eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), She feared that Tom was dead, and that her child was lost too; instead of the thrumming energy she usually felt inside her, the baby had become still. Email Claire Champagne. At age twelve, her maternal grandfather had used the proceeds from his initial cotton harvest in Brazoria County to buy his first rifle. Though she clung to the delusion that she had only been shot in the arm, her magical thinking did not extend to Tom, whom she felt certain was dead. She called out to him, but he did not answer. Its beyond me why I would feel comforted there, she told me. Whitman hit his targets with terrifying precision. Tom was sporting a short-sleeved plaid shirt and his first mustache. No one, as far as she could recall, ever spoke aloud the fact that her child had died. }); And so rather than avoid the South Mall on her way to class each day, she purposely walked past the spot where she and Tom had been hit, intensely curious, as if her proximity to the crime scene would render it more vivid. Preece tracked down Snuff on Facebook, and in 2012, he put him and Claire in touch. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), Listen to the interview. It's from this moment forward that things turn uncomfortable in the series. Its like hedonism, but the opposite. Not since Eden Valley has she remained in one place for so long. While heartbroken and angry, Matt declares to Claire his intention to save their marriage. If passed, concealed handguns would be permitted on university grounds, in dorms, and in college classrooms. The dream, which Claire first had in her twenties, always began the same way: she would look down and discover her baby, bright-eyed, in her arms. The confirmation she sought about the massacrethat she had not dreamed or invented itwas muddled by the fact that Life, like most publications at the time, omitted her preterm baby from the official tally of the dead. I'm not ashamed of being a father. Eight months into the prison, she got pregnant with another child. reporters on a platform technologically tailored to meet the needs of the modern reader. }); She had no pictures of Tom, and though the yearbook photo featured in the magazine failed to capture his spirit, she liked to study it all the same. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), She had always known the name of one of the students who saved her; James Love, a fellow freshman, had been in her anthropology class, and she had stopped him on campus once in 1967 to thank him for what he had done, but he had seemed ill at ease and eager to break free from the conversation. Claire was in the middle of saying that she had, in fact, had a glass of orange juice that morning when a thunderous noise rang out. ga('create', 'UA-67136960-15', 'auto', 'ads'); Each detail he describedthe earsplitting gunfire, the bodies splayed on the ground, the onlookers who stood immobilized, wild with frightwas one she had carried with her all those years too. See production, box office & company info. In a voice thick with emotion, he told her that he had always regretted taking so long to work up the courage to help her. While he is hanging out with Logan and Cody, Eric lies about who Claire is, claiming she is a college girl. If rumors are to be believed, they were once caught on school grounds. He was just 13. While Fualaau's identity was kept hidden earlier, he soon opened up to the press and told Washington TV station KIRO that LeTourneau's pregnancy was planned. Ive done all the things a wife is supposed to do: the house, the kids, the meals. "Noticeable is how seldom it feels like a cautionary tale, despite the onscreen cautions and referrals to sexual assault resources and the storys occasional explicit references to Claire as a predator. Each afternoon, after she had dismissed her students, they talked for hours, hiking through the canyons and dry creeks that he had grown up exploring. In another highly publicised case, Brianne Altice, a former Utah English teacher in her thirties, pleaded guilty to sexual abuse after having sex with three of her students between 2013 and 2014. Around them, a national debate about gun control had just erupted with new force. She had come across a tree whose trunk bent at a dramatic angle at its midway point, forming a curvature that resembled the letter C. Something catastrophiclightning? Most of the shooting victims who had been admitted to Brackenridge were discharged; some, like Karen Griffith, did not survive. His dad was very loving, but he didnt make a big deal out of saying goodbye, Claire said. Gregg Olsen, author of the book 'If Loving You Is Wrong' called LeTourneau a "child molester". [2][4][5], In February 2014, it was revealed that Fidell's film A Teacher