He kept charging. A bullet to the torso did not stop Riley Howell. A second bullet to the body did not prevent him from reaching his goal and hurling himself into the gunman who opened fire last week inside a classroom at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The
Riley Howell's parents say he was shot three times while tackling the UNC Charlotte gunman
By Jim Dwyer and Myah Ward
New York Times·
9 mins to read
Photos of Riley Howell growing up are displayed at his viewing ceremony. Howell was killed as he tackled the gunman who opened fire at the University of North Carolina. Photo / Swikar Patel, NY Times
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"The chief said no one was shot after Riley body-slammed him," said his mother, Natalie Henry-Howell.
Another student, Ellis Reed Parlier, 19, of Midland, North Carolina, was also killed, and four others were wounded, in the shooting last Tuesday, the final day of spring classes at UNC Charlotte.
Mass shootings have their perpetrators and their victims. And then there are those heroes, Howell now among them, who risk their lives to try to take the gunmen down.
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Over the years, other gunmen have been thwarted, in part, by teachers, principals, school custodians and students during attacks such as the ones at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and a two-hour siege at Virginia Tech in 2007.
Last year, a teacher in Indiana hurled a basketball at a 13-year old boy who was firing shots and, as he was being hit by three bullets, tackled and disarmed the boy. And a customer in a Nashville, Tennessee, Waffle House last year wrested an assault rifle from a shooter who had killed four people and threw it over a counter. The gunman fled.
"We're seeing more and more of it," said Officer Johnathan Frisk, who is with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's "active survival" training program.
American society at large has been unable or unwilling to mount a response to mass shootings, which have killed more than 140 students since the Sandy Hook shootings, and so the survival tactics and ingenuity of individuals have been incorporated into lessons for "active shooter" training provided to schools, workplaces and houses of worship.
People are directed to run, barricade themselves or fight, Frisk said. "The bottom line is that Riley countered, brought the fight to shooter and saved many lives."
In interviews with nearly 20 relatives and friends of Riley Howell, not one person was surprised that he had acted decisively and with little regard for himself.
"As soon as we heard, we thought — of course he did, of course he did," said Kevin Westmoreland, whose daughter, Lauren, had been Howell's steady girlfriend since they were both 16. "I could see him turning and just thinking he could physically beat the bullets to get to that guy, because I'm sure he didn't really imagine anything else."
In an interview before their son's funeral on Sunday, Howell's parents said their son had died as he had lived: headlong and helpfully.
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Born December 13, 1997, Howell grew up on a 100-acre "gentleman's farm," as his mother called it, on the edge of a small town in the Great Smoky Mountains. The families of his parents live in the area.
The first grandchild on both sides, he was doted on by aunts, uncles and grandparents. As the eldest of his generation, he was the cousin-in-chief, leader of hikes and the designated shark in rowdy swimming games.
"I remember being little, and I named all my boy Barbies after Riley because I thought he looked like them — he looked like Ken," said Katie Pritchard, 17, a cousin.
As a toddler, he spent time with a deaf uncle and used sign language before he spoke, said his mother, who is 48 and a teacher.
Her son was not a young man who played it safe, she said. He jumped without trepidation from high rocks into the ocean and worked a chain saw on the farm.
He was also a deep scholar of Star Wars, amassing a legion of Jedi action figures with his brother Ted, 14. He cooked on a cast iron skillet he got for Christmas, fixed up junk cars and was an avid target shooter, but not a hunter.
His sister Juliet, 16, said that when she began thinking about a first car, her older brother took it on himself to shop online to find deals for her, counselling against certain vintages because they had been manufactured during recessions and he believed their quality could be suspect.
And he was handy, an uncommon quality among many young men, who do not have the slightest idea how to fix things, said another sister, Iris, 19. "Guys his age looked up to him because he was a jack-of-all-trades," she said.
During a school break earlier this year, Howell's job with student housing kept him on campus. With the grounds almost entirely to himself, he rigged a connection from a video game console to the student movie theater and spoke to his father as he played a game on the giant screen.
Howell played sports, including soccer and cross-country in high school, and while he was aggressive, his family said, he was not competitive. His mane of wavy blond hair and muscular physique threw people off, including, initially, Kevin Westmoreland, who said he was wary of this "big, handsome boy" dating his daughter.
The reality, Lauren Westmoreland said, was infinitely more endearing.
"People thought he was going to be a jerk or something, a big old gym guy, but he was just, like, the biggest dork I'd ever met," she said.
On their first date, when she was too nervous to eat, he volunteered to finish her food, an introduction to his Henry VIII-level appetite. He never hounded her to wear makeup, she said, or to pretend that she was anyone other than herself.
Her father said that Howell turned out to be instinctively helpful — carrying a stranger in his arms who had fainted in a restaurant, or seeking out Kevin Westmoreland's father, who has Alzheimer's, at gatherings.
"He would go and look him in the eye, asked how he was and made sure my dad knew he existed in that room," Kevin Westmoreland said. "A lot of people aren't comfortable doing that."
To the youngest of the clan, cousin Maisie Moylan, 13, Howell's age never changed, even after he became an official grown-up. "When Riley got the choice between the kids' and the adult table, he always chose the kids' table," Maisie said.
An avid student of subjects that he cared about, he barely mailed it in for school courses that did not grab him. Henry-Howell said that she accompanied her son five times to a military recruiting office until he decided that he would go to college.
He spent two years at a technical college, which he attended largely to please his parents, Henry-Howell said, and scheduled classes around his work at a landscaping company. By the time he enrolled at UNC Charlotte last fall, he had become absorbed by horticulture.
"He was coming around to figuring out what it was he wanted to do and be," Henry-Howell said.
Last Tuesday, Riley Howell was in a room with about 60 other students to give 10-minute group presentations for their anthropology and philosophy of science course. It was not a typical classroom: There were 14 tables, with a lectern at the front of the room and doors at either end.
A few minutes into the first presentation, the shooting began. The professor, Adam Johnson, wrote in a blog post that he did not hear a door open or close.
Henry-Howell and her husband did not learn until nearly eight hours later that their son was dead. "Right off the bat, their very first words, 'Your son's a hero,'" Henry-Howell said.
Having watched her boy survive more than a few reckless antics over the years, Henry-Howell said she would have been mad had he been killed by diving onto a rock or crashing a car. She is angry that her son is dead, she said, but she cannot be upset that he took on the gunman.
"That was just who he was," she said.
Most of a 2,000-seat auditorium at Lake Junaluska near Waynseville was filled on Sunday for Howell's funeral. To get cut flowers there in time, market workers in Manhattan boxed and drove them directly to a cargo plane.
And although he was not in the military, Howell received tributes common to the burials of people in the armed services. A volley of shots was fired by an honor guard, and his family was presented with a military burial flag.
The North Carolina bluegrass band Balsam Ridge played an Amazing Grace filled with spirit. The Reverend Robert M. Blackburn, who had baptised Howell, prayed for the other students injured in the attack, and for the family of Parlier. He also prayed for the man accused of the shootings, Trystan Andrew Terrell, and his family.
A cousin, Hank Pritchard, announced that the Howells were establishing the Riley Howell Foundation to provide support for other families who are victims of violence, including the Parliers.
All the cousins were there, of course, including the youngest, Maisie. At Howell's viewing, she remembered being on a trampoline, flipping over backward and nearly landing on her head when he reached out.
"He caught me in the air," she said, "before I fell."
Written by: Jim Dwyer and Myah Ward
Photographs by: Swikar Patel
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
