At Oxford HS graduation, seniors honor classmates who didn't get to walk across the stage

OXFORD, Mich. – Sometimes, Oxford High School really did live up to the ideal high school that graduating seniors dreamed of when they were younger.

Navy blue and gold blanketing the stands at football matches.

Soaking their peers in elaborate (and unsanctioned) schoolwide water wars.

Sitting in the school parking lot, talking with their friends for hours as high school draws to a close.

Sometimes, high school was more complicated. Like when COVID-19 left them staring at a laptop for months.

And, sometimes, high school gave way to tragedy. 

On Nov. 30, 2021, a shooting left four of their fellow students dead: Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling and Madisyn Baldwin. Six other students were injured, along with a teacher. Many more students walked away with emotional trauma they've only just begun to untangle.

On Thursday, 414 Oxford High School seniors received their diploma, nearly six months after the shooting. Justin and Madisyn, both seniors, should have been with them, their names listed among their classmates' in the Class of 2022 graduation program.  

Graduate Lauren Hudson bedazzled the initials of the four slainstudents into her heels. Bryce Esman has 42 decorated on his phone case, the number Tate wore on his football jersey, along with four hearts. Zoe Touray created sweatshirts with the four students' names on it, all in different fonts to represent their different personalities. Jace McCarthy, with the school choir, performedin the students' honor a song once sung by Lin Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt following the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

As high school graduates, they are ready to move forward. But all four said they are doing so as they cling to the memory of their lost classmates.

And they are doing so with the kind of searing clarity that often only comes with pain: They are more aware of every second of their lives that pass.

"I want to live life and I want to get a good job and I want to build a family and everything for the four we lost," Lauren said. "I am very determined in life now because of what happened, and I have the strength." 

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Navy blue and gold pride 

When an eighth-grade Zoe dreamed of high school, she thought of "High School Musical." She envisioned herself dancing on tables, jumping through the hallways, just having a blast. Looking back now, at the end of four years at Oxford High School, she's not sure why her dreams took that shape.

But parts of Zoe's freshman year did live up to the Disney-fied version of high school she’d envisioned in her mind. In middle school, Zoe wasn't accustomed to the kind of school spirit for whichOxford is known. 

Oxford, where students routinely paint their faces and bare chests for football games, is practically bursting with school pride. 

"I wasn't used to so much school spirit," Zoe said. “I’ve probably never met a more devoted group of people to a city or a town."  

Zoe attended a charter school in Pontiac, Michigan, for middle school before going to Oxford High. She was among the handful of students who bus from Pontiac, a majority Black and Latino city, to mostly-white Oxford for school every day. 

The bus ride takes about 30 minutes, but always felt much longer in those early years, Zoe said, partly because she was impatient to get to school. 

Sometimes, Zoe felt singled out as one of about 30 Black students at the school of 1,800. Sometimes students directed racial slurs or even the N-word at her. Others asked her for a "pass" to the use the N-word.

“My skin complexion is a lot deeper than most people are used to so it was really hard to navigate that,” she said. 

Zoe found comfort in a teacher’s office, where she stole away for long, introspective talks and encouragement. Some parts of school got easier with time. She felt stronger with the support.

"People are so supportive," she said. "Once you get to know them, it turns out not everybody's judging you." 

Oxford spirit for Bryce has been second nature for much of his life, long before high school. 

He lives with his family down a dirt road in Metamora, about 4 miles away from Oxford High. Both of his older sisters played basketball for Oxford. All three kids were born in a year when the Detroit Pistons won the NBA championship — Bryce in 2004 — his dad, Jim Esman, said. 

Bryce, who is 6 feet, 8 inches tall, started playing basketball in middle school.

"I love basketball, it's probably my favorite activity, besides hanging out with family and friends," he said. 

Like Zoe, Bryce looks back at his freshman year with affection. It was the 2018-19 school year, long before virtual school would dominate their afternoons and before the kind of athletic gatherings Bryce loves would be deemed unsafe. 

Bryce stuck with the same group of friends from middle school. Sophomore year, he made varsity basketball and he loved playing with upperclassmen and learning from them. 

