Church services with music and testimonials helped many to mourn the four people who died in the school shooting in Winder, Georgia.
Grief, pain, hope and faith permeated church services Sunday as an Atlanta area community’s efforts to cope with the nation’s latest deadly school shooting included prayer, hymns and a first-person account of the tragedy from a teacher who was there.
Brooke Lewis-Slamkova, who teaches food and nutrition at Apalachee High School, told the congregation at Bethlehem First United Methodist Church in Barrow County, Georgia, that she was about halfway through a class Wednesday when the lockdown alarms activated.
She recalled putting herself between the children and the classroom door and hoping to soon hear the voices of school administrators telling her it was all a drill. But she heard no familiar voices in the hallway and the realization that it wasn’t a drill soon took hold.
“As soon as they opened the door in all of their law enforcement regalia, I’ve never been so happy to see a police officer in all of my life,” she said during the livestreamed service. “They opened the door and said, ‘Get out.’”
Lewis-Slamkova said she took heart in what she witnessed after she and her students were safely away: students comforting each other and sharing cellphones with those who needed to contact loved ones, parents arriving at the scene and offering help and transportation to students whose parents hadn’t arrived, “parents loving on their children like we should love our children every day.”
“It’s times like these that words seem to fail,” the Rev. Frank Bernat said at an earlier service at the church. “I’ve reached down for the words all week and they’re just not there. And I know that many of you are in the same boat — overcome with emotion.”
Not far away, at the similarly named Bethlehem Church, pastor Jason Britt acknowledged the shock of Wednesday’s school violence.
“Many of us in this room are deeply connected to that high school,” Britt said. “Our students go there. Our kids are going to go there, our kids went there, we teach there.”'
It’s understood that nobody is immune from tragedy, Britt said. “But when it happens so publicly in our own community, it jars us.”
The shooting Wednesday morning at Apalachee High School in Winder, outside Atlanta, has left the father and son behind bars, families planning funerals as law enforcement continues to investigate the case.
Fourteen-year-old Colt Gray stands charged with four counts of murder, accused of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers this week at his high school. He had his first hearing Friday after being charged as an adult in the latest mass shooting at a school in the U.S.
Immediately after that hearing, his father, 54-year-old Colin Gray, appeared in the same courtroom, charged with multiple offenses for allowing his son to have a weapon.
This selection was curated by AP photo editor Pamela Hassell in New York.