The
Woman Who Stopped a School Shooting
Caitlin Dickson Updated
Apr. 14, 2017 1:04PM ET
A man walked into a Georgia school with an AK-47 and a duffel bag full of ammunition. Antoinette Tuff, who had tried to kill herself 9 months earlier, talked him out of it.
On
August 20, 2013, a man walked into Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy
in Decatur, Georgia, wielding an AK-47 and a duffel bag full of ammunition and
yelling “We are all going to die today.” But Antoinette Tuff convinced the would-be
school shooter that he had a reason to live.
"It's going to be all right, sweetie. I want you to know I love you, okay? I'm proud of you. That's a good thing that you're giving up, and don't worry about it. We all go through something in life....You're going to be okay. It's going to be all right." - Antoinette Tuff
'Tuff,
the school’s bookkeeper, has listened to this chilling 911 recording, but it’s
still hard for her to believe that it’s her voice calmly telling the man,
Michael Brandon H ill, that she loved him.
“It
didn’t make no difference if he took my life, I was already feeling like I was
dead when he walked in the door,” Tuff tells me. “I just knew it wasn’t time
for any of us to go. And I didn’t want him to go and take his life, because I
had felt that way before.”
Tuff
and I talk over tea at New York City’s Renaissance Hotel in the midst of her
whirlwind media tour for her book Prepared
For a Purpose. She’s just filmed an appearance on The View after
visiting Good Morning America. Her afternoon is booked with
even more interviews. The 47-year-old is strikingly beautiful, wearing none of
the hardships she’s had to bear on her wrinkle-free face. The long, curly
braids and black and white patterned dress she sported when she had her
first-ever national media appearance—an interview with Anderson
Cooper—have been replaced with a business suit and a sophisticated bob.
Like
her last name would suggest, Tuff really has been through a lot. She’s been
abused and homeless. Her husband proposed to her and another woman with the same
ring. She gave birth to, and spent her adult life devoted to caring for a son
who is legally blind, confined to a wheelchair, and has very few fine motor
skills as a result of being born with
the neurological disorder Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and a twisted neck
syndrome called Torticollis. Derrick, now 22, was also diagnosed with ADHD at a
young age. Tuff cared for Derrick and his older sister, LaVita, while working
two or three jobs at a time.
Her
most compelling fight, however, was the one she had against herself, against
her depression and desire to die after her husband, who she’d been with since
age 13, left her for another woman. On New Year’s Eve in 2012, Tuff walked into
moving traffic and jumped back before it was too late. That exact same night,
she would later learn, Michael Hill also had a break down and threatened to
kill his brother.
Raised by a devout
Christian mother, Tuff grew up going to church multiple times a day, every day,
but she never felt like she actually had a personal relationship with God
before her husband left her. It was God, she says, who told her what to do when
Michael Hill walked into McNair Academy, dressed in all black, ready to kill.
She says those are God’s words heard on the 911 recording.
Before
Hill walked into the school, Tuff, who was filling in while the receptionist
grabbed lunch, was about to go to the bathroom. At one point during their
seemingly endless standoff, Tuff even got up the nerve to ask Hill for
permission to go. He agreed. She knew that if she could make it out of that
reception area, this could be her escape. She could run and hide in one of the
classrooms with the rest of the children and teachers or even make it out the
backdoor. But she stayed put.
“I
knew he was okay with killing,” she tells me. “I knew that if I left him alone
there would be a possibility that he would go out and kill. So I knew that if I
could stay there with him and keep him in there with me, then we would all get
out safe.”
Tuff
doesn’t claim to understand what was going through Hill’s head when he walked
into the school that day. She knows she never will. But she spoke to a mass
shooter before his rampage, somehow getting through to him—despite never
getting him to make eye contact—before anyone got hurt.
“He’s
a human being,” she says of her refusal to let Hill kill himself.
She’s
still working to pay off the bankruptcy debt that her husband stuck her with,
but Tuff’s world has been otherwise completely turned upside down. She’s raised
over $100,000 with a Go Fund Me
account to create a non-profit—co-run by her son—for underprivileged
kids who want to go to college. She wants to pursue a career in public
speaking, encouraging people to be “prepared for their purpose” as she feels
she was prepared by God to talk down Hill on that day in August. She’s kept her
job at McNair Academy, but she’s not quite emotionally ready to go back there
yet.
“We
all go through something in life and we all need someone to be an angel one
day,” she says. “God sent people to help me in my suicide moments, in my crazy
moments, and in my unbelievable moments.”
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