Qualla: 1993 East Carter High School Shooting

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Deanna McDavid was one day from her forty-ninth birthday. She had earned her English degree from Morehead State in 1966, taught high school in Akron, Ohio for fourteen years, and then returned home to Carter County in 1981 - a hometown teacher, born and raised in nearby Olive Hill, who had spent the last dozen years of her career giving rural Kentucky kids the same kind of education she had received. On the afternoon of January 18, 1993, a seventeen-year-old student walked into her seventh-period classroom with his father's revolver. Deanna McDavid was killed within seconds. Head custodian Marvin Hicks, who responded to the gunfire, was killed soon after. The fifteen minutes that followed shaped a generation of Carter County kids who would carry that day with them into adulthoods their teacher and their custodian never reached.

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: The Two Lives Lost

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: Before Columbine

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: The Trial and the Aftermath

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Ope...

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: Grayson and What It Carried

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

1993 East Carter High School Shooting: The Place on the Map

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 hig...