growing up, my mother instilled in us the golden rule, do unto others as you want them to do unto you. And that seemed to be a perfect guiding light through my own life. I wish everybody success, equal access and equal opportunity to be successful in life. She also taught us about empathy, that not everybody has that equal access and equal opportunity. You don't judge people by necessarily where they're at. You have to take a lot of things into account.

I did love sports growing up. I played football, baseball, basketball, and I really loved the statistics of baseball, and I think it really helped me become a math teacher later on. My mother was very loving and supporting. My father, he was the provider, and he instilled a work ethic in me. In high school, when he was working for himself as a welder, I would find myself sometimes on the weekend in the back of a garbage truck for a garbage company, helping him weld trucks.

Between the two of them, it was a real good balance. But at third grade, my father, he had been working up on the Alaska Pipeline as a welder. And when he came back to San Francisco Airport early in the morning, it was about 1976, a limousine pulls up and it's Ronald Reagan. He saw my dad's jacket, a Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and he got out to speak to him and my mother with nobody around, no fanfare.

I thought that was kind of cool. You know, here's my dad. He never even finished high school. A blue collar fella, rough around the edges. And here's a future president taking the time to talk to him and my mom to see what life is like when you're working on the pipeline. I didn't know who he was at the time, but after I found out who he was and later ran for president, it kind of pushed me towards the narrative that he kind of was pushing as a president. Peace through strength.

That guided my early years as far as being anti-communist, wanting to do my part to help end the Cold War. Middle school, I still had a dream of being a professional baseball player someday. But by the time high school rolled around, my older brother, he graduated four years ahead of me. He had joined the Air Force and he was enjoying the experience. I liked the idea of also serving my country, getting a chance to travel abroad.

They will train you and they instill discipline, structure. But it was important to me to serve my country because, as I said, the Cold War was still going on at that time. And communism, to me, it was a great threat to a world, at least as I understood it back then. And so it was important to serve in the military, to do my part, but also it would help me in the future.

I didn't come from a rich family, so it helped pay for school. It helped me get my first house with a VA loan. Upon graduating high school, I went into the Air Force as a law enforcement specialist, base police, police dispatching, gate sentry. There's about 50,000 people at the base, so we wouldn't have base housing. We'd have domestic disputes. DUIs, we would arrest people for DUIs. We'd do traffic tickets.

We would also carry a sidearm at the time. I was trained with a 38 and later on they upgraded to a 9mm. And also we were trained with shotguns and M16s. So it was good experience for me. I did that for three and a half years. There's good cops and there's bad cops. Just like there's good doctors and bad doctors and good teachers and bad teachers.

But the lack of respect for law enforcement was something I noticed. The worst was probably going to domestic disputes. If you had to arrest a husband, for example, the wife who had been abused would then turn on you. There was a call I went on to base housing where a young man of 15 had locked himself in his room. His father had called us and he had maybe overdosed. And so I remember the sergeant and I going out there. I said, well, what if he won't let us in? He goes, we just have to bust down the door.

Eventually, we did talk him into opening the door. We took him down to the police station. We come to find out he hadn't ingested anything, so we didn't take him to the hospital. And I remember, because I was only 19, talking to this 15-year-old. He was a troubled young man, but he was a good guy. I tried to build rapport with him. And then I found out a couple months later he ended up committing suicide. So, you know, while it was great working in law enforcement and I wouldn't want to trade the experience, I found out it was just not something I wanted to do.

After I got out of the Air Force and went to college for a couple of years, I became a police and fire dispatcher.

As far as my time in the Bay Area as a 911 police and fire dispatcher, I took a 911 call from the local high school. And they said a student had reported another student had brought a gun to school, a handgun. It was in the principal's office. Principal went to take it from him. He pulled it on the principal. Then he went running out of the school into his car. Law enforcement went in pursuit of him. And sadly, the student took his own life while he was being chased by law enforcement.

I was working nights, cops coming in and talking about some of the stuff going on in the streets. And you could tell a lot of them were affected, too, by the constant crime. And it wore me down. You're in a pocket of the world where all the trouble drains towards. You get a jaded perspective of the world, the inhumanity that you're exposed to.

