So Close to Death
by Sandy Warren
(Date of article unkown.)

Bill Thompson [photo right] was in his fifth-grade English class, the last class of the day. He was in the mood to flirt with a little girl named Billie Sue Hall. Problem was she was sitting two seats away. He persuaded another little girl to trade seats with him, so he could sit right behind Billie Sue.

It was about 3:05 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, only a few minutes before school was to be let out for the day. Down in the basement-level shop class, teacher Lemmie Butler turned off a electrical switch on a sander. It sparked and a very fiery explosion raced the entire 253 foot lenth of the building.

Mr. Thompson and Ms. Hall lived. The little girl he had traded seats with died under a heap of twisted concrete, bricks and metal.

"I felt so guilty about that for a long time," he said. I thought God had made a mistake,and I should have been dead. But I came to terms with the guilt, that maybe I had caused her death. It was in God's hands, and God makes no mistakes.

Mr. Thompson said he thinks about telling his dead classmate's family what happened that day, but he never has. Still he might reveal his secret to them one day.

"I started to call her brother and tell him, but i just didn't know if it would hurt the family or not."

The London school explosion yielded many dramatic stories about the victims and the heroism of the rescue workers who arrived from the fields to salvage the dead or save the living. Many of the bodies were unrecognizable. Many of the parents identified dead children by the clothes they had on when they left that morning.

Yet others were perfectly preserved without a scratch. Thick clouds of dust, stirred up by the explosion had suffocated them, doctors said.

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February 2002: Sandy Warren passed away about a year ago.
This article is reprinted by permission of her mother.