Santa Fe school shooting timeline: Six years later, long wait for justice continues for families, survivors
On May 18, 2018, a shooter walked into Santa Fe High School and killed eight students and two teachers. The accused gunman has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
On May 18, 2018, a gunman opened fire in Santa Fe High School, south of Houston, and eight students and two teachers were killed. Thirteen other people were injured.
Six years later, those survivors and the victims' families are still waiting for justice.
Editor's note: The above video originally aired in 2022.
Accused gunman Dimitrios Pagourtzis, now 23, has been repeatedly declared incompetent to stand trial, most recently this past January. He remains in a North Texas hospital.
“I will say that the last few, the last year or two, that progress just, it stalled, it plateaued," his criminal defense attorney Nicholas Poehl told KHOU 11 in 2022. “He can seem to be having a sort of normal conversation and then the conversation just goes off the rails into bizarre hallucination-paced fantasy."
Pagourtzis parents, Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos, were cleared of financial responsibility for their son's actions after a three-week civil trial that ended on August 19, 2024.
After nine hours of deliberations, jurors determined that only Dimitrios Pagourtzis and an ammunition dealer were financially liable for the mass shooting.
“You know, as disappointing as the verdict was today, you can’t hurt these families any more than they’ve already been hurt," said Alton Todd who represented some of the families who sued the gunman's parents.
Jurors awarded families more than $300 million total in damages, including for pain and mental anguish, but they may never see the money.
We look back at that dark day that forever changed the small town of Santa Fe and the people who live there.
Chapter 1 Gunman taunts victims
On the morning of the shooting, Santa Fe students were in first period when they heard gunshots coming from the art complex.
The first 9-1-1 calls came at 7:32 a.m.
For the next 30 minutes, the gunman armed with a shotgun and a .38 caliber pistol terrorized students and teachers in four art classrooms.
Students hiding in one art room closet said Chris Stone, a 17-year-old football player, was shot and killed while shielding them. The survivors said they prayed with Stone as he took his final breath.
Trenton Beazeley, who was 15 at the time, also hid in a closet with classmates. He said Pagourtzis fired a shotgun through a gap in the door before students had a chance to close it fully. Beazeley, who suffered a graze wound in his back, said the accused shooter taunted them, asking if they wanted to pick up their ringing cell phones, and then saying, "You can't, you're dead."
Isabelle Laymance said she helped barricade a door in one art room. She said the shooter began firing through the door and glass while yelling, "Boom!" and singing the song, "Another One Bites the Dust."
RELATED: Former Santa Fe student testifies gunman sang 'Another One Bites the Dust' during school shooting
Other survivors said they heard Pagourtzis yell, "Surprise!" while he was shooting people.
"Shots were being fired in the hallway right next to me," student Grace Johnson said. "We all hid in an attic space probably only 50 feet away from where unfortunately 10 people lost their lives."
Flo Rice, a substitute teacher for a boys’ basketball class that day, said she began ushering students toward a nearby exit when a fire alarm went off. She walked straight into the gunman's path and was shot six times. Rice later said she crawled outside and was terrified the shooter would follow her.
"I realized someone was hunting me like an animal and they were probably just a few feet away, and they were going to come through that door and shoot me again," Rice said.
Chapter 2 'Officer down'
John Barnes, a police officer at Santa Fe High School, knew something was wrong when he smelled gunpowder after the fire alarm went off.
He got to the art building in time to see two teachers get shot.
When Barnes ducked behind a corner, a shotgun blast caught his right elbow, shattering his bone and severing an artery. Barnes fell to the ground. He grabbed his radio, “Officer down.”
Gary Forward, assistant police chief for the Santa Fe Independent School District, was the only other officer on campus that morning.
He ran to Barnes and quickly wrapped a tourniquet around his arm.
“In all my years on the job and all the injuries I’ve seen, I’ve never seen anything like that,” Forward told us in 2019. “I’ve never seen a catastrophic blood loss to that magnitude ever.”
