Murchison Middle School Overview Murchison Middle School opened the fall of 1967 on the 23.6 acre site of a former rock quarry. Logan Bazar, who hadnt been present during the shooting, was dispatched to Graysons classroom to retrieve his personal effects. Slowly, she could feel compassion seep in. At night, according to George Scott, they sometimes argued heatedly. The driver of the Escalade was a well-to-do lawyers son who hailed from Highland Park and who was attending the University of Arkansas. . She was told by city authorities that no space was available. It peeled back all the layers. There, he floated in the cold, clear water, feeling momentarily light. Great, Ray thought. Everything stopped that day as we tried to process it. Everything was a gnawing mystery. His Murchison friends were gone. The next morning, while the rest of his family filed out the front door to their respective daily destinations, John stayed behind, hiding in a closet. Ray spoke to him directly: Thank you for what you did for us.. Pine Middle School shooting. Ray, now 56, lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with his wife and three daughters. Austin Metro Area; Travis County; Austin; At-a-Glance. On the way to the police station, someone spontaneously led the group in singing church hymns. He shot Grayson three times, in the arm, chest, and forehead. But our initial conversation had been twenty years earlier, just after the Columbine High School massacre. So in February 2018, Ray created the Facebook group, and he waited. Many of the details surrounding the incident and its aftermath have gone unreported, leaving the victims with unanswered questions that have derailed their own attempts at recovery. The anguish that has plagued the Murchison students presages the kind of long-tail trauma that many of today's witnesses to shootings will be burdened with for the rest of their lives. Show All News. It was my first face-to-face meeting with Ray. His eyes darted around in search of airplanes plummeting from the sky, a jarring hallucination hed experienced before. Sandy Hook. But Ray had not so much as acknowledged his own emotional scar tissue until one morning in April 1999, when he was driving through the University of Arkansas campus and heard on the radio about the mass shooting at Columbine High School. Murchison Middle School - located at 3700 N Hills Dr, Austin,TX 78731-3092. find Murchison Middle Schoolrating, student, staff and STAAR statistics and scores . Theyd come over the hill and kill everyone around me. School Address (Store Correction) 3700 N Hills Dr Austin . His classmates still wonder: What really happened? He toggled between hedonism and religion, each in zealous doses. But as all the eyewitnesses I spoke with took pains to explain, the sight of John with a hunting rifle was a momentarily bemusing one. Johns fate rested in the hands of state district judge Hume Cofer, a by-the-book jurist who was not regarded as a softie. Instead, without any sort of plan, he walked outside, across the lawn, under the canopy of oaks and the great magnolia tree, and onto the sidewalk. When Neff replied that Grayson and his wife had an eleven-month-old son, the reporter watched as something seemed to collapse inside the father. Above all, after years on the government payroll, George had a private political consulting business to run. Two years later, in 1981, the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum that included a trust fund whose proceeds Ian would receive on his eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays. Beau Bradley 2015-2019. Nothing is ever gonna happen to that guy. Schirpik drove him back to school and led him by his arm into the principals office. The next sound might well have been unsteady applause, since many if not most of the students were still convinced that they had witnessed an exquisitely executed dramatic performance. There was another connection that wasnt reported at the time. As a juvenile, he was entitled to anonymity. The message was Move on, move on.. Hed been concerned about John. He had super-high standards.. The agenda for that day had already been set. I dreamed that John Christian was leading this big group of zombies from the projects near where I lived. He asked himself, What now? Linda Coffee Argued Roe v. Wade. Murchison Middle Public 6-8 3700 N Hills Dr Austin, TX 78731-3092 (512) 414-3254 District: Austin Independent School District (ISD) SchoolDigger Rank: 473rd of 2,254 Texas Middle Schools Per Pupil Expenditures: $10,888 Students who attend Murchison Middle usually attend: High: Anderson High School Feeder schools for Murchison Middle: Butler Butler 2012-2016. They proposed that the boy live with an unnamed physician in Dallas, who would become Johns legal guardian. Im just now remembering. How do I deal with it? he recalled. Ray, in the meantime, had continued to spend his post-Murchison years in a state of what he would tactfully term self-anesthetizing. A wayward path took him to Central America, where he was inspired to later attend seminary and become a spiritual directoressentially a roving ordained minister gravitating to those who had experienced trauma. To Garcias surprise, the typically stoic father broke down in tears. For an hour, five of them stood on the dry, unshaded ground, offering words of thanks to the man who had remained frozen in their memory as their 29-year-old teacher. Someone suggested they visit Graysons grave site. Blood gushing. Where he had mesmerized Murchisons gifted and talented, Laura taught mostly those who were socially disadvantaged or