When a student opened up gun shot at a middle school in Idaho, teacher Krista Gneiting guided the pupils to safety, rushed to provide help to a wounded victim and gently disarmed the sixth-grade shooter while hugging and consoling the girl until police arrived.
Parents thanked the math teacher for displaying compassion with saving lives. Though two students and the school custodian were shot during the incident which happened recently, nobody died and the gunfire came to an end within minutes.
During a recent interview with ABC News, Gneiting said she was getting her Rigby Middle School students ready for their final exams when she heard the first gunshot down the hall. When she looked outside her classroom, she saw the custodian lying on the floor and heard two more shots as she was closing the door.
She said: “So I just told my students, ‘We are going to leave, we’re going to run to the high school, you’re going to run hard, you’re not going to look back and now is the time to get up and go,’”
Accrding to the police, a sixth-grade girl came to school with the handgun in her backpack and shot two people inside the school and one outside the school . The three people were wounded in their limbs but they were released from the hospital in a few days.
Gneiting revealed she was trying to help one of the students who was been shot when she saw the girl displaying the gun. She asked the wounded student not to move and approached the sixth-grader.
She said: “It was a little girl, and my brain couldn’t quite grasp that. I just knew when I saw that gun, I had to get the gun.”
She asked the girl if she was the shooter and then moved closer, putting her hand on the girl’s arm and slid it down to the gun.
She said: “I just slowly pulled the gun out of her hand, and she allowed me to. She didn’t give it to me, but she didn’t fight.
“And then after I got the gun, I just pulled her into a hug because I thought, this little girl has a mom somewhere that doesn’t realize she’s having a breakdown and she’s hurting people.”
Gneiting held the girl and consoled her until police arrived.
She said: “After a while, the girl started talking to me, and I could tell she was very unhappy. I just kept hugging her and loving her and trying to let her know that we’re going to get through this together. I do believe that my being there helped her because she calmed down.”
When the police got there, Gneiting told the girl that an officer would need to handcuff her and the child did not object.
She said: “She didn’t respond, she just let him. He was very gentle and very kind, and he just went ahead and took her and put her in the police car.”
The sixth-grade shooter has been charged in the shooting, but since juvenile court proceedings are kept undisclosed in Idaho, her name and the nature of the charges has not been released.
Meanwhile, Krista Gneiting said she hopes people can forgive the young girl and offer her the support she needs.
She said: “She is just barely starting in life and she just needs some help. Everybody makes mistakes.
“I think we need to make sure we get her help and get her back into where she loves herself so that she can function in society.”