Barnes later told KHOU 11 that he was still in shock, but still aware of the situation: the shooter hadn’t been stopped.
“Then that kicks in and then you start worrying that they weren’t going to get to me in time,” he said a year after the shooting.
Barnes was flown by medical helicopter to the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He said he died for three or four minutes on the flight.
“I was just thinking about staying alive,” Barnes said. “I was just telling myself, ‘Just breathe. As long as you’re breathing, you’re living.’”
Barnes said doctors told him he lost enough blood that his organs should have shut down, but they didn’t. He said he suffered an acute brain injury because of the blood loss and for a time he slurred his words, but that eventually went away.
Barnes spent 33 days in the hospital and underwent several surgeries and extensive physical therapy. He also has emotional scars.
“I knew he was a tough son of a gun, but I didn’t know how tough until now," Forward said.
Chapter 3 'I didn't think I could do it'
After the first 9-1-1 call, law enforcement officers from several agencies rushed to the school.
Galveston County deputy Brent Cooley headed to the school after hearing over the scanner that an officer had been shot. When he ran inside, he saw four officers dragging Barnes to safety.
"He looked like he was dead," Cooley said.
He was outside an art room when he began trying to talk to the shooter. Cooley said the gunman responded with profanities and kept firing before walking out with his hands up at 8:02 a.m., 30 minutes after the first gunshot.
Cooley said as he handcuffed Pagourtzis, the teen said, "I didn’t think I could do it."
The deputy entered the art room and saw several victims, including 15-year-old Angelique Ramirez who died with a phone in her hand. Six years later, Cooley said that image still haunts him.
Recie Tisdale was a League City police officer who also went to the school that day. That's when he learned that his mother, Cynthia Tisdale, was one of the substitute teachers killed by the gunman.
Tisdale said the experience is the reason he left a 25-year career in law enforcement behind.
Chapter 4 Chaos, terror and grief
Parents also rushed to the school that morning after learning about the shooting. Some had been called by their terrified students during and after the shooting.
In the chaos that followed, most of the parents were reunited with their children.
Others waited hours before learning their children were dead.
Rhonda Hart was left with the last memory of her daughter, 14-year-old Kimberly Vaughan, when she happened to see her walking to school that day. They both waved and said “I love you” in sign language, their tradition. It was the last time Hart saw her daughter alive.
Mercedez Stone was babysitting when she got a call about the shooting at her younger brother Chris's school.
“You’re trying to act fine, trying to act cool, but you’re not. You’re freaking out,” she said. “And instantly, I don’t know why, I just knew something happened to Chris.”
Mercedez called her dad. He was already on his way to the high school, but she convinced him to turn around and pick her up. As they made their way to the school, they saw an ambulance speeding away from campus so they followed it to the hospital.
They joined other Santa Fe families in the emergency room lobby until an employee finally walked out and began reading names one by one.
“They get everybody’s name called,” Mercedez said, “and just me and my dad were left in that room by ourselves and left looking at each other like, ‘What do we do?’”
By noon, Mercedez and her dad had gone to several different hospitals looking for Chris. He wasn’t at any of them.
Back in Santa Fe, her mom and sister were at a staging area for parents and families, watching as some reunited with their children, watching as busloads of students arrived from the high school. There was no sign of Chris there, either.
They later learned that Chris died while protecting classmates in that closet.
"Many kids are saying that if it weren't for Chris, the other kids in the room probably would have been dead, as well,” sister Angelica Stone told KHOU 11 days after the shooting. "He was so gentle, anyone that knew him was touched by him.”
RELATED: 'He died fighting': Family remembers son who fought to save others during Santa Fe shooting
Thousands of miles and an ocean away, Abdul Aziz and Farah Naz were having dinner in Pakistan when they learned about the shooting on the news. Their daughter, 17-year-old Sabika Sheikh was an exchange student at Santa Fe.
