It was a little after 2 p.m. in August 2007 at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis when a young man entered the building, pulled out a handgun and said, “Everybody get on the ground.”
Earlier that day, he’d threatened school officials who escorted him out of the building as a part of his pending expulsion from the school.
Instead of shooting anyone, the young man bolted out a door of the wood shop classroom. He was quickly arrested about a half-mile from the school, according to a police report.
That event received little public attention. A 2017 fight outside a Rutherford County elementary school on orientation day also went largely unnoticed. A student’s mother reportedly pulled a handgun on the student’s father in the school parking lot, but no shots were fired.
Few likely remember in 2001 when a 57-year-old man walked into a psychiatrist’s office at East Tennessee State University armed with two handguns and said his wife was “out to get him.” Police responded after he refused to hand over his weapons to psychiatrists.