I felt like law enforcement was no longer a career for me because if I wanted to help people, you had to be in a different situation where you could get to them sooner because law enforcement's just responding to the problem, not intervening to avoid a problem. So it wasn't a long-term way to make a living and have mental health. I think the experience in law enforcement directly led to me becoming an educator so I could later on help young adults or children

I decided to go to school up at Chico State, and then I went into a teaching credential program as a student teacher at Corning High School. I moved back up to Chico and eventually got on at Colusa Alternative High School, working with the at-risk kids. Working with at-risk kids is a roller coaster. You have the highs where you see them turn it around, and you have the lows where they don't. They continue to spiral out of control.

So at the end of the day, I just had to be able to look at myself in the mirror. Am I giving my best effort and doing all I can do to try to help turn the student around? I think because of the way I was raised by my dad, I don't put up with any nonsense. Because of the way I was raised by my mother, kids sense when you love them and care about them. For the ones that did turn it around, it did make it fulfilling.

And then for other ones, I had one student. He was a Sereno, big kid. He's a third grade math level. And within a year and a half, he was doing freshman algebra. So he transfers to the high school. I say hi to him one morning. Good morning. I'm not going to say his name. A week later, he's in the newspaper for gunning down a 14-year-old Norteno.

We are all fellow travelers in this world, and a lot of us are born behind the eight ball. And I don't feel I was. I feel like I was blessed with my upbringing. You know, it wasn't perfect, but it could have been a lot worse. And so I just feel like I'm trying to do the right thing.

And I think that's one reason I taught at-risk kids grades seven, eight, and nine for almost 15 years. Because a lot of people do not want to get involved with more challenging at-risk kids. That was the purpose I was created for and I'm put in these situations and I'll just do the best I can. The superintendent decided to outsource the program. And so that's when I, in 2015, they hired me out of Rancho Tehama on a two years probation.

So I'd never been to Rancho Tehama prior to being hired to work there. A small community, about 1,500 people. Typical rural school in America and not a lot of wealth. Once the first month went by and I started building rapport with these youngsters, we just took off as a class. And I really enjoyed my first year teaching there. I had a third grade classroom. It was my first experience teaching kids below sixth grade. And the next year, I was teaching a third and fourth grade combination class.

My first couple of years there, my students were testing near state average and they were near the top in the district. And then my third year started and I took over the combination class of fourth and fifth graders. Yeah, just a rural school, about 1,500, pretty isolated out there. We're about 20 minutes from a police response. There's no substation out there for the police. Because I was a veteran in the Air Force and law enforcement and living in a rural community, I went ahead and applied for a concealed carry permit.

I went through the training and the schooling. I did approach the principal at Rancho Tejano Elementary at that time, and I asked her, hey, what's the deal out here? Are we allowed to carry? Because the state of California hadn't banned it completely yet. It was up to the superintendent's discretion as to whether or not teachers could be armed. And the principal, she told me, no, I don't think the superintendent will go for that. I said, okay. And I really didn't think much more about it after that.

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I did know of Gage. He was a young kid. I know his grandmother. She was often there, very involved with making sure her child was on the right path. He just seemed like a typical rambunctious young man, full of energy.

I did know the grandmother, but I was not aware that she and her son were dealing with this neighbor. I had no prior knowledge of any situation going on with Kevin and his neighbors. It was a Tuesday morning. It had been raining, and I arrived at the school. I was supposed to be there at 745, and I pulled up and was walking through the parking lot to the front of the school.

So I had just come out of the quad area and was near the gate that separates the quad from my classroom. And I ran into Patty Smith, the yard duty. She's also a paraeducator. And I was asking her about making up some testing for a student, if I could send them over to her. And then both of us heard a rapid succession of gunfire about a quarter mile to the west. And we both looked at each other and we decided, hey, you know, maybe we should get the kids inside just as a precaution.