at risk. School shootings were not a concern then. They met up for the first time in years to talk about the grief theyd carried for two decades. Johns older brother, George Scott, described him as a really fine family person. . His drivers license was suspended after he racked up speeding tickets. I felt lucky that he found any interest in me, because he was so much smarter and worldlier. He headed to a local coffee shop, where hed planned to meet a few classmates before driving to the cemetery, and on the way he heard on NPR that there had been another school shooting in Texas, in the town of Santa Fe, south of Houston. The two of them spoke late into the night, and their conversation resumed the next morning. The collateral continuing tragedy is this silence around the event. He added, I know a couple people whove said, We dont know where this [Texas Monthly] story is going. They dont want it to be a hit piece on the Christian family or something that says, This kid escapes justice. I dont want to hurt John. AUSTIN, Texas An Austin school has found a new leader after its principal's sudden resignation. fatally shot his teacher, 29-year-old Rod Grayson, three times at Murchison Junior High School. Press secretary George Christian (far left) at the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson (far right) and foreign policy advisers on October 11, 1967. Hes back in the neighborhood. He started a private Facebook group, titled simply Murchison/Mr. This article originally appeared in the April 2020 issue ofTexas Monthly with the headline The Aftermath. Subscribe today. What transpired next is based on the recollections of eight eyewitnesses in the classroom as well as those of others at school that day. We played backfield a lot because we were both bad. Smith was the first one out the door. Wow. They shouted out questions as Graysons students were herded into a school bus that would take them to police headquarters to be interviewed. Even for those of us who werent in the classroom, there is a chilling kind of flashback that happens with every school shooting, he wrote me. And it is a medical fact that the adolescent brain is far from fully developedwhich means, among other things, that a violent youth, even a murderous one, is not inexorably destined to a life of brutal criminality. Screenshot of newspaper spread on Murchison Middle school shooting The Christian family hired Roy Minton, the city's most prominent criminal defense attorney. Then, as we spoke, he started to cry. They were among the many Murchison alumni who would later recall the Columbine tragedy as a moment when they felt engulfed by their own past and became, in effect, witnesses again to the loss of their innocence. What had kept him from writing it himself was that he hated the thought of bringing anguish to his former classmate John Christian. Lives were changed. . There is also the manner in which the collateral victims were dealt withor, more precisely, not dealt with. Its the Story of Shankleville, One of the States Early Freedom Colonies. Middle Schools in Austin. Susie Gerrie Davis, a former student of Rod Graysons who witnessed the shooting, photographed at Murchison in February. Cathy Olson Muths 1978 yearbook portrait. 10 weeks after broken fibula . John Christian is sitting right behind me, she whispered to her mother. . Such occasions have famously occurred in resolving interethnic calamities in South Africa and Rwanda and throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. No one, including the Christian family, was disputing that he had intentionally killed Grayson. The institution offered a full academic curriculum as well as a rigorous daily regimen of group and individual therapy with multiple mental health professionals. That movie Dawn of the Dead had just come out. Community Parents Students Staff. Gentle. Extracurriculars Band Choir Orchestra Dance / Cheerleading Newspaper / Yearbook National Junior Honor Society Keyboarding Coach Larry Schirpik saw this as well. According to the Washington Post, more than 240,000 U.S. students have experienced a school shooting since 1999. Yet to those who experienced the shooting at Murchison Junior High School, it remains, even after four decades, mercilessly unforgettable. A new site had been erected, called the Memorial to Fallen Educators, which was designated as a national memorial in 2018. Hell, he was one of us.. Not anywhere. Claim this business. It was Rods turn to stay home with the baby, so he called Murchison and requested a substitute teacher for his classes, beginning with GT English. A few days later, my phone rang. Susie Gerrie Davis remembers his insisting on several revisions for a written assignment, telling her, I think you could do something pretty important with this gift of yours, and thats why Im requiring so much work from you. (Davis has since become the author of several faith-based books.) The teacher on the floor. It doesnt take any effort to stand in one spot and go in circles.Write soon,Love, John, Letter to former classmate Elaine Moore, from Timberlawn. Lynette Baugh 1978-1979. Only later in the evening, when they gathered for beers at a bar in their old neighborhood of Northwest Hills, did someone ask the question that was on all of their minds: Has anybody heard from John? Image:Murchison Middle School Austin Texas.jpg is being used on this article. He received intensive psychiatric treatment, was deemed by professionals to pose no threat of further violence, and was released to live a quiet and productive life. 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