Update: Thursday, 7:39 p.m. Waynesboro Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Ryan Barber confirmed to AFP tonight that Ignatiadis-Isabelle, 19, of Waynesboro, was a student in Waynesboro Public Schools.
“We can confirm that he was formerly enrolled in Waynesboro Public Schools and attended Westwood Hills Elementary in grades K-3 and 5, and Kate Collins Middle School in grades 6-8,” Barber wrote to us in an email.
It sure seemed like Waynesboro Public Schools Superintendent Jeffrey Cassell was trying to tell us yesterday that the young man who broke into Westwood Hills Elementary School early Wednesday morning, shot a school staffer, then turned the gun on himself, had no history with the city school system.
“I can confirm that this the suspect was not a student of Waynesboro Schools, and had not attended Waynesboro High School,” was what Cassell directly had to say about that matter at a Wednesday news conference, in which authorities confirmed details of the shooting at Westwood Hills, in which Anthony I. Ignatiadis-Isabelle, 19, of Waynesboro, is alleged to have shot a staffer, then himself, taking his own life.
ICYMI
- Breaking news: Major police presence at Westwood Hills Elementary School
- Waynesboro: Everything we know at this point about the Westwood Hills shooting
- Reporting on yesterday’s breaking news from a waiting room and hospital bed
Turns out, Ignatiadis-Isabelle was a student at Westwood Hills; a reader shared with us a photo of a yearbook page from the 2014-2015 school year, which features 22 students from a class, and Ignatiadis-Isabelle’s smiling face looking out at us from the third line of photos.
I reached out to Cassell, and also his second-in-command, Ryan Barber, the assistant superintendent, along with Kendra Jones Carter, who heads up division communications for WPS, and Teresa Floyd, the deputy clerk for the Waynesboro School Board, who leads communications efforts for the elected governing body for the school system, to get someone there to confirm for me how long Ignatiadis-Isabelle was a student in the city school system.
No response, at this writing.
Why is this important? Honestly, not sure yet, though it feels important.
First, because there has to be a reason that Cassell went out of his way at the press conference yesterday to try to distance Ignatiadis-Isabelle from having contact with the school system with the parsed language about the young man not being a current student, nor having been a student at Waynesboro High School.
The shooting didn’t happen at the high school, but rather, at Westwood Hills Elementary School, where we now know Ignatiadis-Isabelle had been a student.
Is there significance to the past tie?
Maybe, maybe not.
And as this story goes, it’s a personal tragedy directly for two people – the staff person who was shot, and then, we can assume, witnessed Ignatiadis-Isabelle take his own life, and then obviously Ignatiadis-Isabelle; and then his family and friends.
And then, next level, every kid and every staff member at Westwood Hills, who we can presume are lucky that this tragedy for two wasn’t a wider tragedy, as we’ve seen in so many other of the school shootings that have become commonplace the past 30 years.
And then, still further out, their families, who deserve to know, as soon as is humanly possible, what happened here.
Was there any sense of a threat from Ignatiadis-Isabelle ahead of what happened yesterday?
Knowledge of his past history as a student at Westwood Hills would seem to be relevant there.
How was Ignatiadis-Isabelle able to gain, in the words of Waynesboro Police Chief David Shaw, “forced entry into the school”?
Later in the press conference, in a follow-up question from a reporter, Shaw clarified that “this was not through means of, at least preliminarily, unlocked means to get in. This was forced into the school.”
Again, that Ignatiadis-Isabelle was a former student at the school might be relevant on that one.
Slim chance of this, but did he know, from past wanderings around the school as a student, where he might be able to force entry?
Back to my question as to why is this important: because I’m hearing from parents at Westwood and other schools in the city that they’re not sure about the safety of our schools right now.
And I get it, we’ve all been traumatized, it’s still fresh, as we get further away from the rawness of what just happened, we can all start to breathe again.
But we can’t just let what happened get swept under the rug as we get back to business as usual.
I asked a simple question of the people at the top of the Waynesboro Public Schools pyramid that wouldn’t have compromised any investigation.
The superintendent opened the door to further examination of the kid’s history as a student in the city school system by going public with what he did at the presser yesterday.
I’m sorry to sound conspiratorial here, but that no one can lower themselves to getting back in touch with me comes across as trying to cover something up.
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Chris Graham
