This past August I drove to
Coudersport, Pennsylvania, and spent a few days with my sister Lisa
who has lived there for over twenty years. I'm very fond of that
town. It is picturesque and charming, nestled in the surrounding
forest-covered hills. We have been sitting in Lisa's living room and
watched deer trail up through the trees across the street and, on
several occasions, she has pulled back the curtains to her back lawn
to find a black bear or two roaming around. Coudersport has a
“Mayberry”-like quality to it – it is one of the settings in my
The Reluctant Belsnickel of Opelt's Wood, the town Oliver
lives in when Sam and Ben come into his life. Lisa teaches in the
elementary school there, is active in her church, and belongs to sewing and quilting groups. She is always telling me about plays and
concerts and church bazaars and pot luck dinners. It is the kind of
town that many people dream of for raising kids and living quietly
among good neighbors.
Yesterday things changed. Gregory
Eldred, a popular teacher from the same school Lisa teaches in, and
the man who taught her son, Cal, to play the trumpet, walked into the
180-year old Presbyterian church with a gun, and shot his ex-wife
Darlene, the church's organist and choir director, in front of the
congregation. He was over-powered by some of the congregation and
held until the police arrived. He is now in jail. His ex-wife is
dead. (News Report)
I talked to Lisa last night and both of
us were shaking. “I can't believe this,” Lisa said. “He was a
wonderful teacher. We had playground monitor duties together. I
always enjoyed talking to him.” Prior to teaching at Coudersport
Elementary a couple years ago, Lisa had taught at Northern Potter
Children's School with Darlene. She told me that Darlene was one of
the nicest people she knew. What the hell happened?
According to what she was told, Lisa
said that Darlene had been telling people that she was scared. She
said that she was afraid for her life. Why did this happen? How could
it have? Why was nothing done? I was reading the online reports of
the killing on a Coudersport web site where people left comments and
I was struck by how many people wrote that they had Mr. Eldred as a
teacher and what a wonderful, kind teacher he was. The sense of shock
is palpable.
I'm having a hard time imagining all of
this. It just doesn't seem that something like this could happen in a
town where kids spend summer evenings toasting marshmallows over
backyard fires and catching fireflies. Where there are Harvest
Festivals on the courthouse lawn and spaghetti dinners to raise money
for a family with a sick child. Where there are farms that raise sunflowers and Christmas trees, and where people with mountain water
springs on their property build catch-pools so anyone can come and
fill jugs full of fresh water.
Frankly, after I talked to Lisa I was
so shaken up that I had a hard time sleeping and today I feel queasy
and unsettled. I feel like something terrible has happened where it
just shouldn't. These kinds of things should not happen, that is
true, but it seems like an egregious offense in such a setting.
I know that Coudersport has its dark
side like any town, drug use and domestic violence and all the other
vicissitudes of contemporary life, but why a well-loved music teacher
in a quiet little town would walk into a church with a gun is hard to
fathom. I'm sure we'll learn more as time goes by but right now it
seems like nothing will ever be the same again.
Thanks for reading.
3 comments:
What a terrible thing to have happen in your midst. I can see how the whole community would be shaken to it's core. It must be really disturbing for their students. As adults, we know that people aren't always what they seem, but that is a brutal lesson for an elementary school child to have to learn in such a way.
But things are the same. When that kind of thing happens, it is usually the culmination of years of some kind of violence. A better question might be why did no one pay attention when this woman was so frightened?
It is hard to imagine how this whole thing transpired. Now they are saying he entered the church and shot her in the back then left but she was still alive. People in the congregation called the police but before the police got there he came back in to the church and shot her in the head, killing her.
All I can imagine is that everyone was in absolute shock because he had such a reputation as a nice guy, a wonderful teacher, and an accomplished musician.
My sister said that the day after the shooting everyone seemed to be walking around in a daze. I cannot imagine what the children who were supposed to be in his classes the next day, felt. So terrible.
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