Students will return Friday to a western Kentucky high school with their sense of normalcy shattered.
They will meet in the gym of Marshall County High School — usually filled with cheering crowds of basketball fans in orange and blue — for an assembly, then return this weekend to pay final respects to two classmates gunned down on campus.
After Friday’s all-school gathering, classes will resume, just three days after a 15-year-old boy opened fire, killing two students and wounding 16 people, CNN affiliate WZTV reported.
Visitation for both slain teens will be Saturday afternoon in the school gym, with funerals to follow Sunday for Bailey Nicole Holt and Preston Ryan Cope, both 15.
The suspect — who was not identified because he is a juvenile — was charged with two counts of murder and 12 counts of first-degree assault, said Marshall County Assistant Attorney Jason Darnall said.
‘I tried to call her name’
Bailey called her mom in one of the final acts of her young life, her mom said.
“She called me, and all I could hear was voices, chaos in the background,” her mother, Secret Holt, told CNN affiliate WKRN. “She couldn’t say anything, and I tried to call her name over and over and over, and she never responded.”
After the gunfire, buses took surviving students to another school, where parents waited. Secret and Jasen Holt waited for Bailey to walk off one of the buses. But she never did.
To her parents, Bailey was a perfect daughter. She was always putting others first, and she knew she wanted to be a labor-and-delivery nurse, her family said.
“She was perfect in every way,” Jasen Holt told WKRN. “She was an angel here on Earth. She was a perfect angel.”
Prosecutors want to charge teen suspect as adult
The 15-year-old suspect remains in custody after making his first court appearance Thursday, Darnall said.
He was ordered to be detained at a location to be determined by the Department of Juvenile Justice until his next hearing, Darnall said.
Prosecutors are expected to ask for the case to be transferred from the juvenile court system to Marshall County Circuit Court under youthful offender provisions. In Kentucky, those rules allow a suspect to be charged in an adult court, if a judge rules the case meets set criteria, Darnall said.
A grand jury is expected to meet on February 13.