‘Everybody was freaking out’: Olathe East student heard six shots, then a scream
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Olathe East High School shooting
A shooting at a Johnson County high school injured a school resource officer and an administrator, according to police. The suspect, a student, is in custody.
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Lexi Smith first heard the shots — six she thinks — and then a scream.
Then, silence.
”I immediately got on the phone because I didn’t want to die in silence,” the 16-year-old sophomore said after Friday’s shooting at Olathe East High School.
She and others with her immediately ducked beneath the conference room table. It was midway between 3rd and 4th hour, and she was on a video call for the diversity club, a room full of women, she said. The people on the other end of the video chat, she said, would have seen the shock on their faces.
“Everybody was freaking out. My life flashed before my eyes,” Smith said. She wondered if she would die. “We were just in a room, everybody freaking out with no information for Id’ say a good 30 minutes to an hour. Felt like it was five minutes to me, but I know it was longer than that.”
Soon, authorities announced that the shooting, which unfolded about 10:30 a.m. in an office area at the school, had left an administrator and a school resource officer injured. A suspect, who is a student, was also injured and was taken into custody, according to radio traffic captured by Broadcastify.com.
Police confirmed publicly that the suspected shooter was in custody, but did not identify the person.
‘I wanted to get somewhere safe’
Hiding beneath the table, Smith texted everyone she loved. “When I knew it was definitely gunshots ,I was telling everybody what had happened, and I wanted to get somewhere safe.”
She called her grandmothers, her father, her stepfather, friends. People were texting her to tell her they loved her. She texted the same.
“I was terrified,” Smith said.
For hours after, frightened parents lined up at reunification sites elsewhere in Olathe to find their children, who were transported from the high school and released in groups.
Later Friday, two people wounded in the shooting were released from the hospital.
A third person remains in critical condition, according to Christine Hamele, a spokeswoman with Overland Park Regional Medical Center.
‘We just didn’t know what to do’
Other Olathe East students later recounted frantic moments after word spread of the shooting.
Mike Robertson, a 16-year-old junior, said he was walking down the hall during the advisory period when other students ran past, alerting others, “There’s a shooter in the building!”
“A lot of us were kind of like in denial,” said friend Paige Schmideskamp, 17 and also junior. “Because we really couldn’t believe this was happening to us. We just didn’t know what to do other than talk to our other friends, call our parents.”
She and Robertson, and Robertson’s twin brother, Jack, were all in the same class. No one there heard gunshots, she said.
“It’s not realistic until it happens, I guess,” Jack Robertson said.
This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 4:29 PM.
