MUSC-based center helps in aftermath of Nashville school shooting

It’s the kind of expertise Angela Moreland-Johnson, Ph.D., wishes she didn’t need to have. But since she does, the psychologist is grateful that her work with the National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center gives her the chance to help in the aftermath of the Nashville school shooting that killed three 9-year-olds and three adults.

“I have children the same age as the children in Nashville,” Moreland-Johnson said. “So, it’s immediate sadness and fear and just all of those human responses. But then it is very nice to say, “OK, but I have something that I can do.’”

Within just a few hours of the shooting, she and other specialists at the federally-funded center, based at the Medical University of South Carolina, prepared and sent out information about resources they knew the survivors and community would need. 

The documents, also posted on the center’s website, included information about:

• How teachers can help kids cope with the psychological effects of the shooting.
• Common reactions parents should look out for such as anxiety and irritability.
• How parents can help children recover.
• How to find trauma-focused therapists.
• Steps the community can take to recover.
• Unexpected challenges that can arise and how to overcome them.
• How crime victims may be eligible for compensation from the government.
• The Transcend NMVC app. It was developed by the National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center to help survivors reduce the risk of developing problems and recover.

The mass violence center works with hospitals, mayors, governors and other leaders to get the information into the right hands. If needed, the center’s experts can also go to Nashville in person to help. But director Dean Kilpatrick, Ph.D., said in the immediate aftermath of a mass violence incident, too many people on hand can make things more complicated. So the center focuses on science-based expertise to help over the long haul.

“When the media loses interest, usually because there’s some other event that's happened, the media moves on. But the people who’ve been affected don’t move on. And so we know that the effects of these things can last a long time,” Kilpatrick said.

 

He, Moreland-Johnson and the rest of the center’s team know from personal experience. They helped people affected by the 2015 Charleston church shooting that killed nine people, in part through an anti-terrorism emergency assistance program grant that funded their work. After that, they got a different grant to establish the National Mass Violence and Victimization Resource Center with the U.S. Department of Justice.

“We know from when the Emanuel AME shooting happened here, it’s very scary and you want resources, but you don’t really know quite where to look,” Moreland-Johnson said. 

“So if you have one number that you can call and figure it out, then it’s very, very helpful. Until we launched the National Mass Violence Victimization Resource Center, there wasn’t a central warehouse that had all the resources, all the technology, a training source data and research, kind of everything at once.”

Since its opening, the center has worked behind the scenes following a series of incidents that had widespread impact, including:

• The 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
• The 2021 mass shooting at a FedEx site in Indianapolis
• The Flint water crisis. This was part of a special category of incidents the federal government asked the center to tackle involving criminal acts or criminal negligence and exposure to toxic substances.
• The 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

And this isn’t the first time the 5-year-old center has helped in Tennessee. “We’ve been working with them for several years, actually. They’ve had just a lot of different mass violence incidents occur in their area,” Moreland-Johnson said.

“The Covenant School was just a few days ago, but we actually started working with them on the Nashville Christmas day bombing, which was December 25th, 2020. I don’t think that that one, unfortunately, received a lot of media attention.”

 

The center also helped after a 2021 mass shooting at in a grocery store in Collierville. “And then in September 2022, there was the Memphis spree shooting. A shooter went to multiple different places throughout the Memphis area. And that caused a lot of fear for the community because the shooter was on the loose.”

All of those incidents meant that when a shooter wreaked havoc in a Christian school in Nashville, the MUSC-based team knew exactly who to reach out to in Tennessee. They’d already been working with the Victims of Crime Act administrator there to develop a statewide plan for mass violence readiness and response. 

“We still don’t have a final plan. It’s been developing over several years. But the main pieces of that is to have mental and behavioral health training. And they actually want us to do that across the entire district. So even before this week at the Covenant School we’ve been setting dates and figuring out how to go work with them,” Moreland-Johnson said.

Kilpatrick said at this point, his team knows exactly what to do and how to do it. “I’m incredibly proud of that, even though it’s for a terrible reason – the ongoing issues with mass violence.”