20 years after Minnesota's deadliest school shooting, survivors seek to keep victims' memories alive
A community is still healing, 20 years after it experienced the deadliest school shooting in Minnesota history.
It was March 21, 2005, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.
A 16-year-old gunman killed seven people and wounded nine others before dying by suicide.
Two survivors from that day are looking to help the community heal and remember those who were lost.
"Sometimes we feel like we've been forgotten," Missy Dodds, a former Red Lake High School teacher and survivor of the shooting, said.
Dodds believes many have forgotten the horror her community experienced 20 years ago.
But for those who lived through it, the memories still haunt them.
"Twenty years ago when the shooting occurred, I had to take time off. I have not gone back to the classroom," Dodds said. "I spent probably 10 years healing myself, working on myself, working through the trauma of that day, the survivor's guilt. And then I became a survivor, which is different than a victim. A victim is you are not able to use your voice, you are not able to talk, but once you become a survivor you can speak your truth."
And that truth is helping Dodds and her former student, Starr Jourdain, who was just 15 years old when tragedy struck, find their voice and work to bring their community together to heal.
Jourdain now teaches in the same school where she witnessed the killing of her classmates.
"Some of the kids that I work with, their moms and their dads were there that day so you can see the generational trauma there," Jourdain said. "They do bring it up, but it's kind of hard to talk about."
Hard to speak about the horror she saw that day. What she can talk about is the movement to build a permanent memorial to Red Lake so that day is never forgotten.
"Throughout the years, everyone just kind of drifted apart like that and just went their own ways of healing. And now that we've come back into it, we've kind of brought everyone back together," Jourdain said.
Jourdain says her former classmates and the tribal community have been sponsoring events to raise money for a memorial. The plan is to have it along the bank of Red Lake.
"A memorial means that you are not forgotten. A memorial is a place, though, to also go and honor, it's a place to honor those lives who were lost that day," Dodds said. "This feeling in your heart, you are with people that know your worst day. They were there, they sat right beside you, they've been on this journey with you and so it's a feeling of peace."
There is a fund set up to help make sure the Red Lake memorial becomes a reality.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is rolling out its statewide Targeted Violence Prevention Strategy to honor 20 years since the Red Lake School Shooting.
A team will give communities the tools to see warning signs in people before they resort to violence.
"What we've learned by studying school shooting events, places of worship or mass violence events, that there is often an escalation in the behavior from individuals, that if there is intervention ahead of time that you can actually prevent some of these mass violence events from occurring," BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said.
The BCA will set up local teams around the state. Those teams will be given resources to provide social services and mental health help to those in need.
