The day that Thomas Hamilton walked into a school in a small Scottish town has remained etched in the country’s memory. Because moments after doing so, he opened fire and took the lives of 16 children under six, one teacher, and injured many.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, survivors, some of whom have never spoken out publicly before, have been sharing their stories.
Amie Adams was five years old when Hamilton stormed into her school gymnasium and began shooting at random.
She was shot twice in her right buttock and thigh before her PE teacher told her to crawl to a cupboard and hide.
Now 25, the nursing student told Good Morning Britain she remembers snippets from the day, including people shouting for paper towels, and then she lost consciousness.
Amie explained that she has no movement or feeling in her right leg from the knee down due to her injuries.
“The bullet in my spine did that.
“I had nerve damage and my foot hasn’t really grown since the accident so it’s smaller than my other one.
“I just feel like it’s part of my life so it feels like the normality to me. I suppose it’s quite a surreal thing to have happened to you.”
Amy Hutchinson, featured in the BBC doc about Dunblane, after the shooting
Amie told the press that popping or banging sounds still scare her, and that it often reduces her to tears.
In a special programme made by the BBC Dunblane: Our Story, parents, siblings, pupils and teachers talk about how that fateful day on March 13th, 1996, changed their worlds forever.
Headteacher Ron Taylor, who raised the alarm that morning, gives a heartrending account of the “enormous guilt” that has plagued him throughout his life, describing the “unimaginable horror” of seeing his pupils lying dead on the gymnasium floor.
At the time, Ron said at the press conference: “Evil visited us yesterday. And we don’t know why, and I guess we never will.”
Indeed one of the few criticisms of the BBC programme by critics was that it didn’t explain why the perpetrator did what he did – but perhaps this was a deliberate move to make the piece about the victims, rather than the criminal who took their lives so cruelly.
