Molly Darnell, the Oxford High school teacher who was shot in the November 30 2021 shooting at the school speaks at a news conference announcing a commission’s gun violence prevention findings on June 11, 2024. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)
Since the horrors of the 2021 school shooting at Oxford High School in Metro Detroit, Molly Darnell, the teacher who stood face-to-face with the shooter and survived, has shared publicly how the tragedy has impacted her life. Now she’s suing the school district in a lawsuit that alleges school officials saw clear and repeated warning signs that the shooter posed a threat to the school community and repeatedly disregarded the violence that was to come.
The shooter, a 15-year-old student at the time of the shooting, was sentenced last October to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of four students at the school, Tate Myre, 16; Hana St. Juliana, 14; Justin Shilling, 17, and Madisyn Baldwin, 17. The shooter’s parents were also found criminally responsible and sentenced to prison terms for making a firearm readily available to their son who prosecutors asserted gave a wealth of warning signs that he was planning the shooting.
During the various court proceedings against the shooter and his parents, Darnell shared that she had come face-to-face with the teen who fired three shots at her at close range, with one bullet striking her in the arm, six inches from her heart. Darnell and six students were injured in the shooting and survived.
“You made an intentional plan to shatter lives because I came within your line of sight. You intended to kill me, someone you didn’t even know…“You intended to leave my husband a widower and my children motherless,” Darnell said during her victim impact statement during the shooter’s sentencing last year.
Now with just days until the three-year mark of the Nov. 30, 2021 shooting, Darnell is seeking accountability from the school through a lawsuit seeking damages for the economic and emotional turmoil she has endured since the shooting.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday outlines how the Oxford Community School District and specific school employees “recklessly” created and exacerbated the risk of a shooting at Oxford High School “through acts showing a deliberate indifference to the safety and constitutional rights of Oxford High School students and staff.”
The shooting was foreseeable, the lawsuit asserts, pointing fingers particularly at former Oxford Dean of Students Nicholas Ejak and Shawn Hopkins, who was a school counselor at the school, for their role in sending the shooter back to class the day of the shooting after the shooter had drawn images of guns, bullets and a bloody figure on a school assignment.
After a teacher informed the school of the drawing, the shooter was brought to a counseling office along with his backpack that contained his gun and ammunition. His parents were called to the school for a meeting Hopkins has said neither parent seemed very engaged in. The parents were asked to take the shooter home, but they declined and the school has said it had an obligation to return the shooter to class.
“…school officials escalated the danger by releasing the shooter back into the school population from a place of safety and security. They did this despite knowing of the shooter’s desire to inflict harm on himself and/or others,” the lawsuit reads. “These school officials compounded the danger to Oxford High School students and staff by releasing him from a safe zone with an unsearched backpack that contained the deadly weapon that the shooter used to carry out his suicidal or homicidal plans. Plaintiff Molly Darnell survived the shooting but has suffered irreparable harm.”
The school had a duty to ensure the safety of all of its students and employees to the best of its abilities and to take necessary precautions to protect them against known emerging threats, the lawsuit states.
The school was aware and responded in such a matter that it knew that the shooter was possibly suicidal and could harm himself and other, the lawsuit outlines, but subjecting the shooter to the meeting where he was met with apathy from his parents “worsened the situation” and was “a contributing cause-in-fact of the shooting”.
Neither the shooter’s teachers nor the students were informed of the shooter’s worsening mental state and were unjustly placed in harm’s way in a tragedy that has changed the lives of the school community permanently, according to the lawsuit.
In Darnell’s case, the shooting has caused her to suffer severe emotional distress, the lawsuit asserts, and she will continue to suffer losses in her life due to the disturbance the shooting has had on her health.
“On November 30, of 2021, I woke up as a wife, mother, educator, friend and colleague, and by the time I came home that evening, three unrecognizable labels had given to me: Victim, wounded and survivor,” Darnell said during a June press conference talking about the shooting. “The person that I was what I left for work that morning was taken, the life I had, the life I knew was stolen.”
A request for comment was made to the Oxford Community School District, but has yet to be returned.