Village Mourns Slaughter of Innocents

“I thought I had seen death in all its forms, but I was wrong,” gray-haired paramedic Thomas Urquhart said Thursday.

“Some of the children were lying in a circle; it looked as if they had been shot while playing a game. The way the dead teacher was lying, it looked as if she was trying to protect the children.”

There is no official reconstruction of Wednesday’s slaughter of first-graders at Dunblane Primary School; police are not talking. And mercifully, there are no pictures. But there are indelible impressions among health professionals summoned to horror in a quiet town.

They say Thomas Hamilton began shooting before he reached the gymnasium where 29 children were gathered for an early physical-education period. He shot and wounded teachers Mary Blake and Eileen Harild in the foyer.

Inside the gym, he shot teacher Gwen Mayor and the 5-year-old girl next to her. He shot children in a play circle.

The others ran from the madman who had come to school with four guns. Hamilton chased them, shooting at close range. He shot the last of the children in a clump at the far end of the gym, where they cowered in fear; there was nowhere else to run.

It took between two and three minutes. By that time the children were all down, 15 of them dead, one dying, 12 others wounded.

Then Hamilton blew his own head off.

“He would have done less damage if he had stood at the door firing an automatic weapon. The close range . . . all the head wounds,” said John McEwan, manager of district ambulances services, in an interview Thursday.

Dunblane grieved in a blend of anguish, anger and incomprehension Thursday. Victoria, Emma, Brett, John, Hannah, Melissa, Charlotte, Kevin, Ross, David, Mhairi, Abigail, Emily, Joanna, Sophie, Megan--the names echoed across the village and around a nation in mourning. “A silent scream,” one politician called it.

“Evil visited us yesterday, and we don’t know why. We don’t understand it, and I guess we never will,” said Ron Taylor, principal of the 700-student public school in this upscale village of 7,300 in the center of Scotland. Of the 29 students, one boy was uninjured; he may have been protected by the bodies of two dead friends.

As a snow shower sprinkled a school besieged Thursday by battalions of photographers and reporters, the pain was too much for some.

“Have you no heart? Leave us alone!” screamed a redheaded teenager as she fought her way through a clutter of cameras to lay a bunch of flowers outside the school gates.

Today the prime minister will visit; on Monday, the queen. All day Thursday, the flowers came.

“To give you something to hold in heaven,” read a card with flowers that were accompanied by a teddy bear.

“Sleep well, baby chicks,” said another.

“May God take better care of you than this world ever could,” read one remembrance, from “all the people in our office who cried for you today.”

There was a stuffed black-and-white dog with a red collar, grinning big bears, a smiling tiger.

There was a candle in a jam jar, and a message carefully printed in a child’s hand: “To my friends. I had great games with you. Bye Bye, Victoria.”

“We are getting a feeling for a good bit of what happened,” Police Chief Louis Nunn said, noting that Scottish law forbids police to disclose details of a “fatal accident” inquiry.

There is no question, though, that Hamilton came dressed to kill about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday. Laura Bryce, an 11-year-old student, said she caught a glimpse of him: “He seemed to be wearing black; big black cap, waistcoat and guns.”

The 43-year-old loner ignored a challenge--police will not say from whom--and headed for the gym. As the firing started, Taylor dialed 999: “A madman with a gun is running amok in the school,” the principal said. Police were at the school within six minutes; the first of 18 ambulances arrived two minutes later. It was over.

Danny Mulheron, an ambulance officer, had just dropped off his 7-year-old daughter at another school and was on his way to work when the call came. When he got to the gym, McEwan was just staggering out.

“I’ll never in a million years believe what I have just seen,” McEwan said.

McEwan was in charge of ambulances at the Lockerbie disaster, when 270 people died when a bombed jetliner fell from the sky.

“This was worse, surreal,” he said. “It was like a Brueghel painting, a medieval vision of hell; pieces of 5-year-olds--something from the Holocaust.

“Children were everywhere. Some were lying in groups. Some singly. What struck me was the unearthly hush. There were a few whimpers from the wounded, that’s all.

“He was up at the end of the gym, one gun beside him. I got the impression he must have been chasing them around with the gun,” McEwan said.

Said Taylor: “We did what we could, we tried to stem the blood. There was so little we could do to help. We tried to identify those whose wounds could be taken care of, but there were so many, so many.”

Mulheron took stock as stunned paramedics began to do triage, separating the wounded from the dead and gauging the severity of their injuries. With the help of local doctors and nurses who rushed to the school, it took about 50 minutes to get all the wounded out.

“It was a sea of blood, wee bodies piled everywhere. Carnage. . . . Indescribable,” Mulheron said. It was a scene that will never leave any one of us.”

The two wounded teachers on the floor of the foyer partially blocked the door, making it difficult to get past.

“There were a whole lot of kids right at the back, as if they ran. That’s where we found him, a gun next to the body. In all, I saw four guns,” Mulheron said. “The third teacher was dead next to a little girl, as if trying to protect her. I think he got them first.”

As emergency teams worked and grieving teachers tried to identify the dead, desperate parents gathered on the sidewalk in front of the school, awaiting word about their children. Gradually, students from other classes were dismissed when officials could be sure they would be safely cared for.

The number of parents diminished until, long hours after the shooting, those who had been unable to locate their children were taken to a house nearby. They formed an awful queue, and couple by couple were told the news.

Then the paramedics stood by while parents were brought in to identify their children. One woman, 36 weeks pregnant, went into false labor.

The mother of one of the dead girls is a doctor who was working at the local hospital to save wounded children when the word came that her daughter was a victim.

“You let the robot in us take over; try and forget your emotions, but they’re always playing with you,” Mulheron said. “Our brains couldn’t take in what our eyes were seeing.”

It seemed the horror would never end. By late afternoon the emergency teams had all left. After nightfall, though, when the police had finished, there came a call to move the bodies from the gym.

“Some of us older men volunteered,” Urquhart said.