Barbaro proceeded back to the window overlooking the front lawn and West Sullivan Street, attached a Starlight scope—that he had just received as a Christmas gift—to his rifle, and started looking for targets.
Pancio moved Metcalf’s body about ten feet before he saw the blood streaks along the corridor and realized the man was beyond saving. Pancio and the others rushed down to the board office to phone the police. Eventually one of Pancio’s companions convinced the distraught Mrs. Perry to go down to the boiler room for safety. She had no way of knowing that her daughters were safely locked in the main office with four secretaries, in a room the size of a closet with a lock as imposing as a bank’s safety deposit vault, intended to keep state exams secure.
A gun shot disabled Wayne Dutton’s purple car on the corner of West Sullivan and 3rd Street. His wife and three small children were passengers.
“We took turns, the other secretaries and I, sitting with the girls in there,” said Mrs. Clawson, a petite, friendly woman who teachers described to me when I was first hired as the person truly running the school. I would come to learn there was some truth in that. When she announced her retirement several years ago, there was genuine wringing of hands.
“There was no panic bar in the vault back then, so once it was closed, it was closed until someone with the combination could open it,” she went on to say. “We didn’t want to close the door until it was absolutely necessary.”
*
At that moment Cynthia Wright, driving south on 3rd Street, having picked up her sister, Carmen Wright Drayton, 25 years old, and their younger brother, 12-year-old Julius, were on their way to get their blind father for a shopping excursion. While stopped at the intersection of West Sullivan, a bullet shattered the windshield and struck Carmen in the head, the broken glass causing facial cuts to Julius. Cynthia, seeing Carmen and Julius bleeding, sped to the hospital, one minute away, but Carmen was pronounced dead on arrival. Julius had wounds to his eye and face but survived.
Carmen had been pregnant with twins. The death toll for the Olean High School sniper attack is always reported as three people, not five. That the unborn children were not included in the death toll must have been unfathomably hard for the family of Carmen Wright Dayton. As the judge explained during Barbaro’s arraignment, the state law does not make provision for unborn children.