I turned and started walking west towards my classroom, and then Patty started heading east towards the quad area, blowing her whistle, telling the kids they were going to line up early. Trying not to look alarmed, but I could see after those gunshots and after I communicated with Patty walking towards my students that they were looking at me, and they had a concerned look on their face. And in this rural area, you do hear gunshots, but it was just unusual the early hour of the morning.

how close it was to the school and how many shots were released all at once. It was just a barrage of gunfire. I told my students we're going in early. They got lined up, door open, getting ready to send them in. And I'm totally aware of my surroundings. I'm looking for any sign of gunfire, like, for example, dirt being shot up, a window, a building, just any indication that there's trouble coming our way.

Right when I said everybody inside, I just heard this loud crash. And it was the bus gate next to my classroom being blown open by the perpetrator. From where I was standing, all I could see was debris flying from where he had crashed through. My students, they paused and they gathered at the bottom of the ramp to look around the corner. And I just heard a collective gasp come out of them. And then they started running into the classroom. And one of the students said, gun.

At that point, it was quite obvious because they could hear gunfire and what he was doing. He was shooting his way out of the truck that he had stolen. Apparently, he couldn't open the jammed door. I had three students that were walking between the quad area and my classroom because Patty had gone on the whistle. We're lining up. These kids were over in the quad area and they were just, you know, walking towards my class to line up. And they were caught between the quad and my classroom when this maniac crashed the gate.

So he shoots his way out and these three students are running for their lives. I remember having this conscious thought, I was worried that this maniac, because he had an automatic weapon, if he shot me while I'm standing there at the door, I become a doorstop and he can access my classroom and get the rest of the kids. But I told myself I can't leave these kids outside. So I stood there and the last girl who was running, she told me, she said, Mr. Yorris, he was trying to shoot us, but his gun wouldn't work.

And it was during that time when he was trying to unjam it that the custodian came around a corner from the main quad area of the campus. The maniac saw him. He's a six-foot-three guy. He got his gun unjammed. The custodian took the gunfire that probably would have been meant for my three students running. And that gave me enough time to get them into my classroom and close the door. I could hear kids whimpering and crying. They were under the desk. They knew what to do.

But we didn't start tipping over tables or anything like that, trying to set up a perimeter inside because we didn't want to draw attention. So I just told them, you guys be as quiet as you can. Our eyes are our ears. So the kids were shushing each other.

I went to the back of the classroom and I saw a metal Chromebook cart and that holds about 30 laptop computers and it's either 12 or 16 gauge steel. And I was thinking this thing's on wheels. I can probably use it to kind of protect myself. If he comes through the north side of the classroom, he comes in there shooting through the window. I can, you know, rotate the Chromebook cart and kind of give myself a little protection. But as I heard the kids crying and whimpering, I was just thinking, I can't do that.

I felt that I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I'm all protected behind this thing while my kids are exposed. So I decided to unplug the Chromebook card from the wall and I wheeled it up towards the classroom door with the idea that if he started to shoot out the door, that I would hide behind the Chromebook card and the door opens outward. Once he opened it up, I would try to battery ram him. And, you know, I didn't like my odds, but, you know, split seconds, you really don't have time to sit there and figure out a plan.

I wheeled it up to the door, and then I did my best army crawl towards the southeast part of the classroom where the phone was to call 911. All lines were busy, so I called my ex-mother-in-law, and I told her we have an active shooter here at Rancho Tamo Elementary. Could you please call 911? And she was kind of taken aback by it all, so I repeated it. She said she would. I watched the video later on. There was a camera right at the southeast corner of my classroom.

He ran up towards the ramp of my classroom. He was dazed and confused, and when he shook his head like that, and he was done shaking his head, all you could just see was rage, anger, insanity all over his face, and hate. And he did a 180 and turned and ran towards the main part of the campus. And at that point, just my class and I all speak here was just gunfire. It just seemed like forever.

It was at the point where I put the Chromebook cart up against the door that, geez, I wish I was allowed to carry because if I had a firearm, I could take up a defensive position behind this Chromebook cart and give myself and my students a chance to live if he comes after us. But that wasn't the situation. And that sense of helplessness, being in such a helpless situation while being responsible for 18 lives as well as yourself,

It's just, there's no words to describe it. Kids are underneath their tables and they're whimpering and crying. We're trying to stay quiet. I gave up the card at the door. I'm just sitting in the back of the classroom. I'm kneeling almost like a football player stance, ready to dive left, dive right, whatever I had to do, stand up. But, you know, again, without any way to fight back, it was a tough situation to be put into to be helpless when this guy, you know, he had all the advantages.

