Published 6:00 am Saturday, October 24, 2026

The most sorrowful thing I saw for a long time was a woman running down the road, her Sunday dress whipping in the wind. Her dress was covered in blood.

A tornado had struck the Goshen United Methodist Church near Piedmont, Alabama, during the Palm Sunday service more than 30 years ago. A weather warning had been issued. Nobody in the church heard it.

The roof came down. Twenty people were killed. The woman was running away from it.

I was a reporter then and arrived right behind emergency vehicles. The first responders ran out of body bags. The funerals of children were the hardest to deal with. I never thought I would experience something worse.

The shooting at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend feels worse.

Partly because it was human caused. Four universes of life, family and community unraveled by a teenager. So many more lives are horribly altered.

There have been at least 2,300 gun incidents in schools across the country since 1966 .…