TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2001 SECTION A
CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST
Aftermath of Santee School
Shootings Becomes a
Testing Time for Counselors
Healing: Many have
donated their services, but
find rewards in bringing
back smiles.
BY JESSICA GARRISON
T I M E S S T A F F W R I T E R
ANTEE, Calif. — All day long, the
S question lurked in Nancy North’s
mind.
There it was at 8 a.m., as the sun peeked
over the scrubby green hills and she parked
her car outside Santana High School, where
two days earlier a student had shot two
classmates to death.
The question popped up again that
afternoon as she told sobbing 15-year-olds
that, yes, it was normal to lie awake in
bed, flashing back to bullets ricocheting off
classroom doors. It was OK to cry and cry
and cry.
This was her question: "How could I ever
even begin to help them get over this?"
North was not the only one wondering.
The question confronted more than 200
therapists — many of them, like North,
volunteers — who streamed into Santee
from across the country the day after
Charles "Andy" Williams came to school
with a gun in his yellow backpack.
The question is also being asked by
mental health experts nationwide, some
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of whom say the influx of counselors
after disasters is useless, a ritual gesture
emblematic of a therapeutic culture.
"Sometimes grief counselors do more
harm than good," said Sally Satel, a
Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and a fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute.
Satel, who published articles blasting the
"grief industry" after the Columbine school
massacre, said that for some students, talking
about painful experiences can make things
worse. But much research shows that early
intervention after a trauma can prevent or
lessen the severity of post-traumatic stress
disorder.
So in Santee, the aim was to get students
talking to each other as soon as possible. The
response by therapists was unusually quick,
partly because the Grossmont Union School
District had updated its crisis plan just six
weeks earlier.
Counselors used an intervention method
developed for firefighters who witness
unspeakable horrors. The first week after the
March 5 killings, there was one therapist for
every 10 students, a counselor in every
classroom, and others stationed outside the
boy’s bathroom where the shooting started.
Guidance counselors pored over student
files, tagging those of the ones who had
attempted suicide. Those who have had
substance abuse problems remain on close
watch. District officials even had a portable
classroom towed onto campus, where
students could go for extra help. About 35
counselors remain on campus.
"It’s like a mental health MASH unit,"
said David Moore, a San Diego psychologist.
"For 95% of the people who were there, it
will be the most traumatic experience they
will have in their lifetime. . . . We don’t even
pretend that these kids and their families will
ever return to what is normal."
So students were gathered into groups
and presented a series of questions: How did
you feel when you knew someone was hurt
or even killed? What did you do? How has
your life changed?
The counselors hoped that by answering
these questions, students would build a
"therapeutic community" and learn to rely on
each other as they grieved.
At first, such questions seemed "silly" to
Misty Bonds, who attended the sessions on
her first day back at school.
The 16-year-old junior had a backpack
full of CDs that had been cracked by bullets.
Nightmares propelled her into her mother’s
bed in the wee hours of almost every new day.
Her first afternoon back at school, she called
her mother in a panic after students learned
of e-mail threats to finish what Williams
allegedly had started.
How, Bonds wondered, could questions
like "Where were you when the shots rang
out?" possibly make her feel better?
But six days later, after yet another
nightmare and a morning spent curled up on
her mother’s pillows watching cartoons and
eating pizza, Bonds had decided that, maybe,

the counseling at school was making things
easier. "Groups don’t usually talk to each
other," she said. But now they were.
The counselors have come from all
over, including the Red Cross, the San
Diego County departments of education and
mental health, and the U.S. Department of
Education. Counselors in private practice
answered urgent pages or, like Nancy North,
called and volunteered. Some flew into town,
but most live near San Diego.
Before counselors were allowed to see
any students, district officials evaluated their
credentials. You can’t be too careful, said
Loretta Middleton of the San Diego County
Office of Education.
After another school shooting a few years
ago, a Tarot card reader showed up and
offered her services, said Cheri Lovre, a
nationally recognized trauma expert.
Across their lapels, right below their
name tags, the counselors affixed bright shiny
dots, connoting their specialties so panicked
teenagers could find someone suited to their
needs.
And within a day, the therapists, like the
athletes and the cheerleaders, had formed
their own campus clique: "We’re the dot
people," said Moore, who gave up two
weeks of income from his private practice to
volunteer in Santee.
In every corner of the campus, the
therapists found themselves tested — and
rewarded — as they rarely are in private
practice.
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They encountered every symptom of
traumatic stress they could imagine. Some
students are beating themselves up because
they didn’t grab the gun from Williams’ hand,
Moore said.
Others, friends of Williams, are torn with
confusion and guilt. Some refuse to talk about
it, staying in their bedrooms.
For some students, the shooting ripped
open holes, allowing past traumas to come
flooding back in.
There was the boy who had scooped up a
fellow student as the bullets flew, helping his
bleeding friend to safety.
But now he was haunted, not just reliving
the gunfire, but also a beating as a child. The
two incidents had linked in his head, forming
a traumatic prison he could not escape.
And then there was the student, once
a user of marijuana and methamphetamine,
who had successfully completed a drug
treatment course. Now, for the first time in
two years, he was feeling urges to use.
Without hesitation, Moore opened his
own wallet and drew out a coin, given to him
to commemorate 19 years of his own sobriety.
He pressed it into the boy’s palm.
The student’s insistence that his therapists
could never understand him melted, Moore
said. The boy put the coin in his bag, next
to his own talismans marking the first and
second anniversaries of sobriety. To Moore’s
knowledge, the boy has stayed off drugs.
"It made me feel wonderful," Moore said.
"I’ve been working with kids and trauma for
Page 2
20 years. This was like nothing I’ve ever seen
before."
Most of the families will never see a bill
for all this therapy.
For the first, intense, week, various
agencies lent staff counselors.
Now the U.S. Department of Education
has offered grant money to keep therapists
on campus, and families can also apply for
as much as $10,000 in state funds from
the Victim Witness program for private
counseling. For many therapists in Santee,
the idea of payment was as obscene as the
bullets ripping across school hallways.
"It’s a crisis, and the community needs to
come together," said North, who saw patients
in her El Cajon office in the evenings, grabbed
catnaps on her couch and spent her days
working with students in Santee.
For many therapists, the work was its own
reward.
Many evenings, Moore gathers his wife
and two sons around him. Family has rarely
seemed so important.
And the aftermath at Santee has given
him a new appreciation for the strength of
the human spirit, and of community bonds.
A personal victory: A football player,
who for days had walked around campus with
head hunched and face drawn, broke into a
smile last week at a joke.
"His life will never the same, but he
can laugh again," Moore said. "And for a
therapist, there’s nothing more rewarding
than that."