On the Other Side

Nick Walczak tells his story on being the other side of a gun, a victim of a school shooting.

It’s a Monday morning, and I’m really tired. I don’t want to go to school, especially with it being a Monday. I wake my mom up and ask if I can stay home. I tell her I don’t feel well, but that’s only because I really, really don’t feel like going. Her response was no. Shocker. I guess I better get ready and get a move on or I’ll be late.

It’s my junior year, which means I’m old enough to drive myself. I put my key in the slot and turn on the ignition of my Ford Explorer and began driving to Chardon High School on this bitter-cold day, February, 27.

I’m a little bit late, but it didn’t matter to me. I went to an alternative school that teaches trades, like electrical. As I walk inside, the bell rings, making me realize how late I really am. I see my friends sitting at a table and I head over to join them. We’re waiting for the bus to pick us up from Chardon and take us to Auburn Career Center, the alternative school. 

Standing at the end of the table, hanging with my friends, I see a shadow sitting behind us. What’s T.J. Lane doing there? This is odd. He normally sits on the far side of the cafeteria. I shake it off. Thinking about, he and I were good friends once actually, back in middle school. Things kind of change, like relationships and such, as we get older. I mean, he goes to a different school. He’s at another alternative school for troubled kids.

T.J. gets up from his seat and moves a table closer to us. This is really weird. Why am I the only one noticing this? I shake it off again. He’s not doing anything that strange and it’s not my place to be in anybody’s business. I draw my attention back to my friends at our table. The next thing I know, I hear a ear-ringing pop.

I look toward T.J.’s direction, where the sound came from. We’re making eye contact and he’s holding something. A gun? He aims it at me. Three more pops pierce my ears as bullets ran through my arm, neck and shoulder.

I hit the ground. My adrenaline takes over and everything moves fast in a blur. I’m crawling on the floor, making my way out of the cafeteria. I manage to reach a doorway leading to the hallway. I get up, turn left and start running. 

It’s a long, straight, narrow hallway. I’m sprinting as fast as I can, but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere, like I’m actually going slow. I see a group of people at the end of the hallway and try to catch up, but suddenly they aren’t there. A herd of people and they disappear in front of my eyes. Maybe they ran into classrooms or maybe they were never there at all. I can’t tell reality from imagination. I just know I need to get out of here, the school isn’t safe.

I realize a shadow is chasing me as I continue to run to the end of the stretching hallway. It’s T.J. Lane behind me. Suddenly there’s another pop piercing my ears. Another bullet went through my back causing me to fall to the ground, unable to move.

T.J. jumps over me and continues to run away. I’m still lying here in shock. I hear a teacher scream for help as I lay there. Another teacher wearing a bullet proof vest comes to my aid. He grabs my legs and drags me across the hall into his classroom. I see kids crouching in the back of the classroom, staring at me in panic. At this point I realize this isn’t a prank. This is an actual lockdown, with a real gun, and I just got shot.

It’s difficult to share stories like these when your life was once on the line, bringing back traumatic memories. For Nick Walczak, telling his story helped him ease his mind and helped others find relief after confronting similar circumstances, like having a loaded gun pointed in your direction. He’s always willing to speak with anyone and share his story about being on the other side of a gun, losing friends and living with change.

Nick Walczak, who is 24 today, says he’s mentally strong and dealt with everything that’s happened seven years later, since the Chardon High School shooting. Walczak wasn’t the only victim though. A large number of people at the table he stood at were victims, his friends.

“I think I was shot twice, Russel was shot first. And then my friend Danny Parmertor, he passed away. And then my friend Demetrius, he passed away as well. I think that’s the order it went in,” Walczak says about the shooting. “I think it was just anybody at that table he was trying to kill.”

Walczak and his friends assume Lane targeted them because of an ex-girlfriend issue, but the reason why is still uncertain. 

“My buddy Russel was dating his ex-girlfriend and he was all upset about that. For me, I think it’s because he was quiet and I was really outgoing. I don’t think he liked that… other than the fact the he’s just a crazy person.”

Walczak says he doesn’t think he was ever specifically Lane’s target. “Although he did chase me, it’s not like I bullied him or anything. Like I said, we were friends in middle school.”

He says there was one huge regret he has on the February 27, and it wasn’t that he went to school that day.

“I had choice to go right or left, and I went left, which is like a terrible choice because it’s a long, straight, narrow hallway going the way he (Lane) can see,” Walczak says about when he left the cafeteria. “I decided to take a left because I wanted to get to my car because what I knew at that point was the school’s not safe, let’s get to my car… If I took a right, I could have ran right out the door and been fine. I would have been shot three times, but I wouldn’t have been paralyzed.”

The last bullet shot at Walczak went through his back, paralyzing him from the chest down.  

“When you think of someone who’s in a wheelchair and can’t use their legs, you think of the waist down,” he says. “I’m all the way up at my chest. I have full use of my arms and my hands, but it stops right at my chest. I don’t have ab muscles either, which makes it really difficult to sit up and balance.”

Walczak isn’t lying when he says he’s mentally strong. After recovering and learning how to use a wheel chair, he was back at Chardon High School in the same year, 2012, but it wasn’t the same. 

“I ended up going back to school that same year for a few days, but it was such a huge… it was such a big deal that I didn’t feel comfortable in the school anymore,” he says. He wasn’t uncomfortable because of what happened the last time he stepped foot in the school though.

“People seemed to look at me through their peripheral vision, like staring at me, and it was a little odd. I went back to school for two days and then I didn’t go back the rest of that year.” 

He says the student body being so supportive of him made him uncomfortable to the point he couldn’t go back. 

“One of the meanest teachers in that high school was incredibly nice to me after,” he says. “If I was never shot, she was never close to that nice. Everything seemed fake and I started to resent the school because everybody was faking it besides my friends.”

Still determined to finish high school, Walczak was tutored in the summer and went back to finish his senior year with a tutor the following school year. Today, he has a high school degree and is taking online courses at Kent State University.

Rather than having regrets or dwelling on the past, Walczak keeps his mind set forward. He’s still his down-to-earth, class clown self and cherishes every minute of his life. He misses his friends every day and visits their graves every year on February 27. “If I dwelled on it, I’d be miserable every day,” he says. “I stay as positive as I can be.”