America has a serious school shooting problem, and teachers who work in the system must now undergo training to ensure they know what processes to follow if things go down.

Of course, nothing can prepare you for the terror of a real shooting. Just ask substitute teacher David Briscoe, who was forced to protect students from harm while working at Santa Fe High School, in Texas, where 10 people were killed on May 18 last year.

17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis has been charged with 10 counts of murder and 13 counts of attempted murder.

Sounds like Briscoe is a hero, except for the fact that he wasn’t even there, and made the whole thing up. Below from the BBC:

He said he had barricaded his classroom door with tables and desks, turned off the lights and telling his students to get down.

“It felt like hours before we got out of the school, but one of my students said it was 30 to 45 minutes,” Mr Briscoe told the news outlet. “I had around 10 to 15 students and I’m grateful they were safe.”

On Monday, Texas Tribune journalist Alexandra Samuels revealed Mr Briscoe had contacted her in April 2019 to do a follow-up piece in light of recent suicides by mass shooting survivors.

She says she spoke to him on the phone for 31 minutes, during which he claimed to have “quit teaching after the massacre” and had become depressed.

He said “just knowing that there’s blood on the walls” meant he could not go back to the school.

Briscoe’s story was covered by a number of international and national media outlets, but Samuels wasn’t convinced by what she heard from Briscoe.

When she dug deeper, she found out, via the local school board, that no one with his name had ever worked in the district. After Samuels published her story, the social media account used to reach out to journalists was quickly deleted.

It brings back memories of the infamous story of Tania Head, who claimed that she was inside World Trade Centre’s south tower when a plane struck on September 11, 2001. She wasn’t – read more about that here.

There’s a special place in hell for the likes of Alex Jones and other ‘Truthers’, who deny that a shooting like Sandy Hook ever took place, and perhaps Briscoe will be joining them there.

[source:bbc]