"Freshman and sophomore year were my two favorite years," he said.

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2020 challenges

COVID-19 came near the end of the graduates' sophomore year. First, a temporary disruption, then a larger one.

"It just didn't feel right," Lauren, said.

In those days, she remembers waking up, logging onto Zoom, and churning through assignments without talking to classmates.

She longed for the kind of interactions that made high school special: The quiet moments of bonding when everyone does their homework together, playing on her soccer team and the football games where she dreamed of standing in the front row, a privilege reserved for Oxford seniors. 

Lauren usually loves raising her hand in class. But she didn't have the same enthusiasm through a screen. 

"On Zoom, I was just so quiet and it was like I wasn't even there," she said. 

Jace, who also lives in Oxford, would have been prepping for the high school's musical. He would have been doing his favorite thing to do as a high schooler: sing. 

He would have been sending off some of his friends, who were older and graduating in 2020, but plans for graduation parties started to fade away. 

The virus stuck around for junior year and Jace stayed home, opting for Oxford's virtual school instead of in-person school like a lot of his classmates. 

"I still did choir but I didn't show up often because I don't trust a lot of people in my school to be wearing masks," he said. 

But virtual school for Jace wasn't the same, either. Lessons flew at him at lightning speed. He had no motivation to finish anything.

"It was just not fun," he said. "I don't know how people do it."

This school year, Jace came back in-person. He played the role of Tommy Boy in the school's musical, "Newsies."

And for all the students, it felt like some normalcy was returning. Lauren got to cheer for the football team from the front row as a senior. She handed out candy to students through the kindness committee on Halloween, passing out cider and doughnuts to teachers. 

Bryce was happy to stop wearing masks and start hanging out with his friends during breaks in Oxford's senior courtyard, ready for his final season of high school basketball. Zoe and a few of her friends started an affinity club for minorities in Oxford, and connected with younger students who looked up to her, through a club called Bully Busters. 

The end of November seemed to arrive with unexpected speed.   

Nov. 30, 2021

When the shooting started, Lauren was in English class. She froze. A classmate grabbed her heavy YETI water bottle to add to a barricade they'd begun to construct at the classroom's door.

In sign language class, Zoe and her classmates thought the call for lockdown was just a drill. Or maybe a terrible joke.  

Jace didn't go to school that day. He'd had a bad feeling all month, while rumors of threats swirled. His mom shook him awake that afternoon, frantic about reports from Oxford High. 

Zoe's class started getting Snapchats from other students, their screens glowing with videos of their classmates running from the building, fleeing the halls.

Jace rushed to find his friends, driving to the grocery store just down the hill from Oxford High, where students were gathering. On his way, the road to Oxford was filled with red lights flashing atop police cars. 

A sheriff's deputy told Lauren and her classmates to look straight ahead and keep their arms above their heads as they left their classroom. Rattled and still frozen, Lauren's English teacher propped her up the entire way out. 

Bryce said he came home and sat dazed in a chair in his living room for an hour.

Actually, it was a lot longer than an hour, his dad said.

The aftermath

Lauren and her friends fell into a new routine in the days and weeks that followed the shooting, shuffling from funeral to funeral, candlelight vigil to candlelight vigil.

Lauren barely ate or slept. Her body physically hurt. She reached a point where she couldn't cry anymore. She was negative all the time, about everything. She didn't want to go back to the school.  

She'd see updates about a school shooting on the news and do a double-take, thinking, "That's not my school," then, "Oh, that is my school." 

"It hurts," she said. "That's the only word. It just hurts." 

Bryce's friends stuck close. At least 15 kids spent the night at his house one night shortly after. Nobody wanted to be alone. 

"We all still wanted to be together," he said. "That's what's just so nice about our community." 

Jace remembers sitting with his friends, 20 or 30 of them, still in shock. Sometimes he'd go to as many as two vigils a day. Sometimes he logged onto Twitter and tried to fight misinformation spreading like wildfire online about what happened.

It felt like "no one on Twitter was from Oxford at that time," he said.

It took Zoe about a week to cry, "because it was just a lot at once." She felt withdrawn and in shock.

