While live in Nashville, reporter reveals she survived a school shooting
"Many of you might know this, but I'm actually a school shooting survivor."
The scene Monday felt all too familiar to Joylyn Bukovac.
The television reporter had just arrived at Hillsboro Pike, a street near the Covenant School in Nashville, where a shooter had opened fire in the morning, killing three 9-year-old students and three adults, including the head of school.
As she prepared for her first broadcast of the day, Bukovac watched as ambulances rushed past. She saw parents running, their children in their arms.
It was Bukovac’s first time reporting on a school shooting of this size. But she felt a connection to those frightened children at Covenant.
“This is something that hits very close to home for me,” Bukovac, 27, said in a WSMV4 segment that has since garnered thousands of views online. “Many of you might not know this, but I’m actually a school shooting survivor.”
On Feb. 5, 2010, she had been in the hallway of Discovery Middle School in Madison, Ala., when a 14-year-old classmate was shot and killed.
She continued, rattling off a statistic about the number of school shootings since Columbine in 1999 – a list of more than 375 that included the tragedy at her middle school.
At the time, Bukovac was in eighth grade. She was standing in the hallway, giggling and talking with friends during a break between classes when she heard a “pop” sound that she thought had come from a balloon.
She didn’t think anything of it until screams erupted in the hallway.
“He’s been shot! He’s been shot!” she recalled students yelling.
“It was just chaos,” Bukovac told The Washington Post on Monday. “I just knew I had to get away. And I also wanted to talk to my family. I wanted to tell them that I love them.”
She ran into the choir room, fumbling with her cellphone to try to call her mother. She didn’t get an answer before her teacher took the students’ phones, turning them off so as not to draw attention to the classroom.
The students waited, crouched quietly underneath risers in the room.
Later that day, when the students were able to leave the building, Bukovac recalled running into her mother’s arms on the sidewalk outside the school.
“I really had no words for her,” Bukovac said. “We just locked eyes, and we cried.”
Bukovac said she was hesitant at first to recount that experience as she reported on the shooting at Covenant. She didn’t want to make the story about herself, when it was about “this issue that’s plaguing our country,” she said.
But Bukovac hoped speaking about her experience would help show that those watching were not alone.
“If I could just help one family or one person by sharing my story, then it was worth it,” she said.
As both a mother and a reporter who has covered gun violence, Bukovac has worried about her 1-year-old son. But Monday’s events evoked even more questions about his safety.
“Today proves that tragic things can truly happen anywhere,” she said. “And it’s really a terrifying thought.”
When she got home Monday night, Bukovac held her son, squeezing tight and closing her eyes, wondering if she’d still have the same fears when he starts school in a few years.
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