Secret Holt got a phone call Tuesday morning from her teenage daughter, Bailey. She did not hear her daughter on the other end of the line, though. Instead, Holt said, she heard “chaos.”
“All I could hear was voices and chaos in the background,” Secret Holt told WKRN-TV, the ABC affiliate in Nashville. “She couldn’t say anything. I tried – I called her name, over and over and over, and she never responded.”
Bailey Nicole Holt, 15, was one of two teenagers killed in Tuesday’s shooting at Marshall County High School, authorities said this week. Another 15-year-old, Preston Ryan Cope, died after a student opened fire at the school, an incident that left several wounded.
“Whatever that kid had going through his mind, I don’t know,” Secret Holt said of the suspected shooter. “But if he needed a friend, I know [Bailey Holt] would have been a friend to him, and talked to him about anything that he needed. That’s just the kind of person she was.”
The gunfire at Marshall County High School began shortly before 8 a.m. Tuesday, authorities have said. Holt was pronounced dead at the scene. Cope was airlifted to a hospital, but later died.
The suspect, a 15-year-old male student armed with a handgun, was taken into custody after the shooting.
“It’s just so hard to believe, that somebody, in a split-second, could take two lives and injure so many in just a short amount of time,” Secret Holt said in the WKRN interview. “Can’t get it back. Can’t get it back. I don’t know if I can go to court to see him, I just don’t know if I can. But I want him to pay for everything he’s done, but also I want to pray for him too, because I know he’s probably having a hard time, too. But -“
“He still took our baby,” Bailey’s father, Jasen, said.
“He still took my baby from me,” Secret Holt said.
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