Deanna McDavid née Mullins was born on January 19, 1944, in Olive Hill, Kentucky. She graduated from Olive Hill High School in 1962, enrolled at Morehead State University as an English major, and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1966. She then taught high school in Akron, Ohio for fourteen years before returning home to Carter County in 1981, where she taught at East Carter for the next twelve years, teaching the books she loved to the children of people she had grown up with. Marvin Hicks was the head custodian, the person who knew every hallway and unlocked door in the building. Both were killed doing the most ordinary things educators and school staff do - showing up for the afternoon shift on a Monday in January.

The East Carter shooting happened in 1993, six years before Columbine, before the country had developed the vocabulary it now uses for these events. School lockdown drills did not yet exist. Trauma counseling for survivors was improvised. The national press treated the incident as a regional tragedy rather than a national crisis - the New York Times and People and U.S. News covered it, but the story did not stay on front pages for weeks. Twenty-two students were held in the classroom during the fifteen minutes between the shootings and the surrender. Mandy Morse, one of them, wrote a farewell letter to her family while it was happening. They were children who believed they were going to die in their English class.

A Carter County grand jury indicted the shooter on June 15, 1993, on two counts of second-degree murder and twenty-two counts of kidnapping. The local community could not produce an impartial jury, so the trial was moved twice - first to Morgan County, then to Johnson County. Opening arguments began on February 9, 1995. The defense entered a plea of guilty but mentally ill, which the court accepted. On February 28, 1995, the seventeen-year-old who had walked into Room 108 with his father's revolver - now nineteen - was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. He remains incarcerated in Kentucky, with an additional twenty-year sentence added in 2015 for assaulting a prison food-service worker named JoAnne Smith.

Grayson is the seat of Carter County, a small Eastern Kentucky town near the West Virginia line. The high school where the shootings happened still stands, and the school district has continued to educate Carter County kids in the three decades since. The community absorbed what it had to absorb. Friends of Deanna McDavid - colleagues who had taught beside her, students she had taught years before - kept her memory in the kind of quiet, persistent way small towns remember their dead. Marvin Hicks left family of his own. The conversations Carter County had to have in 1993, about how a tragedy this large could happen in a town this small, were the same conversations countless American communities have since had to have, in increasingly familiar ways.

East Carter High School sits just east of Grayson at about 38.32 degrees north, 82.93 degrees west, in the rolling hills of northeastern Kentucky where the Eastern Coalfield gives way to the Ohio River valley. The school is unremarkable from the air - a typical rural American high school complex, athletic fields and parking lots and a low brick building. The map gives no indication of what happened inside. That is the way it should be: no monument, no mark, just the building still doing the work it was built to do, with the names of Deanna McDavid and Marvin Hicks remembered in the community that lost them.