About this story

Jan. 17, 2024 marked the 35th year since the Cleveland Elementary School shooting. The 1989 schoolyard shooting was one of the earliest school shootings in the country, and it left five students dead. Victoria and I interviewed two people who were students at the school and survived the shooting.

One of them was Rob Young, who was shot twice. Rann Chun survived the shooting, but his sister didn't. She was one of the five students who died in the shooting that day.

Years later, Chun returned to the same school to teach math to fourth graders. Every day, he walks down the same hallway that children ran across to hide in a classroom away from gunshots. Despite the constant reminders of the shooting and of the day he lost his sister, Chun said he decided to return to the school as a teacher because it's where he felt grounded and where he felt at home.

Young returned to the school district to work for the Department of Public Safety. The little replica of an army man in the photos was first found in the motel room of Patrick Purdy, the gunman at the school. "Some might find me holding on to it morbid, but it's a reminder of why I do what I do; it keeps me going," he said.