Aziz said they frantically tried to reach Sabika and then called her friends and exchange program coordinator but no one knew anything. They finally learned from Sabika's host family that she was one of the students killed.
The 10th grader died just 19 days before she was supposed to return home to Pakistan.
“She was my oldest child and she was my friend. There hasn’t been a day where I don’t miss her. She had a lot of dreams that she didn’t get to finish or pursue,” Naz said six years later.
Chapter 5 Accused gunman's parents on trial
In the civil trial currently underway in a Galveston County courtroom, plaintiffs attorneys are trying to prove that Pagourtzis' parents share the blame. They say Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos knew their son was mentally ill and should have done more to prevent him from getting access to his father's weapons that were used in the shooting.
Antonios testified that he thought his wife was the only other person who knew where the keys to his gun cabinet and safe were hidden and didn't realize Dimitrios had found them.
Attorneys pointed to homemade bombs that were made by Dimitrios and found in the family's home after the shooting and said the teen bought ammo and other items online before the shooting.
"Dimitrios, who is 17 and doesn't have a job, spent $1,722 or so in having items delivered to the front steps of their home. In addition to the ... ammunition coming to their home, 29 different shipments of items," attorney Clint McGuire said in opening statements.
Defense attorneys argued that Dimitrios hid the purchases from his parents.
Plaintiffs' attorneys also argued that the parents failed to help their son amid a mental health crisis. Jurors saw videos of Pagourtzis interviews where he said he'd had homicidal thoughts since 8th grade and he'd been intentionally acting out for years so someone would notice he was struggling.
In an alleged journal entry, Pagourtzis wrote: “You want a motive. How about because the idea of pumping my classmates full of buckshot and watching them writhe in the ground in agony like the vermin they are is an exhilarating thought.”
Antonios testified that he didn't see signs of depression or delusion and didn't observe Dimitrios becoming a “loner,” referencing his participation in sports and Greek dancing.
The accused shooter's younger sister also took the stand. She testified that she had a “close” relationship with her brother, and never saw him hurt himself or express a desire to harm others.
Defense attorneys say Dimitrios alone is to blame for the shooting, not his parents. They also point fingers at the company that shipped ammo to him and Santa Fe High School for missing red flags.
In 2023, the families settled with the company that sold Dimitrios the ammo. According to the firm representing several families, the settlement will require the online ammunition seller to verify the age of customers for all ammunition sales.
Chapter 6 Turning pain into purpose
Since the shooting, some victims have become advocates for safer schools and successfully fought for new state laws designed to help prevent mass shootings in Texas schools.
They also helped get a law passed that allows victims' families to get information about how their loved ones died. Unlike the Uvalde school shooting, there were no third-party investigations, leaving many families in the dark about what happened.
The hundreds of students who were in Santa Fe High School when the shooting happened have since moved on with their lives but many remain haunted by the memories and some have survivor's guilt.
Graduates Annabelle O'Day, Grace Johnson, Madison McKaskill and Kaitlyn Richards decided to turn their pain into purpose by starting a non-profit. Together with community partners, Hearts United awarded more than $20,000 in scholarships and grants to seniors and survivors of the shooting. They're also raising mental health awareness and providing resources for survivors who suffer from PTSD, anxiety and depression.
"Originally your town will come together and then they will divide, and then it's up to you to figure out how to bring them back together," Johnson said.
For current students who started school on August 9, one of the few reminders of the tragedy is a 12-foot bronze statue called "Warrior Spirit." It was designed by the same sculptor who created the Texas A&M Bonfire Memorial and it includes the names of the 10 victims.
Another memorial, The Unfillable Chair, was designed by current and former students and unveiled in 2023.
In 2019, 23 oak trees were planted in memory of those killed and injured.
“We’re like these trees, big and small. We withstand the storms and gradually get bigger each day," Santa Fe sophomore Jai Gillard, who witnessed the shooting in the art classroom where most of the violence occurred, told us that day. “We have been incredibly resilient and fierce in the midst of grief and anguish and I am proud of how far we have come."