would be adapted for television by HBO. Popular and outgoing, Eric is the captain of the soccer team and nearly inseparable from his best friends. Then, Smart, who was having difficulties in her marriage, convinced Flynn to kill her husband, Gregg Smart. But Sirak embraced the very thing that set him apart, beaming when his fatherwho made biannual visits to Arizonastood before his classmates and spoke about their African heritage. ga('ads.send', { . During his fraternity initiation, the members bring out an, Claire is released from jail and her formerly, Claire begins working in her father's retail store and uses, In 2024, Claire has remarried, has two daughters, and lives in, Outstanding Made For Television Movie / Limited Series, Hannah Fidell, Michael Costigan, Kate Mara, Louise Shore, Jason Bateman, Daniel Brocklehurst, Daniel Pipski, Marielle Scott as Kathryn Sanders, a French teacher and Claire's newest friend, Dylan Schmid as Josh Smith, one of Eric's best friends, Adam David Thompson as Nate Wilson, a local, Jana Peck as Victoria Davis, Logan and Cody's mother who becomes hostile toward Claire once her crime comes to light, Camila Perez as Alison Martinez, Eric's ex-girlfriend, Charlie Zeltzer as Phil Walker, one of Eric's younger brothers, Matt Raymond as Devin Walker, another of Eric's younger brothers, This page was last edited on 1 May 2023, at 15:09. On the list of those killed, she located the name of her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman. Like many survivors of the shooting, Claire will return to campus to mark the anniversary. Id seen things no seventeen-year-old should ever have to see, and Id carried those memories with me, and Claire understood.. He didnt know me, I didnt know him., It will have been fifty years since the shooting this summer, an anniversary that, for Claire, has brought the tragedy into clearer focus. Rejoice with me., By the time of my visit, he had lapsed back into a depression, and he announced that he wanted to return to Atlanta. He was a healthy, if slight, little boy, and when Claire took him to see his pediatric cardiologist every three months for his checkups, he was usually given a clean bill of health. She thought about Tom and about the babys father, John Muir, whom she had called and spoken with, after a decades-long estrangement, before he had passed away that June. No sooner was his body strong again than he faced another ordeal; during his hospitalization, doctors had discovered he needed open-heart surgery to repair his aorta, this time unequivocally. Her mother, Mary, was the local precinct chair for the Democratic party, so consumed by her work championing various liberal causes that Claire came to measure time in election cycles. The friend had been allowed into the United States a year earlier so that his young son could undergo emergency surgery for a congenital heart defect that had left him near death. Like many rural Adventist schools, it was modeled on a one-room schoolhouse, and she was its only teacher. Learn. Many of them were bleeding out quickly, and doctors and nurses shouted back and forth as they tried to discern who should be sent into surgery first. Sisakoth Chhun MS Assistant Principal. At the time, Smart was running a drug awareness program at the Winnacunnet High in New Hampshire. It's why the the 10-episode series, created by Hannah Fidell and based on. From hair trends to relationship advice, our daily newsletter has everything you need to sound like a person whos on TikTok, even if you arent. Even as she grieved for them, Claire was taken aback by the attention the shooting commanded. Though her doctors in 1966 had assured her that she would still be able to have children despite being left with one ovary and a uterus that had been stitched back together, she often wondered if Whitman, who had already robbed her of so much, had also stolen her ability to conceive. Even a nick in the mouthsustained during a dental exam, say, or while playing with other kidscould allow bacteria into his bloodstream and have fatal consequences. Her gaze fell on Toms picture, in which he sat in the formal pose of all mid-century yearbook photos, smiling broadly, his tie tucked into his V-neck sweater. A few years ago, while working on my last book, I downloaded a database of grave sites located in the Austin Memorial Park. She walked right through the looking glass.. As if to define the monster he had become, he chose the youngest life as his first victim from the deck. Harder to hide was the anguish she had carried since the shooting, which would surface unpredictably despite how fortunate she felt about finally having a family. Audio of the Tower bell chiming courtesy of the documentary film Tower, directed by Keith Maitland. She found a psychiatrist