School Bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff, Hailed as Hero for Stopping Gunman (Video)

Antoinette Huff, a bookkeeper at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy is being hailed a hero across the United States for her vital role in talking down a gunman with over 500 rounds of ammunition inside the elementary school.

According to an ABC News report, Tuff said that in watching the suspect load up with ammunition, she was witnessing an individual “ready to kill anybody that he could and take any lives he wanted to.”

In the 911 tapes, you hear Tuff calmly humanizing the suspect who is holding an AK-47 and had at that time already fired his weapon at least once.  She tells him, everyone has made mistakes.  She shares her own personal pain and hardships. She eventually is able to get the young, troubled white man to lay on the floor with his hands behind his back so that the police can enter and arrest him. 

Antoinette Tuff has become the symbol of true grace under pressure after this incident.  She may have single-handedly stopped another horrific school massacre against innocent elementary school students, and all of it without a weapon of her own.  During this latest gun laws debate within the nation, the NRA consistently says the way to keep a school safe from a gunman is more people inside the school with guns...

Tuff totally disproves that notion.  She had no gun, and it seems to be that her calming, caring qualities are what were able to defuse the situation so that the gunman would not carry out his planned massacre for whatever reason.

According to an additional Patch report, "details continue to trickle in about Hill, whom neighbors told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a “quiet and polite” individual who kept to himself near the home he lived at off Decatur’s East Lilac Street, within walking distance of the school."

Cascade Patch has tried to reach out to Antoinette Tuff directly for an interview, but was unable.  Join us in thanking Antoinette Tuff for her courage and heroism.