All this time we're waiting, I don't know how many shooters there are. I knew there was at least one. He was on that campus for six minutes. He dumped 100 rounds into the school. We could hear somebody get into a vehicle, door close, and then peeling out. What he had done is he had got back in that truck and continued his rampage through the community. You could still hear the gunshots going off through the community. But in the classroom, we continued to just lay low and quiet and wait for law enforcement to arrive.

You knew you were in a life or death situation when he busted through that gate and ran up to the corner of my classroom. You're just picturing the worst as he's unloading his weapon that people are dying right now. And then you're just waiting like a sitting duck for him to come to your classroom and shoot his way in there, too.

It's beyond mind-blowing. It's just like a system overload, like an overcharge. You're blowing out all your circuits, trying to process it, and you're going into fight-or-flight mode at the most highest level. Nothing I've ever been through in life even compares to it. It was just extremely challenging how overwhelming it was on my central nervous system, my mind, realizing what was coming next.

The sound of gunfire, rapid succession, so loud, just sounded like a war zone. And while you're trying to process this overload, having to be conscious and mindful that you've got 18 kids in your classroom and they're looking towards you. You know, I'm the adult in the room that they're looking towards, so you have to keep your cool.

I felt it was vital that they see their teacher acting as if there was some control here and there was things we could do to help keep them from falling further apart, which was to tell them that our eyes are our ears, and so we have to stay quiet. And another thing I told them when I ran in the classroom was, if he shoots his way inside, you guys have to run. It's harder to hit a moving target. This is just something that no teacher ever thinks about having to tell their students, and yet here I am telling them,

I felt terrible for them. Here they are, I got fourth and fifth graders fearing for their lives and it was heartbreaking. It was just a lot more to try to manage in your mind the circumstances of having to keep your cool while at the same time inside you're just, your body's screaming.

While he's over at the main part of campus, it didn't cross my mind, but if I'd been by myself, he could just hop a fence and be running towards the hills and be gone. But I wasn't in a situation where I could do that. I was going to stay with my students. I would be there till the very end. I would defend them with my life. It really felt like an eternity waiting for law enforcement to arrive. I looked at the dispatch records later, and I think it took them 18 or 19 minutes to arrive on scene.

Once this guy left campus, you could still hear the gunfire. So we didn't know if there was one shooter, two shooters. So we really never, I never really felt there was a moment where we're going to get through this. It was an extended period of helplessness. I did have a parent show up at the door, pounding on the door. So I let her in. While she was in there, she shared with me, and I wish she had done it sooner, that the police had engaged this guy out on the road and he had been shot.

Once we knew that the perpetrator had been taken down and the police had showed up at our door, and I told them, hey, they're going to come in with their guns, but know that that's a standard protocol. They don't know if there's a bad guy in here or not. And I said, you guys just sit at your desk and have your hands out. And they came and they cleared the room.

And then afterwards, I finally had a chance to start talking to some of them. And the one girl, the last of the three that had run in the classroom and told me that this maniac was trying to shoot them and his gun was jamming. And I told her that, you know, you're upset right now, but you're alive. We all had walkie talkies. And as the secretary was calling in each classroom to see what kind of casualties we had.

my classroom, first grade, second, third grade, kindergarten, there was one injury, but no fatalities. And that sense of, my goodness, there was no fatalities. It was just a feeling of, wow, we're blessed or we're lucky. And I was trying to tell that to the girl. I just said, this might be the worst day of your life, but you survived it. And you're just trying to create some sense of reason from all the madness, which is surreal, the whole thing.

Probably I was in a certain state of shock as all that was going on and still trying to function. I'm sure I've forgotten many of the details. I just remember the heightened alert and then trying to have compassion and offer some kind of reason to them as to how they could proceed from here. We ended up loading up on the bus, and I remember seeing the kindergarten teacher. And I said, "Well, how's your morning going?"

