Megan Butala said she walked out of Rocori High School a different person on Sept. 24, 2003.
She sees it in a newspaper photo depicting her after one of Minnesota’s worst school shootings, fear in her eyes, hands over her head.
Butala was a senior at the time of the shooting in Cold Spring. Her friend and classmate, Aaron Rollins, 17, was among two victims. Seth Bartell, a 14-year-old freshman, later succumbed to his wounds in the hospital.
More than two decades later, the trauma associated with that horrific event has followed a winding path for Butala and other Rocori survivors, sometimes brought on by news of school shootings elsewhere. The Aug. 27 school shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, the deadliest in Minnesota since the 2005 attack in Red Lake that claimed seven lives, was the latest painful reminder.
Their experiences, while different for each of them, shed light on the complex nature of grief and what the road might look like as the students and parents of the Annunciation tragedy heal in the years to come.
Related: For our family, the Annunciation shooting was a tragic reality
“It opens the wounds every time you hear of one happening,” said Butala, now a mother raising her family in Cold Spring. “You put yourself in their shoes and realize they’ve now joined this club no one asked to be a part of.”
Stolen innocence
Before heading to school that day, Butala told her mom about a light encounter with Rollins from the previous night. A mutual friend was too bashful to ask her to go to homecoming, so Rollins did the honors on his behalf at a volleyball game.
Rollins was a jokester in the friend group. “A hoot,” Butala remembers her mother calling him.
Butala was sitting in class the following morning when the school went into lockdown. Her teacher locked the door, covered it and told all the students to huddle in a corner.
In a world not yet inundated with smartphones, information wasn’t readily available at first. Students could hear a helicopter’s thrum outside. Eventually, they turned on a television to watch reports on the situation developing around them.
The class got cleared to leave the room, police telling them to keep their hands on their heads on the way outside. She hopped on a bus, then saw her mom waiting for her outside. Next she saw her brother, a freshman, walking out of the building.
“I’ve never been so happy to give him a hug,” she said.
Leah Brix, a freshman at the time, remembers yellow tape in the hallways and sharpshooters standing on the roof as she walked out of the school.
“It’s a haunting experience being there at a crime scene in real time,” she said. “Going back next time, it was all cleaned up and looked normal, but you just couldn’t get those memories out.”
Bartell was Brix’s classmate, as was the shooter, John Jason McLaughlin, 15, who was convicted of murder and remains in prison. Although Brix had a locker next to McLaughlin’s, they were both shy and didn’t interact much.
Like Butala, Brix feels like she lost part of herself that day.
“It steals your innocence,” she said. “We grew up that day in a way we should not have. It took so much from us.”
Soon after she got outside, Butala found out about Rollins’ death. It was earth-shattering news, she said.
The following days and weeks were a blur. She remembers the school made counseling available to students, but at the time she didn’t understand how it could help. “It was kind of that mentality like no one knows what we’ve been through except for us so why would we talk to them?” she said.
Butala found support in other ways. Every Wednesday night for years afterward, she’d gather with friends and classmates at the Rollins home. No doubt in her mind, it helped.
The community really did rally together, Brix said. She felt there was a unique tight-knittedness to the classes who experienced that day together, with more awareness of bullying.
“We definitely, definitely grew close,” she said. “It hit so close to home that we really did lean in to that.”
As a devout Catholic, her hope is the Annunciation community is finding similar support among each other in the aftermath. Two children died in the shooting.
Mourning comes, sooner and/or later
Grief comes in waves for Butala in adulthood, both predictable, like anniversaries, and unpredictable, like one tough day in college.
A classmate was demonstrating dementia symptoms as part of an exercise. The student acted confused, going in and out of the doorway. It triggered something in Butala, perhaps bringing back the fear she felt as she huddled in a Rocori classroom worrying if anyone would come through the door.
For those who lived through a traumatic experience, seemingly small reminders can bring it back to the forefront, said Dr. Jessica Cici, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with M Health Fairview.
“We call that hyper vigilance in trauma, where we’re just acutely aware of reminders,” she said. “It may not be a conscious awareness, but our body can sense it and feel it, and it can cause an increase in anxiety.”
Cici, a mother of three, shared tools for talking to children about school shootings and recognizing signs of trauma in them after Annunciation.
Brix reckoned more with her trauma in 2024, when the oldest of her eight children reached the same age she was when the shooting happened. Now living near Albany, she wrote about it on her blog, Catholic Country Chronicles.
In the post, she describes going from lunch to being whisked into a classroom for safety. Afterward, she didn’t seek out the counselors that the school brought in, either, figuring she had no right to them because she wasn’t as close to the victims as the students around her.
She “semi-successfully disassociated” from being a school shooting survivor for the next 21 years, never truly allowing herself to process it.
Related: After school shooting, former Greater Minnesota principal near Rocori High School creates HuddLUp to help emotionally isolated kids
Her son reaching his freshman year last year, a school shooting happening in Minnesota this year, and the Catholic connection to the event – all of it hit her harder than it had in the past.
“I had all this grieving that I don’t think I ever did,” she said. “I thought I was unworthy to grieve because I was affected, but not as affected as the students’ best friends or parents.”
Brix has since realized it was OK to mourn all along. Living through a school shooting isn’t something to brush aside.
A range of responses are natural after a traumatic experience, Cici said, from worry to guilt to anger. Whether it comes from a therapist, family member or friend, it’s important to create space for someone to process it.
“Some of that validation just normalizes their experience and helps them be able to move forward with their coping journey,” she said.
As with Brix, the way Butala processes the event is now influenced by being a parent. Worrying is part of parenting, but going through what they did adds another layer.
Every spring, Butala and her three kids help to clean the memorial to Rollins and Bartell that stands outside Rocori High School. She talks to them about the event, using it as a reminder to pay attention to people struggling with mental health and help out whenever they can.
How tough each anniversary of the shooting will be is impossible for her to predict. Grief will strike hard one year, a flood of thoughts pouring in about the life that her friend lost and the lost parts of herself. The next year may be a bit easier to bear, helped by happy memories she has of Rollins.
Forgetting isn’t possible.
“I feel like it’s a good thing to remember,” she said. “It just makes me realize that it still can happen and not to be immune to it, sadly. I just wish there was something more we could do.”
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