KAIT, Gray’s ABC and NBC affiliated station in Jonesboro, Ark., produced a special to observe the 25th anniversary of a school shooting that killed four students and one teacher at Westside Middle School on March 24, 1998. The shooters were fellow students, just 11 and 13 years old.
KAIT, Gray’s ABC and NBC affiliate in Jonesboro, Ark., produced a special to observe the 25th anniversary of a school shooting that killed four students and one teacher at Westside Middle School on March 24, 1998.
Hatton Weeks, KAIT’s general manager, says he was working at the station when it happened. “It really ripped the fabric of the community.”
The shooters were fellow students, just 11 and 13 years old. Too young to be charged as adults, the day they turned 21, they walked out of a federal facility with no criminal history, Weeks says.
“It’s one of those altering moments in a community,” Weeks says. “We had I think maybe a naïve sense of security that it could never happen here.”
Weeks says for years the survivors and the families of the victims didn’t want to talk about it.
But because of other school shootings around the country over the years, they changed their minds, he says.
“It wasn’t just the survivors that finally were willing to open up a little bit, but also the chief of police,” says Drew Hancock, KAIT’S marketing director. “He was one of the initial responders there and he really didn’t like talking about it.”
The production of the special was made easier thanks to the insight of the news department back when the incident happened in 1998, says Grant Newkirk, KAIT’s promotion manager.
“They did an amazing job of realizing how important this story was at the time and archiving it and making it very available to us 25 years later.” Newkirk says.
Newkirk says the lead anchor at the time, Diana Davis, can be seen in the newsroom with her notepad going around from desk to desk coordinating with producers and reporters to get people on the scene.
“We have the footage of her going live for the first time with the reporter that was on the scene,” Newkirk says.
Davis has been an anchor and reporter at KAIT for more than 34 years. She anchors the noon news and co-anchors the station’s 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts.
The special, Westside Tragedy 25 Years Later, aired at 10 p.m. this March 24, replacing the station’s normal 10 o’clock newscast.
Hatton says much of the credit for saving the videos of big news events in Jonesboro goes to Ronnie Weston, who retired in 2008.
“Whenever a big event would happen or the station would do something special, he would always save the coverage and hide it away somewhere,” Hatton says.
Hatton says the station donated its archival footage to Arkansas State University where it’s kept in a climate-controlled room, “a better place than we would have been able to do here.”
Hancock says it’s important for a TV station to keep the record of their community so people can learn from its history.
In the case of the Westside Middle School shooting, ”even with being 25 years removed from that tragedy, there’s a lot of people that weren’t here and don’t really know that much about it. We are trying to be almost like respectful archivists of all that.”
NOTE: This year, KAIT is celebrating its 60th anniversary; here is the promo and other video related to that milestone.
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