For Zachary Mackey, every mass school shooting brings flashbacks of a childhood nightmare

For Zachary Mackey, a community engagement supervisor at Philadelphia’s Lutheran Settlement House, a school shooting like the one Wednesday at Georgia’s Apalachee High School — where two teachers and two students were fatally shot — takes him back almost 36 years.

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He was a 6-year-old first grader who lived across the street from the 600-student Oakland Elementary School in the small town of Greenwood, S.C. On Sept. 26, 1988, James William Wilson Jr., a 19-year-old man, entered the school, made his way to the cafeteria where Mackey and other students were eating, and started shooting.

“It was a pretty normal Monday. I went to lunch with my classroom. Then I can remember hearing what as a child I thought were firecrackers,” recalled Mackey, now 42. “I can remember my teacher screaming at us and getting us toward the back of the cafeteria.”

When it was over, Wilson would be responsible for one of the first modern mass school shootings in the country.

“I remember a bullet hit the wall and seeing dust come out of the wall,” Mackey said. “I don’t remember seeing the gunman, but I was not really looking around. A lot of teachers were taking kids to houses across the street. I wasn’t crying, but I knew I was trying to get some adult’s attention because I wanted to go home, which was a few doors down. My grandparents weren’t home, but my uncle came and found me and he picked me up. That’s when I started crying.”

Today, few remember the Oakland tragedy. It would be 11 years before Columbine High School would make America take notice.

Wilson stole the .22-caliber handgun that he used from his grandmother, with whom he lived. In the cafeteria, he wounded two students and a teacher. After reloading his gun in a girls’ restroom, he was confronted by gym teacher Kat Finkbeiner, who tried to stop him; she was wounded twice, including being shot in the mouth. He then entered a third-grade classroom and shot toward the students, wounding five children and killing two 8-year-olds, Shequila Bradley and Tequila Thomas.

Wilson, who suffered from mental illness, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He remains on death row. “I don’t remember too much about him,” Mackey said.

According to the Washington Post school shootings database, there have been 416 shootings at schools since Columbine, including the tragedy at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., a suburb an hour outside Atlanta.

Just as it did at Oakland Elementary, the sound of gunshots unleashed chaos at Apalachee High. Staff and students went in a frantic search for places to hide, and frightened parents hurried to the school, looking for information.

Like Wilson, the suspect, a 14-year-old student of the school, was swiftly apprehended. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said the teen was charged as an adult in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and instructors Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53.

In 2006, Wilson’s mother, Shirley Bordner, told a local television station that her son had a troubled past, being bullied by his peers and his father for being overweight and dressing differently. “His dad would get angry with him and curse him — sometimes threaten him with guns,” Bordner said.

Wilson started going to psychiatric centers at the age of 14 because he would become violent. “I remember one time I had brought him home from the hospital, he got out of the car and blackened my eye,” said Bordner.

Jillian Peterson, a psychologist and associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., is a cofounder of the Violence Project, a nonprofit organization. She has compiled a database of every mass shooting in the U.S. since 1966 and has found that mass shooters, 98% of whom are male, tend to share a similar psychological pathway.

It often begins with childhood trauma, usually a type of abuse like witnessing domestic violence. That leads to anger and isolating, which leads to hopelessness and self-loathing. Wilson was often called a recluse in news accounts about his life.

Mackey, who has been working with Lutheran Settlement House’s domestic violence program, said he is not surprised that witnessing and enduring domestic violence as a child is traumatizing.

“If you asked me before I started doing this work, I would have said I was surprised,” he said. “But when you hear some of the stories of people and what they have gone through and endured, if a child witnesses that, I can only imagine it is very traumatizing.”

Lutheran Settlement House runs a counseling program for children ages 3 to 18 who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse.

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The Oakland Elementary students returned three days after the shooting to a school surrounded by police. “I went back to regular first-grade life,” said Mackey, whose memories of the aftermath of the shooting have grown hazy. Much was the same as before, except Mackey said the teachers had walkie-talkies, there were tighter security measures around the school, and classroom doors could lock.

What Mackey also recalls is becoming a boy afraid of the dark and sleeping with his grandparents for the next two years.

“Certainly anything of this magnitude, it’s going to take some time to recover,” Oakland Elementary principal Eleanor Rice said in the days following the shooting.

She died in 2021, and Oakland Elementary was ultimately renamed Eleanor Rice Elementary School for her efforts in helping the school community recover.