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Midland grad at NIU during shooing
A Cabell Midland High School graduate who now attends Northern Illinois University was shaken Thursday evening after a gunmen opened fire in a building next to where he was taking an acting class.
Michael Moore, a sophomore theater student at NIU, watched through a window as students fled for their lives from Cole Hall next door.
"We all thought immediately that there was a school shooting," he said. "It's sad that we live in a world when we would think that."
Moore's professor took his students to another room, where they waited until it was safe to leave the building, Moore said in a phone interview Thursday evening from his apartment. Classes are canceled at NIU for today.
He said he had met at least one person who was shot, and a friend of his visited Thursday night, makeup running down her face, and told him that she was on her way into the lecture hall where the gunman opened fire. His friend left the building when a classmate who was shot in the leg came out.
"She has a cut from when people were storming through the doors," he said. "She said she saw somebody get sprayed with blood. It's so sad."
Moore said his school has had at least one threat before, last December.
Nothing came of it then, but now that a shooting has actually occurred, it's unnerving, he said. "It's scary to know that it could have happened to me," Moore said.
One comfort has been the ringing of the telephone. It was no time at all before word got around and the calls started coming, some from his old classmates and his hometown, as well-wishers heard about what happened.
"It's so great to know that people care for you," he said.