It was just surreal. We're trying to still be human and have a little bit of levity, but we're all in shock. And we take the bus over with our students to the recreation center and we're calling parents and they're coming to pick them up. Once all the kids were gone, that's when I allowed myself to just kind of go off into my own sense of shock and processing. I was responsible for my students. I've done my job. Now maybe I can go home.

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None of it's penetrating my brain. And she responded, yeah, that's how it feels for me too. So I didn't talk to a lot of people. And I'm a single dad. My daughter wasn't in kindergarten yet. She was with her mom. So I remember getting home that afternoon and talking to my sister. She was the one in my family that tried to be there for me. I really didn't have much to say at all. She could tell I was in shock. And I really didn't feel like talking. All the rest of the school year, I just felt tension in my entire body.

So I never really had a sense of release. I didn't call in sick the rest of the school year. I wanted to be there for my students because they've been traumatized. And then when the school year ended, I had my daughter for three days in shared custody. And I remember dropping off her mom's and I'm driving home. It's about an hour drive. I'm thinking, OK, school year's over. I've taken care of my daughter and I can now just relax. So I went to sleep that night. And that's when I had my first flashback.

The details, I can't remember them all, but there's a killer on the loose. Where's my daughter? Popping up out of bed, T-shirt and boxers, you know, and ready to be action Jackson. It just, you know, it's the fight or flight kicking in. You know, I got my daughter. Where is she? My whole central nervous system just completely out of whack on a high alert about three o'clock in the morning. Unfortunately, I had my border collie. And so she helped grounded me. I was able to pet her.

But these flashbacks would come intermittently over the summer. I just slowly was pulled into the rabbit hole. When PTSD starts stirring up in your brain, it activates the fight or flight. So you're all amped up. That switch doesn't turn off. And so you're laying in bed in that state of mind and you're scared. You're fearful. When is this going to end? Am I going to get my life back?

Every fiber in your body, you feel the tension because your body's in this fight or flight mode. So your body isn't focused on your appetite. It isn't focused on your well-being. It's just focused on survival. And that's activating every muscle in your body. So you hear a dumpster lid close. You're jumping out of your shoes. I started losing a lot of sleep and I'd be up all night, maybe only sleep 30 minutes a night.

I remember one time at 4.45 in the morning, I finally fall asleep and just waking up startled. Like if you've ever been in a dream where you feel like you're falling, it's like that except that you're startled, like somebody's coming to get you. And I look at my watch and it's 5.15. I've only been asleep a half hour. But here I am startled and I'm wide awake again, but not a wide awake with a clear mind.

As far as nightmares go, most of them centered around there's a threat. Somebody's here with a gun. Where is my daughter? It wasn't so much my students. Once that summer of 2018 hit, it seemed to just keep circling back towards protecting my daughter. I guess that's, you know, inside your subconscious that, you know, being a dad, that's your greatest fear is the safety of your children.

So it's kind of a form of a hell on earth.

I have a 20-acre piece of land. I remember one day walking in my back 10 acres and thinking to myself, if somebody offered me $100 billion to continue with my life this way, $100 billion to live like that is nothing because you have no life.

That's when you find out who really cares about you and your family or your friends. And I was fortunate that I had a good friend who's a retired chief master sergeant. He was there for me. He would talk to me for wee hours in the morning. My sister and another friend here locally. But eventually it just got to the point where I had to get to a therapist and go through some hardcore therapy to get my life back.

The superintendent had called me over the summer to let me know that the kids during the summer program were good and everybody seemed happy and he wanted to share that with me. I called him before the next school year was about to start and I said, listen, I'm going to therapy right now. I'm still trying to get back on my feet. I want to keep on teaching, but I need to know you have my back.

And what I mean by that is I'm not going to extra training. When there's extra training, I'm able to leave to go to therapy. And I'm just going to be pushing the curriculum. I'm not going to be doing extra volunteering. And he agreed. If he hadn't, I probably would have tapped out for a while and gone on disability. I had to ease off the gas pedal and tap the brakes to also take care of myself. I found a good therapist. She introduced me to this thing called EMDR.

