A student was recently pulled from the Maryland high school where a student shot two classmates on Tuesday.
The student’s mother, Marianne Taylor, confirmed to The Signal that her daughter was pulled out of Great Mills High School two weeks ago because of safety and security reasons.
The move might have saved her daughter’s life.
At 8:30 a.m., Taylor and her husband were driving around the area when they began to notice a mass amount of emergency vehicles. They initially didn’t think anything of it, as the vehicles probably were responding to an accident, they figured.
Then they noticed the mass casualty unit truck pass them. She would later have news of a shooting confirmed by the news.
Austin Wyatt Rollins entered Great Mills High School shortly before 8 a.m.. Armed with a handgun, Rollins shot a male and female student, according to a report from CNN.
The 16-year old female student is in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, and the 14-year male student is in stable condition. Rollins was shot and killed by the school’s resource officer, who arrived a minute after the shooting began, according to the same report.
Marianne Taylor had a separate concern, which prompted her decision to withdraw her daughter from the campus and transfer her to the SCV.
“She had a grown man who wouldn’t leave her alone,” Taylor explained. “He would follow her home and just walk on to campus to talk to her, tell her he loved her that he wanted to be with her.”
Her daughter’s stalker was not the man who shot the school, Taylor said. The stalker was a former student about 19 or 20 years old, while Austin Wyatt Rollins, the shooter, was a 17-year-old student at Great Mills.
The stalker was able to make it on campus by walking through the doors of the school near the basketball courts. “He knew a lot of the kids there… he would just walk in and they would see him and not say anything,” Taylor said.
Her daughter is now attending a SCV school, and her family plans to move once their house in Maryland has sold. Taylor herself graduated from a SCV school in 1993.
“I always say, everything happens for a reason…,” she wrote in a Facebook post, referring to the security concern that allowed her daughter to avoid this tragedy. “…It’s devastating my heart is broken, but thank God (my daughter) was not there.”
The Signal has redacted the name of the school due to concern for the safety of the student.
