Perspective: No One Was Hurt. But Something Was Taken.

I was hanging laundry outside when it started.

It was one of those early spring days that makes you feel quietly grateful for where you live—sunlight filtering through new leaves, birds loud and insistent in the trees, the kind of ordinary beauty that feels almost protective. I remember thinking, as I pinned up a shirt, how lucky we were to be here, in this small, thoughtful community as the world around us rages.

Then I heard the first shots.

At first, I told myself it was something else—roof work, maybe, or construction echoing strangely across the neighborhood. It didn’t belong, but I tried to make it fit anyway. A few seconds later came more shots, sharper this time, undeniable. They cut through the birdsong in a way that felt wrong on a cellular level. And suddenly I knew.

They were coming from the direction of Carrboro High School.

I ran inside and told my wife, who had just begun a call with colleagues at UNICEF working to support children in crisis zones around the world. The contrast would have been absurd if it weren’t so terrifying. Then I ran toward the sound.

On the wooded path that leads to the school, I saw the first students—faces I didn’t know but will not forget. They were running. Not the carefree running of teenagers late to class, but something primal. Eyes wide. Some crying, others silent in shock. I asked if they were okay, told them they could come to our house if they needed refuge, but they kept moving. There was only one thing on their minds: get away.

I kept going, hoping— irrationally maybe—that I would see my own child coming toward me.

Closer to the school, the scene widened into something chaotic and surreal. Scores of children were running in every direction. Sirens multiplied. Police cars poured in. Parents began to gather, scanning faces, calling names, their fear barely contained. It was the kind of moment that stretches time, where every second feels suspended between hope and something you don’t dare name.

Then I saw three young men in handcuffs on the sidewalk, surrounded by officers. A bus sat awkwardly off the road, as if it had tried to leave too quickly. And then an officer in tactical gear, carrying a long gun, moved toward the school.

That image will stay with me: a school, a safe place of learning and growing, approached like a battlefield.

I texted my child. They told me they were locked in a closet.

“Stay there,” I wrote back, trying to compress all the protection I could not physically give into two words on a screen.

And then we waited.

It is hard to describe that kind of waiting—the way your mind cycles through possibilities you cannot control, the way you try to stay steady for others while something inside you fractures. Eventually, word spread: the shooting had occurred at a nearby apartment building. No one in the school was hurt. Police were clearing the building room by room.

Relief came, but it did not come cleanly. It arrived tangled with anger.

Because even in the best-case version of this story—no injuries, no lives lost—something was still taken.

My child spent that time alone, in a closet, waiting for an unknown outcome. So did many others. They followed the drills. They did exactly what they’ve been taught to do. And that is precisely the problem.

We have accepted a version of childhood in which this is normal.

We tell ourselves these are precautions, that preparation is safety. But there is a quiet cost to asking children to rehearse fear. To normalize the idea that at any moment, their school might become a place to hide, to barricade, to text their parents what they hope are not their last words.

Standing there, watching terrified students run, I felt something shift. Not just fear, but a kind of clarity. We have adapted to this reality so thoroughly that we measure success not by the absence of these events, but by how well we survive them.

No one was hurt, we say, as if that is the bar.

But something is happening to our children. To their sense of safety. To the texture of their everyday lives. And, if we are honest, something is happening to us, too. We are learning to absorb the unacceptable. To move on quickly. To be relieved enough that we do not ask harder questions.

What does it say about us that this can happen on a beautiful spring afternoon, in a community like ours, and still fit within the boundaries of what we now consider normal?

And what will it take for that to change?

I don’t have policy answers here. I have a memory: of birds still chirping as gunshots echoed, of children running through the woods, of a text message from a closet. I have the image of a peaceful day interrupted, not by something unimaginable, but by something all too familiar.

We tell our children they are the future. But the question we should be asking is simpler, and more urgent:

When do they get their present back?

Coverage of the incident on 4/14 can be found here.