She would put a pulse in my right hand and a pulse in my left hand. It would alternate, and you would have to go back to the dark days of what happened. Your greatest fears, bringing on a lot of tears and going through it. After going a couple times a week and then down to one time a week, I was able to finally process a lot of that emotion that had got stuck in my brain and eventually start getting back to normal sleep patterns again.

I'm grateful that I am the age I am because if I'd been a Vietnam veteran and exposed this kind of stuff, they didn't have the kind of therapy available back then. And they weren't quite aware of the mental health challenges of being exposed to violence.

I remember a retired Vietnam veteran, his name is Bruce, telling me that, you know, when we go to war, we're expecting to get attacked and we have weapons to fight back. He said, "You guys, it's a different situation with your PTSD. You're going to school to teach kids and all of a sudden you're under attack. You weren't expecting it. You have no way of defending yourself.

Even though you guys weren't in a war zone, you were exposed to a different type of PTSD because you were largely helpless to fight back against it. I don't want to compare myself to a soldier who's been in combat, but I could see what he was talking about as far as with us, we're not expecting to go into our day with any kind of attack. And that's just hard for the mind to process, especially when you're responsible for a lot of young lives.

That shooter, he was on the campus six minutes shooting up the school and it took 20 minutes for the police to get there. So that was a long time for my mind to be on heightened alert and helpless. They do have an armed security guard there now, but if somebody really wants to create havoc at Rancho de Jemima Elementary, after that armed security guard, there's no other line of defense.

So I think that was a big contributing factor to the PTSD. I think it wouldn't have been as bad if I had been allowed to be armed that day. I wouldn't have been as helpless. Instead, I had to go through the long aftermath of getting myself back and turning off that fight or flight in my brain. And it never quite leaves you. It'll always be with me the rest of my life, PTSD. But it is manageable.

You just got to be mindful of it, and there are a lot of grounding techniques to be aware of. And I still will check in with the therapist when I feel it's necessary. The superintendent said he would tell our story, so I didn't talk to the press, but he only talked to the secretary and the custodian about what happened that day. There was no debriefing. You know, it was four and a half months before we all got to tell our story.

When you go through something traumatic like that, you should be able to tell your story to at least law enforcement or the school. There was a lot of angst over that, too, because there was a narrative created that the secretary heard the gunshots, called the lockdown, and the staff executed it. As we went through the debriefing, eight of us showed up to the debriefing, and all of us said we did not hear a lockdown call. Now, I'm not saying the secretary didn't call a lockdown. All I'm saying is none of us heard it, and none of the kids I had heard it.

She may have done it. It may have been too much chaos, but there was a false narrative created. And I don't know if it's political to make the school look good. I'm not sure what it was, but it certainly wasn't a situation where what everybody went through was acknowledged and validated.

The secretary was invited down to Sacramento, the state legislature, and they honored her there and they gave her a plaque. The superintendent was there. The principal was there. But none of us were invited. In fact, none of us were even told about it, the rest of the staff. The only reason I found out about it because one of her kids was in my classroom. I'm still trying to recover and I'm traumatized. And then all this added layers happening. That just didn't feel right.

Then they gave us a plaque at a school board meeting a couple months later, similar to what the secretary got.

And this plaque has a narrative of what happened, and it tells the same thing. Secretary heard the gunshots. We all reacted. For myself and several other staff members, we were just, we were not happy about that. And I don't blame the secretary for that. She didn't control the narrative. I think that falls on the superintendent. And he did say, you know, my staff did great, but when he singled out anybody, it was always the secretary or the custodian, and that's because he didn't know the rest of our stories. And so we got in touch with the senator's office and said, hey,

If it's not going to tell the story of what happened for each of us, we don't want it. So fortunately, they did take the time to redo it. We were invited into town. We sat in a big giant circle. There must have been 50 people there. So everybody gets a chance to tell what happened, rather than the superintendent just talking to two people and going with a narrative that doesn't tell the complete story.

You have to have some validation after you go through something traumatic and not being able to tell your story is it's very dismissive and it leaves you alone with your thoughts to try to process things. Yeah, it was the scariest day of my life. And I think it's therapeutic to validate what what I went through that day. I believe I've come a long way in my healing journey.

