Darian Quist, a grade 12 student at the school, was in a classroom with a teacher and about 15 students when the lockdown alarm sounded, though he believes he was in a different part of the school from the shooting. He and his classmates stayed there until the police escorted them out.
“For a while I didn’t think anything was going on, but once everything was circulating and we realised something was wrong we got tables and barricaded the doors, and I believe we sat in there for two or two-and-a-half hours,” he told CBC.
He said everyone was tense and nervous. People sent him “disturbing” photos, he said, with “blood and things like that”.
“I think that’s when it all set in,” he said.
His mother Shelley Quist was working at the local hospital at the time. She said they only found out about the shooter half an hour after the lockdown – though she was on the phone with her son the whole time.
“It’s just one of those things when you just think it’s never going to happen,” she said, adding: “Panic was setting in until I laid eyes on [Darian].”
Norbury said that it wasn’t until after 17:00 local time – three-and-a-half hours after the lockdown was first announced – that people started to be released from the school and he was able to find out that his wife was safe.
Quist described the departure as “organised chaos”. “Professionalism definitely took hold,” he said.
But even then those involved did not know the full extent of what had happened until the casualty figures were revealed.
“A lot of people are shaken up right now, especially when we were told the true numbers,” Darian Quist said.
Though the names of the victims have not yet been released, it is clear the whole town has been deeply affected.