Student recounts teacher's brave actions

ROSEBURG, Ore. — Hannah Miles, 19, was in Writing 121 at Umpqua Community College when she heard a loud noise in the connecting room.

“It sounded like a ruler smacking a chalkboard,” she said. “I didn’t think it was a gunshot until the second one.”

At that point her teacher, Amy Fair, knocked on the door, which was locked, and asked whether everyone was OK, Miles recounted in the parking lot of the Douglas County (Ore.) Fairgrounds, where students and employees were taken to be picked up by their families.

In response, more shots rang out in the room, Miles said, and everyone panicked.

Fair immediately got everyone out of her classroom and the building, knocking on windows and doors and urging others to evacuate, Miles said.

“I think she saved us,” she said. “She saved us all.”

A short distance away, at Mercy Medical Center, respiratory therapist Sandy Miles was called to trauma.

“I’m thinking, bus accident on the freeway,” Sandy Miles said. When she arrived, she learned there was a mass shooting at UCC, where her daughter Hannah was in her fourth day of classes.

Hannah, meanwhile had made it to a locked room in the library, along with Fair and other students. They shared their cellphones to quickly call relatives.

“She called the church line instead of my cellphone. That’s when I knew something was wrong,” said Hannah’s dad, Gary Miles, pastor at Christian Life Center United Pentecostal Church. He hadn’t heard about the shootings yet.

Hannah was only able to say she was alive before passing the phone to another student. But it was enough.

Sandy Miles got the call from her husband, then immediately went to work on injured students being brought into to the hospital.

“I kept thinking, this could have been my daughter,” Sandy Miles said. “I knew she was OK. But I needed to feel her. I needed to touch her.”

Hannah Miles said she held it together until she got to the fairgrounds, where her friends had parents waiting to meet them.

“You see these things, hear about them. You never think that it’s going to happen to you,” she said. “It can and it does. We all have suffered a great loss.”