Teachers, students struggle with Sacramento church shooting that took classmates
Miss Darlene just saw her on Monday, didn’t put together the quiet girl’s empty chair on Tuesday and what had happened the evening before. Then, noon came and a line of teachers broke the news to her class.
“I saw her yesterday. She came to school yesterday,” guest teacher Darlene Tellis — Miss Darlene to students at Bannon Creek School in the South Natomas neighborhood of Sacramento — said outside the grief-stricken campus on Tuesday as classes let out for the day. “I didn’t even know. You call roll and she’s not there. I didn’t think about it. About noon today, 15 teachers and administrators came up and they kept coming, they kept coming. Then, their regular teacher came in.”
Students and parents throughout this elementary school and at Leroy Greene Academy nearby learned much the same way Tuesday.
The girls — Samia, 13; Samantha, 10; and Samarah, 9 — were gone.
Two of the girls attended to Bannon Creek. The other went to Greene charter school, said Natomas Unified School District spokeswoman Deidra Powell.
A church a few miles away in Arden Arcade near Arden Fair mall was supposed to be safe haven for a troubled father to see his children on a supervised visit. Instead, the 39-year-old walked into the sanctuary’s meeting hall with a gun, turned it on his young daughters and a chaperone, then killed himself.
“She was a nice girl — quiet,” Tellis recalled of Samantha, a fourth-grader who would have turned 11 on Wednesday. “She seemed to be very smart,” then with a wry smile, Tellis remembered how the girl spoke up Monday in class to defend a student being teased by another classmate. “She had a philosophy about her. She was standing on her principles.”
Then came Tuesday, and the girl’s chair was empty.
Last year, their mother had filed a restraining order with Sacramento Superior Court against David Mora, the gunman. The court order barred him from possessing firearms, but he used an AR-15 to carry out his attack. And, on Tuesday, adults were left to explain to children what they themselves struggled to understand.
“That’s what they keep talking about. They don’t really know,” said Brittany Wartham, a mother to two boys, 9 and 6, at Bannon Creek. “It’s really sad because we didn’t know they went here. It’s very shocking to them.
“They’re like, ‘We’re going to die.’ I said, ‘No,’ but I’m scared, too.”
“She started here in kindergarten,” said Rosie Radrokai, mother to 9-year-old and 12-year-old boys at Bannon Creek, of Samantha. Radrokai’s younger son was quiet, absorbed in his thoughts, as he stood beside her.
“He was like, ‘Mom, I’m scared. I heard that someone died,’” she said.
Radrokai tried to take it all in — a pandemic, the war raging in Ukraine, and, now, Monday’s tragedy. Finally, she asked, “When is this storm going to end?”
Samia, 13, was an eighth-grade classmate of Leila McCray’s daughter. McCray waited for her outside the school and tried to absorb the news. McCray watched the news reports Monday night but was still trying to make sense of it Tuesday afternoon.
“I don’t know how to feel about it — it’s really sad. I’m totally speechless,” she said. “I’m just praying for the mother — all her babies, I just couldn’t imagine.”
District social and emotional response teams were at work through the day Tuesday, Powell said. Social workers, counselors, first mobilized during the early days of the pandemic, now were helping students, parents and teachers try to understand the unimaginable.
“It’s anything but a normal day,” Powell said. “This is a day we thought we’d never see. We know our parents are going through so much. We want to let them know we’re here for them as well,” she continued. “Natomas, we know each other. When one hurts, we all hurt.”
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
.JPG)