On the morning of January 8, 1991, Jeremy Wade Delle was late to school, missing his first class of the day. When the 15-year-old showed up for his second period English class, having missed morning registration, his teacher, Fay Barnett asked him to go to the school office to get an admittance slip. Instead, Delle returned to class with a gun, a .357 Magnum revolver.
"Miss, I got what I really went for," Delle told Barnett, walking to the front of the classroom.
Facing his classmates, the teenager then put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Fellow pupils in classes throughout Richardson High School, located in an inner suburb of Dallas, Texas, heard the bang echoing through the halls, and assumed that someone was playing a joke.
"But then we heard a girl running down the hall screaming," one student told reporters from The Dallas Morning News. "It was a scream from the heart."
