The cafeteria at Oakland Elementary was full when Wilson entered. He stood quietly for a moment before he began shooting, choosing his victims - children and adults - at random. Witnesses described a look of rage on his face. Three students and a first-grade teacher were wounded in those first seconds. Teachers and staff began evacuating children toward a wooded area behind the school. Others hid in the cafeteria freezer before slipping out toward the woods. Some children found shelter in a neighboring home. The school's physical education teacher, Kat Finkbeiner, was on her way through the building when Wilson left the cafeteria to reload in a girls' restroom. She tried to stop him. He shot her twice. She survived; her bravery almost certainly saved more lives that morning.

Of the nine people wounded, two did not survive. Shequila Bradley was killed in the cafeteria. Tequila Thomas was rushed to Self Memorial Hospital, where she fought for her life for three days before she died. Both were second-graders. Both had families - parents, siblings, grandparents, friends - who had sent them to school that morning and would never bring them home. The community of Greenwood mourned them at funerals attended by friends and neighbors, with extended families navigating a grief no schedule of life prepares anyone for. The memorial garden later built behind Oakland Elementary - with two benches, two birdhouses, and two plaques - is the school's quiet, ongoing answer to the question of how a community remembers.

James William Wilson Jr. was 19, unemployed, living with his paternal grandmother, and had been a patient at psychiatric hospitals since he was 14. His family knew he was dangerous. His prescriptions disappeared in days rather than months. Four years before the shooting, his grandmother and her husband had called police after Wilson locked them in a bedroom and left in a violent frenzy; because he was a juvenile and no family court petition was signed, he was not arrested. There were other incidents. Police were not called. He stole his maternal grandmother's .22 revolver on the morning of the shooting and drove to a discount store to buy hollow-point ammunition. He was obsessed with mass killers and had checked out books about them from the library days before. The warnings were there. The system that should have caught him did not.

Wilson was convicted, sentenced to death by electric chair on the murder counts and to 175 years on the lesser charges. He remains at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. He has been on death row since May 1989. Greenwood has carried the day differently. Survivors organized; some became educators or counselors themselves. On the anniversary, families return to the memorial garden behind the school to tend it together. In 2018, on the 30th anniversary, survivors gathered to relive the trauma and to remember Tequila and Shequila by name. School shootings became, in the years that followed, a category of American horror that Greenwood understood before most of the country did. The lesson the families and teachers of Oakland Elementary keep insisting on, every year, is the names. Tequila Thomas. Shequila Bradley. Eight years old.