to fine-tune his prescriptions and arranged for weekly talk therapy sessions. Sirak, usually a modest person, would walk to the mailbox at the end of their driveway in nothing but his underwear. Only Claire stayed on, her presence noted every now and then in the local paper, which ran a two-sentence squib on September 16 announcing that she was the last of Whitmans victims to remain hospitalized. }); Claire had always been aware that the baby had received a proper burial, but she had not pressed her mother for details until her later years, when her mothers memory was failing and she could no longer summon them. All I wanted right then was for somebody to put their arms around me and hold me tight.. With Kate Mara, Nick Robinson, Ashley Zukerman, Rya Kihlstedt. Sometimes Tom pressed his hand to her belly to see if he could feel the baby move. I learned more in those [months with Tom] than perhaps in any other period of my life, she wrote in a four-page condolence letter to his father. In 2013, 32-year-old Claire Wilson starts her new job as an AP English teacher at Westerbrook high school in Austin, Texas. Temple University - M.A. But within a matter of weeks of her release, she was found assaulting him in her car. As he described the superpowers he would possess when the prophecy came to fruition, he grew elated, his face alight. Sometimes, in those days after Siraks recovery, Claire thought back to an epiphany shed had years before, while on a hike in Wyoming. Once, after he and Claire ate out, he told her he was sure that the restaurants staff had put laxatives in their food. The mass shooting was an obscenity whose memory stained the university, an aberration to be forgotten, and in the vastness of that silence, Claire found herself second-guessing what she remembered. To do that, Fidell didn't base her series on any particular teacher-student affair which could be quite traumatic for the individuals involved. "A Teacher is a fictional story, but its portrayal of abuse and trauma are real for many young people," actor Kate Mara told Timelast year. "And I thought thatit would, and it didnt.". ", Nonetheless, Mara and Robinson told Entertainment Weekly that they're interested in the conversation the show will encourage. Because she did not own a TV, she was not subjected to the disturbing footage that seemed to play on every channel, in which petrified teenagers streamed out of their suburban Denver high school, hands over their heads, frantic to escape the carnage inside. It was so affirming to finally say thank you, Claire told me. Thats when I knew something was really wrong., At home, his behavior only grew more erratic. eventAction: 'load' Thumbing through a stack of back issues, she scanned the dates on their well-worn covers. As the victim of a crime that was still cloaked in silence and shame, she felt strangely envious. I was really, truly happy for the first time in my life, Claire told me. To their left stood the Tower, the tallest building in Austin after the Capitol; to their right stretched the malls green, sloping lawn. But by the time she returned to UT, in January, the tragedy had become a taboo subject on campus. Claire initiated a sporadic correspondence with Preece as she continued her itinerant existencefirst heading to New York, to take care of her ailing mother after Sirak left for college, and then moving back to Colorado, in 2005, and Wyoming, two years later, to teach in Adventist schools. In a story that later inspired the film To Die For,high school media coordinator Pamela Smart started an illegal affair with a 15-year-old student, Billy Flynn, in 1990. } Armed with a degree in education, she then made her way to Wyoming, where she taught at a private Seventh-day Adventist school in the town of Buffalo, in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains. As Claire read his account of the massacreEvery year, when August approaches, I start trying to forget . Claire lives in Texas now, having finally, after all her years of wandering, come home. Another time, while driving through the Denver area, she chose to take a detour through Columbine, even circling around the high school. Claire sat down and studied the large, color-saturated pictures inside, turning the pages as if she were handling a prized artifact. In a year, she was pregnant and was sentenced to two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child. In those analog days, before it was possible to conjure up information about anything with a few keystrokes, her personal history was relegated to microfilm reels and hardbound magazine volumes, and there, alone among the stacks, she would scrutinize Toms photo again. }); [8] In September 2019, Ashley Zukerman, Marielle Scott, Shane Harper, and Adam David Thompson