I still sometimes have challenges with sleep, but I've learned to be able to be mindful of myself. If I feel like I'm pushing myself too hard, whether it's school, parenting, I've learned to just, you know, hey, sometimes you got to step back and take a break. And if necessary, revisit the therapist.

I don't think anybody ever clears completely from PTSD, but I feel like I'm in a good spot now in life where I'm close to where I was before. And in some ways, when you go through something traumatic, there's good things to come out of it. Don't get me wrong. I didn't like getting the experience to get to this point. But because of the PTSD, I honestly believe I have more empathy now than I did before the shooting.

I can sympathize, empathize with people who are going through mental health struggles, whether it's from trauma. You know, it could be something complex growing up with abusive people around you, the people who have abused drugs and they're having a tough time getting their mind back. I'm a lot less judgmental as to where they're at instead of how they got there, because I know what it's like. It just totally knocks your life out of balance.

It's constantly stirring within you, at least when it was raging out of control for me back in 2018. It's not as simple as it looks from the outside. March of 2018, it was about six months after the shooting, I had reached out to the president of the Oakland A's. I had heard he was accessible. I emailed him on a Sunday morning and I said, hey, we got the junior giants up here. Be nice if you guys maybe could do something for us, maybe send up some A's caps or something, get some green and gold here.

And he emailed me back within 20 minutes. He said he was familiar with what happened in Rancho Tehama through the news, and he would do one better. He was going to send up the mascot to the school with some A's employees. And so they did that in September of 2018. So my fourth graders were now fifth graders. We played a game with their employees. The younger grades watched it. It was a great day. The mascot elephant, he's out there pitching and doing his antics, and it was just a beautiful day.

At the end of the day, they invited me to throw out a first pitch of one of their games. For me, being a lifelong baseball fan, that was just overwhelming. My students were cheering me when they announced it, and I had to step outside. It was just an emotional moment after all I had been through.

To have something like throwing out a first pitch at a baseball game for a team you've been rooting for since you could remember. At my age, I can remember the A's winning three straight World Series in the 70s when I was a little kid. So I've just been a lifelong fan. And to go through something so positive, that just kind of helped counteract things in my mind, body and soul.

It's hard for people to understand the amount of trauma and how it gets in every fiber of your being. And when somebody reaches out with some empathy, how much it can mean to somebody who's been a victim of something so traumatizing. I'm still deeply appreciative of doing that for my students and then inviting me to throw out a first pitch at a game. It just, I think it was definitely a part of the healing process. I stuck around the rest of that school year and the year afterwards.

You know, these kids love you for, I don't know, just being there that day and trying to do my part to keep them safe. But when I was given an opportunity to move into town, I took it because I felt my fourth and fifth grade combo class, they had moved on. It was time for me to move on as well. Now, I'm glad I work in town where the police are only two minutes away. There's a local monastery here. We've got monks that have been here since 1955, Cisterian monks.

They got 500 acres. They make their own wine and walnuts are self-sustaining. You know, I go to church on Sunday and just talking to the abbot and telling him, you know, during these rough nights where I can't sleep, I can't even pray properly. He said, Ken, you don't have to pray properly. Just say, God, help me. God, help me. I was so tired and stressed out. Simple advice like that. I needed it.

Because your brain is traumatized, it's really hard to take out all the noise that's going on in your mind. There's so many different thoughts circulating because the emotional side of your brain has been overstimulated. Faith and the good therapist and the A's helping me out and good friends and my sister. Without that package of support, I don't know if I'd be here today still teaching medicine.

Today's episode featured Ken Years. This episode was part three of our limited series, Point Blank. Co-produced by me, Witt Misseldein, in collaboration with Connor Sheets, investigative journalist with the Los Angeles Times, with special thanks to Jason Blaylock, Andrew Waits, and Gabby Quintana.

To find out more about the shooting, you can read the original article by Connor that inspired this series, titled, It Was California's Forgotten Mass Shooting, But For Victims, The Hell Never Ends, on latimes.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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