Terri Roberts was at the theatre where she worked when the call came. It was her husband, Chuck. Terri should come straight away, he said, to their son Charlie’s house. Terri knew instantly, from the tone of Chuck’s voice, that it was serious. She didn’t ask questions, just ran to her car. And it was on the short drive that she turned on the radio and heard for the first time about a shooting incident that morning at a school in a nearby town.
Several children were dead, the report said, and the perpetrator was a man named Roy. Terri suspected immediately that the killings were connected with Chuck’s call. “I knew straight away that the school they were talking about was very near the place where our son Charlie used to park the milk van he drove,” she says. “I was imagining all sorts of dreadful things, like that he had been killed while helping to rescue some of the children. I knew he’d have helped them if he possibly could.”