An Incident of School Violence in East Greenbush, New York

On February 9, 2004, 16-year old Jon Romano carried his brand new shotgun, inside a black case, into Columbia High School in East Greenbush, New York. Unquestioned, he walked by the Main Office and up the stairs to a second-floor bathroom. He sat in one of its stalls for twenty minutes, waiting and thinking. When a student entered the bathroom, Jon forced him back out at gunpoint. Then Jon fired at two students in the hallway, taking the baseball cap off one of them, and sent everyone within earshot into a panic. As Jon moved down the hall, peering into classrooms, leveling the gun at other students and teachers, an Assistant Principal grabbed him from behind. Before he was subdued, Jon was able to get one more round off, and he wounded a teacher.

The incident took only a few minutes to play out inside the school but, like most school shootings, produced effects for those involved that reverberated for years. What the general public saw, however, were only a few front-page articles about it: the shooting itself; a follow-up story on some students who weren’t very close to the action; Jon Romano’s arraignment; the expected “Are our schools safe enough?” article; the “heroes” story about the Assistant Principal and the wounded teacher; and, finally, Jon’s plea bargain and his sentence. In this case, as a 17-year old, he accepted 20 years at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York.

In January of 2005, officials at the New York State Education Department (NYSED) commissioned me to write a book-length report on the incident. They planned to disseminate the report to all the school districts in New York State so those districts could be proactive around school violence. With the lessons learned and the protocols established after the shooting by Columbia High School administrators, NYSED wanted to ensure that other districts in the state would be better prepared.

I spent a year interviewing everyone involved in the case, in the school and in the community, and another six months doing research and transcribing the interviews. Then I wrote a chronicle of the incident and its aftermath as a first-person, multiple-narrative documentary report, which I submitted to NYSED. That got people excited, and they proposed I expand the report into a book. I switched to a 3rd-person narrator and wrote an expansive second draft. As I was sending the book out to agents and editors, NYSED informed me that Jon Romano’s lawyer was threatening to sue them if they continued with the project. My second draft appears here in its entirety.