A round of applause is in order for Antoinette Tuff who works in the front office at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy. When a gun man enter the school where she worked with a AK 47, instead of running she talked the gun man down. He was taken into custody and no one inside or outside of the Decatur school was hurt.
When Michael Brandon Hill, enter the school he was bent on killing as many people as he could. Diagnosed with a mental illness, Hill had stop taking his medicine after his mother had died and his medicare ran out. Hill enter the school with a assault weapon and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition. When he approached Tuff he order her to get on the school intercom to tell everybody “he wasn’t playing.” He also pushed her to call a local news station because “he was gonna end his life and take all the cops and everybody with him.
What happen next is what Tuff describe as it “Wasn’t nobody but God”.
Tuff reason with the gunman and convince him to surrender. She talked about her divorce after 33 years of marriage, her suicide attempt, she assured him that she had pain in her life too.
“I told him, ‘Okay, we all have situations in our lives,’” she recalled. “It was going to be okay. If I could recover, he could, too.”
When she saw Hill was starting to absorb what she was telling him, she urged him to stop shooting. “I told him to put the guns down on the table, empty his pockets,” she said. After Hill piled a cache of weapons and ammunition onto the counter, Tuff told him to lay on the floor.
“He put his hands behind his back and he said, ‘Tell them I’m on the floor,’” said Tuff, who then alerted the officers that Hill had given up.
In the end, no one including the school’s 870 students was harmed in the incident. Currently, Hill is facing charges of assault against an officer, making threats, and illegally possessing a firearm.
