Lisa Deal remembers that it was a muffled "bam, bam" that abruptly put an end to a much-anticipated trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. last Wednesday.
The Oxford High School teacher ? who lives in Wellington ? had gone to the museum with Tinka Valtl, an exchange student who spent the school year living with Deal and attending school in Oxford. Valtl is headed back home to Slovenia at the end of June and the trip was one teacher and student were excited about.
"The biggest thing I wanted her to see was that museum," says Deal, who each year teaches an entire nine-week unit focused only on the Holocaust.
But the tour was cut short.
The pair viewed a few exhibits before stopping to watch a video on the museum’s fourth floor. As the video played, Deal picked up on something Valtl did not.
The first gunshot, Deal says, sounded a lot like a heavy, metal book case falling flat onto the floor.
"And then I heard the bam, bam," she says.
Deal would later find out the noises were from gunfire that fatally wounded Stephen Tyrone Johns, a special-police officer that had worked at the museum for six years. James von Brunn, 88, is accused of entering the museum and opening fire, according to news reports.
Brunn, who is alleged to have racist and anti-Semitic views, was critically wounded during the incident. He will face charges if he recovers.
"I want him to live," Deal, 38, says. "I don’t want him to die a martyr for his cause."
Deal and Valtl saw guards move about briskly as their video came to an end. As they attempted to leave the fourth floor they were told the floor was locked down, no one in or out. After waiting for quite some time, the pair and other museum guests were ushered out a back exit and told to organize according to the floor they were on, on a grassy lot across from the museum.
Deal snapped some shots of the chaos that ensued outside the museum. Everyone who had no direct knowledge of the incident was eventually released. Deal and Valtl walked several miles to get back to their metro stop because so much of the area was cordoned off.
The day had an impact on Valtl, who returns to her hometown of Muta, Slovenia with one particularly interesting story to tell.
"We were there," she says. "I had never been around anything like that in my life."
Deal admits she was angry at first because guests were told very little and made to stay put. She demanded to know why the museum was closing and was eventually told that something very bad had happened.
She thinks the story she has to tell will help to add impact to the unit she teaches on the Holocaust.
The museum reopened Friday, a day after Deal and Valtl returned to Kansas.