"All I would do is go to Oxford and hang out with friends and go to funerals and then come home and like sit at home for like a week in my bed and not shower," she said. 

On Dec. 14, Oxford's varsity basketball team played its first game of the season and first since Nov. 30. Oxford fans lined the stands. 

"It just happened so quickly," Bryce said. "To see that much support and that many people after such a traumatic event, it's just crazy." 

Bryce scored a team-high 18 points.

Oxford won, 50-43. 

The team would play 10 games before playing again at Oxford High, which remained shuttered for nearly two months after the tragedy.

The boys practiced anywhere they could. And the community followed them to every game. 

"I don't know any other place on Earth that could do that," Bryce said. 

By February, the team was back on its home court. Students sang "Don't Stop Believin'," swaying and leaning against each other, hands swung over each other's shoulders between the third and fourth quarters. 

Oxford high schoolers returned to the school building on Jan. 24. 

To Lauren, students seemed more considerate of others' feelings. If someone appeared to be having a bad day, another would approach them and ask if they were OK, if they needed help or if they needed a break. 

And Lauren's mindset softened as time went by. She'd wake up and think of Hana, Tate, Justin and Madisyn. 

"I can't live this way," she recalled thinking at the time. "Because they're looking at us saying, 'OK, we're gone, but you need to live it out for us.' " 

For Zoe, it was a message from March for Our Lives, a student gun control advocacy organization formed in the wake of the Parkland school shooting, that got her out of the house. 

In late February, she stood on the steps of the Michigan Capitol and remembered the moment she'd learned her friend Justin died. Justin, who she remembers as a goofy presence and the loudest person at football games. The friend who hugged her in the hallway. 

"If people had taken action sooner, my friends and classmates would still be here," she said in February. 

March For Our Lives called for mental health resources in schools and safe gun storage laws. The request to speak out brought her back to Nov. 30, she said. 

Each student interviewed for this article said the events of Nov. 30 taught them that life is precious and sometimes fleeting.

Bryce said the shooting prompted him to "reset" his perspective on life. 

Jace is counting the seconds in his life more closely. 

Lauren said to her, it represented a loss of innocence. 

Zoe said that at times she feels more closed off, more reserved – but also buoyed by hope. 

"It's also given me a lot more hope in a way," she said. "Just seeing how our community came together." 

They are all hopeful for the students who remain at Oxford and the students who will join them in the fall. They hope they learn the "unspoken" rules of the school quickly: no slamming locker doors, no sudden loud noises, no running in the halls.

They hope future students get more normalcy out of high school than they had — more football games, more goofy days in class, more congregating in the senior courtyard, pulling off pranks and laughing together. 

Bryce and Lauren both hope students get involved with 42 Strong, the mentoring organization started by Trent Myre, Tate's older brother.

Some of the graduates said they agreed to be interviewed for this article because they wanted to share that good does not vanish after evil.

Sometimes, good returns in a fierce way, they've found. Through crowds drawn to athletic events to cheer on grieving athletes. Through therapy dogs, sidling up to distraught students in school and even mingling with the crowd prior to Thursday's graduation cermony. Through groups of friends who take their first steps out of the darkness together. 

Bryce wants you to know that he’s thankful to the communities surrounding Oxford, for all the support they poured into his corner of the world when tragedy struck. 

Jace wants you to know that he has learned to live life in a way that feels more bold, to take more risks, to have more fun. 

Zoe wants you to know that yes, it is difficult to be a teenager in 2022, especially when you’re surrounded by tragedy, but that Oxford's tight-knit community lifted her up and gave her the strength to move forward when she needed it most. 

Lauren wants you to know that she sees her class like a heart: "Because we were broken. But with everything that we've done now, we're just putting our heart back together." 

And every senior interviewed wants you to know that on graduation day, and in the days after, they will remember the students who won’t get to walk across Oxford’s graduation stage.

"They really showed the best of Oxford, each one of them," Bryce said.

Remember their names, they said.

Hana, Tate, Madisyn and Justin. 

Follow reporter Lily Altavena on Twitter @LilyAlta.

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