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Editorial - November 2002 |
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Remembering Amanda November 4, 2002 - We’re not used to multiple shooting fatalities in Lincolnton so it’s not surprising that talk of Friday morning’s fatal assaults at a North Grove Street home near our downtown sparked a lot of talk and head-shaking during the weekend. Early Friday morning Kevin Morrison, 39, shot and killed his wife, Gael Morrison, 35, and her daughter, 15-year-old, Amanda Barnhrdt, before fatally shooting himself with a handgun. He and his wife had recently separated. People were still talking about it at Sunday morning church services.. This was a horrible tragedy, one of the worse we’ve seen around here. Our sympathies go out to the family and friends of the victims. It’s hard to say anything positive about this brutal incident, but something happened that is worth remembering, a moment of great courage on the part of the slain teen, Amanda Barnhardt. Just before her death, she hurried her younger brother out of the back of the house, steering him clear of a shooting attack that surely would have resulted in his death. She pushed 11-year-old Bobby Barnhardt down the back stairwell and quickly shut the door behind him. In that terrifying moment, when shots were being fired, its hard to believe a 14-year-old would have anything on her mind except escaping with own her life. But apparently that’s not the way Amanda thought. It was Bobby who had to live, not herself. Police said she probably could have run out with her brother, but instead she went back inside to help her mother. Her friends remember her selflessness, especially with her brother, Bobby. “She would do anything for her brother,” said a friend, 15-year-old Lindsey Campbell. “They had to look out for each other — they were tied at the hip.” It was her young friends that helped capture her in our memory. At the Lincolnton High School football game Friday night, a long banner with the words “In Memory of Amanda” hung behind the cheerleaders. Many of her friends wrote her name on their headbands and hats. LHS students wore baby blue clothes and the cheerleaders wore baby blue wrist bands — baby blue was Amanda’s favorite color. We will put the horror of the Nov. 1 shootings behind us and hope we never see that kind of violence again. But we will remember Amanda for a long, long time.
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© 2001 Lincoln Times-News |
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