Mike Hollins won’t want to hear it, but he’s a hero on the level of the firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Hollins had led two UVA students to safety as shots began ringing out on a charter bus following a field trip to Washington, D.C., on Sunday, then after realizing that none of the other students on the bus had followed, he went back.
“He said, ‘Mom, I went back. I needed to do something. I was going to beat on the windows because no one else was coming off the bus.’ He said, ‘I was going to beat on the windows. I was going to go on the bus and tell them to come on, get off,’” his mother, Brenda Hollins, told ESPN reporter Mark Schlabach.
Mike Hollins started to get back on the bus, and he encountered Chris Jones, another student who had been on the trip to take in the 3 p.m. Sunday performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, D.C., of The Ballad of Emmett Till, the first in a trilogy of powerful plays about the 1955 lynching of a 14-year-old that was among the moments that sparked the civil rights movement.
Jones had already shot three of Hollins’ teammates, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry, Hollins’ best friend, and a fourth student, Marlee Morgan.
As Hollins stood on the first step, Jones pointed a gun at him.
Hollins turned to run, and Jones shot him in the back.
“The only thing he remembers is he tried to turn, but he saw him lift the gun,” Brenda Hollins said. “He felt his back get hot, and he ran.”
Mike Hollins told his mother that he started running toward a parking garage, pulled up his shirt and saw a bullet protruding from his stomach.
“He got afraid that if he ran too far into the parking garage, no one would find him, and he would die,” Brenda Hollins said.
‘What’s up?’
Mike Hollins had seen his mother the day before, at dinner after Virginia’s 37-7 loss to Pitt.
Brenda Hollins said her son talked about being excited to go on the field trip the next day because he had been invited to go by Perry, who was a student in the class on African American playwrights.
Hollins told his mother that he had wanted the two to drive themselves to the play, but Perry encouraged him to ride the bus, because he’d be able to meet and get to know the other students on the trip.
Jones, like Hollins, was not a member of the class, but had been invited to go on the trip by the professor who had organized the outing.
That four of the shooting victims ended up being football players has led some on the outside to speculate that Jones, who very briefly was a member of the football program as a walk-on, in 2018, never practicing with the team or suiting up for a game, to speculate that the shooter had targeted football players out of some sense of revenge for a perceived past wrong.
And to that point, Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney James Hingeley said in a Wednesday court hearing that a witness has told investigators that Jones appeared to be aiming at “certain people,” shooting Chandler as he slept in a seat, shooting Davis after shoving him and saying, “You guys are always messing with me,” though Davis hadn’t had any interaction with Jones on the trip, according to witnesses, then shooting Hollins after he had returned to the bus to try to help others.
Brenda Hollins said her son told her that he didn’t know the shooter before the trip, and only remembered interacting once with him, with each of them saying to the other, “What’s up?”
‘His cry was so deep’
Mike Hollins, who was able to run toward the parking garage after being shot, had to undergo emergency surgery Sunday night and a second surgery on Tuesday.
He’s improving, Brenda Hollins said, and was able to walk for the first time on Wednesday.
Doctors have told Brenda and Mike’s father, Mike Hollins Sr., that their son will need months of rehab, but Brenda Hollins said her son is determined to return to the football field.
He’s also determined to finish up his work toward his undergraduate degree. Mike Hollins is scheduled to be able to graduate next month, a semester early, and then begin working toward a master’s degree.
The mental part of the recovery might be more difficult.
Doctors told the family that they wanted to wait until after the second surgery to tell Mike Hollins the news that his teammates had passed.
He asked about them, Brenda Hollins said, by writing their names on a dry-erase board, and when family members tried to avoid telling him the truth, she said her son knew.
“We told him that because of the severity of the situation, it was confidential, and we couldn’t get any information. I don’t think he believed us. He was throwing his hands up and had this look on his face, and I know he was saying, ‘Why? What do you mean?’” she said.
When they were finally able to tell him, he lost it.
“Mike’s cry was so deep, it was like coming from his soul,” Brenda Hollins said. “It was like a cry I’d never heard before in my life. It was so deep. His cry was so deep. There was nothing I could do. I can’t grab him and pull him to me and hug him because he’s hurt. I can’t move him. It was like he was alone in that moment. We were there, but he was alone.”
Brenda Hollins said her son told her he doesn’t know how he’s going to live without Perry, his best friend.
She said she told him: “You’re going to live for him.”
One goal Mike Hollins has, according to his mother, is to be able to walk across the graduation stage with his classmates.
“That would be a blessing,” she said. “It’s a blessing because he’s walking with his three brothers on his back, and that’s exactly how he’s going to feel because he’s missing them. And so, he’s determined, and if he will graduate, he will walk.”