On an ordinary April day in 1999 in a small agricultural community in the heart of Alberta’s southern Bible Belt, a gunman entered W.R. Myers High School in Taber — killing one student before a gym teacher managed to tackle him down.
The student who lost his life was Jason Lang. His friend Shane Christmas, also 17, was blasted in the stomach but survived.
It was the first fatal school shooting in Canada in a quarter of a century — and came eight days after the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where 12 students and one teacher were killed.
Now, 27 years later, Dale Lang, Jason’s father, is speaking out after another tragic school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. has shaken Canada.
“This is something that you can’t fix. It’s a very helpless feeling, a very empty feeling.”
He says the shooting that took his son’s life will never fade from his memory.
“Even though I would say that God has healed us over the time, we still think about it sometimes and we still live in a place where you know you’ve lost somebody and you can’t get them back.”
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Jason’s legacy has continued in several ways, including a scholarship in his name, which has helped countless students.
“We have had, over the years, a number of students who have contacted us to say thank you, to say they remember Jason, they know what happened. So, there’s kind of a legacy going on and hopefully it’s a positive thing that helps people remember things can go wrong and we have to watch out for each other.”
After the shooting in 1999, when classes at W.R. Myers resumed, Lang returned to the school in an effort to heal as a community.
“A lot of the kids were very frightened about the idea of going back into the school where somebody had been killed. For us to be able to (greet them), that was a healing thing for us, but also a healing thing for the kids.”
Lang, an Anglican minister at the time, became a tireless crusader for nearly a decade against the sort of bullying and school violence that led to the shooting. He then walked away from organized religion.
He says the message he shared following Jason’s death unfortunately still rings true today.
“We’re living in a world that’s pretty broken and damaged and people are getting damaged. It was my hope that those kinds of things would begin to change a little but in the 27 years since, we still see a lot of terrible things happening to people, needless things happening.”
Now, for the families of Tumbler Ridge, like Lang’s family, things cannot be the same.
“For the families that lost people, it’s a new normal and it’s not a very nice normal,” said Lang.
As a former pastor, Lang says faith, forgiveness and acceptance was crucial for his personal journey of healing.
“We need some place that we can go to (a church), where we are stimulated to honour and respect other people and treasure other people — support people wherever and whenever we can. There’s lots of good people out there doing nice things and good things,” Lang said.
“But there’s still a lot of broken people and hurting situations and difficult family circumstances and all of those things. So, I’ll just keep praying and we’ll see what happens.”
While hesitant to give advice on healing to other people, Lang does believe there is a way to continue your life even after dealing with such a horrible tragedy.
“These things are painful and when you think about them even 20 years later, you still have a sense of the pain, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be healed and move on with your life.”
With files from Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press
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