joined the cast as series regulars, while Rya Kihlstedt, Camila Perez, Cameron Moulne and Ciara Bravo joined in recurring roles. Despite being a victim in a tragedy that had made headlines around the world, she never saw or heard a single news report about the shooting. Dozens of students had run home to retrieve their deer rifles, and the echo of return fire rang out as they came back to take aim at the gunman. Claire and Tom walked to the Chuck Wagon, the cafeteria inside the Student Union where campus leftists and self-styled bohemians held court, and happened to run into an old friend of Toms from junior high. As the only dark-skinned person in their community, he was a source of fascination to the kids who reached out to touch his hair. Ma gave her a Bible, which she began to read, and one afternoon, Claire found herself kneeling in prayer beside the older woman, searching for words as she tried to communicate with God. Every now and then, as Claire and I chatted, he would smile at the mention of a childhood friend or a story about his and Claires days in the Arizona high desert. My doctor said I have something called anhedonia, he said. [19][20], Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 73% based on 33 reviews, with an average rating of 6.20/10. Once their second child, Georgia, was born, he spilled the secret of their relationship in a 1999 French book 'Un suel crime, l'amour (Only One Crime, Love)'. Claire Wilson James is on Facebook. Letourneau had been a married mother-of-four and a well-respected sixth-grade teacher at the Shorewood Elementary School in the Seattle suburb of Burien when she met a 12-year-old schoolboy, Vili Fualaau. She could not say exactly what she had gone looking for except for some deeper understanding, she told me, that went unsatisfied. Looking down on her from a fortress 231 feet above, Whitman pulled the trigger. Eric gets drunk with his friends and encourages them to drive recklessly until he is thrown from the car and injured. The change of scenery seemed to help him, at least at first. Matt notices Claire acting strange, but she allays his suspicions by giving him oral sex. window.googletag.pubads().addEventListener('slotRenderEnded', function(event) { She was eight months along by then, and she could feel the weight of the baby as she walked. Sirak absently raised his feet, walking in place where he stood, and looked unfocused, his clothes rumpled, his hair uncombed. Is FX on Hulu's 'A Teacher' Based On A True Story? She rarely gives much thought to Whitman, who remains, in her mind, remote and inscrutable. Post continues after video. The myriad complications of abdominal gunshot wounds, including the threat of infection and sepsis, made Claires condition tenuous. As we talked, Claire bent down and tore off a few sprigs of mint, handing me some to taste. She spent the next seven weeks in the ICU in a fog of Demerol and Darvon. By then, Letourneau was already pregnant with Fualaau's child. It's adapted from showrunner Hannah Fidell's 2013 film of the same name. pg.acq.push(function() { Claire goes to a bar where Matt and his band are performing their first show. document.querySelector("#google_image_div").addEventListener('click',function(){ He would probably be a father by now, she observed, and she a grandmother. Claire finally spotted the book, whose cover featured an old black and white yearbook photo of Whitman wearing a wide grin. San Francisco State University - Middle School Specialist Certification. On nights when the stars shone so brightly above their desert outpost that they illuminated the canyons below, Claire, Brian, and Sirak would roll out their sleeping bags on the flat portion of their roof and lie side by side, staring up at the constellations. Claire and Brian formally adopted him when he was six years old, shortly after they moved west to the unincorporated community of Arivaca. was walking with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend and roommate, Thomas F. Eckman, she read. As she lay there, she was acutely aware of the babys presence, of the molecules somewhere below the earths surface that belonged to him. . Scandalous as it may be, the teacher-student relationship depicted in 'A Teacher' doesn't sit well with many viewers. When the heat became unbearable, she bent her right knee just enough to lift her calf, half expecting to be torn apart by gunfire. Gullett Elementary School. Eager to find a way to dial back his medications, she moved him to Texarkana the following month and gave him her spare bedroom. Four years later, when Fualaau was just 12 or 13 years old, she raped him. document.querySelector("#ads").addEventListener('click',function(){ }); Letourneau and Fualaau were later married in 2005, before eventually divorcing in 2019.