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Solomon was firing so low that the bullet that entered Laster's backside may have actually ricocheted off the floor. She was hurled into her friend, and both sprawled to the floor. "I think I've been shot," Stephanie told the teacher when she got up. She put her hand on her buttocks, saw the blood and fainted.
By this time, Solomon had backed out the door he had entered. His rifle abandoned, he was kneeling on the ground. He pulled out another gun, a powerful .357 magnum revolver, and put the barrel in his mouth. "It's going to be all right," a voice said. "Put it down." Something about the voice must have calmed the boy. He took the gun from his mouth. The voice belonged to assistant principal Cecil Brinkley, into whose arms T.J. then collapsed, shaking. "Oh, my God, I'm so scared," T.J. said.
Rosa had made his way to the school's resource officer. The boy used a cell phone to call his mom. "You need to come here to school," he told her, bringing to life any parent's nightmare. "I've been shot." By the time his mother and stepfather reached the school, Ryan was at the hospital emergency room. His injuries weren't serious, and he was released within hours, though at least for now he will carry the bullet in his leg.
A helicopter took Laster to another hospital, where she arrived in critical condition. The bullet had lodged in her abdomen, and surgeons had to repair her intestines. But the operation went well, and Stephanie will probably be home within days. By Friday she was able to talk with friends and family, folks so bighearted they sat around her hospital bed and said how awful they feel for T.J. Solomon.
We'd like to believe that no boys are truly evil, and if Eric Harris tested that proposition at Littleton exactly a month before Conyers, T.J. did not. Within hours, Rosa was struggling to explain Solomon's crime against him. "He'd be the last person I'd think would do something like this," Ryan told TIME after he was released from the emergency room. "He was normal. Just like me."
Solomon lives in a four-bedroom, $275,000 home in a subdivision full of AT&T and IBM executives. His stepdad, Robert Daniele, is a trucking-company executive who likes to hunt; his mom, Mae Dean, is a secretary. The family moved to the well-kept neighborhood with Georgian homes for the space--their house sits on a one-acre plot--and the schools. Heritage is regarded as one of the best in the area.
Only an outline had emerged by week's end to explain Solomon's feeble rampage. T.J. was taking Ritalin, which is usually prescribed for hyperactivity. A friend of the family said that his grades had been falling during the past year and that he had been medically treated for depression.
Some of the boy's acquaintances spoke of T.J.'s resentment of Jason Cheek, a popular boy two years older who had lettered in three sports. Cheek had teased Solomon, they said, but it was unclear if the linebacker was a primary target. Cheek, who was shot twice in the leg, was healthy enough Friday to deny taunting Solomon and to joke that the bullet still stuck near his groin would set off the metal detectors he was sure the school would install.