A 15-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee, is being hailed as a hero for her quick-thinking after a classmate was shot.
On Nov. 30, students at Kirby High School had just been dismissed for the day, when shots were fired at a Sonic Drive-In restaurant located about 500 yards away.
“Everyone started running back into the building,” C’Azia Hamilton tells TODAY.com. But Hamilton stayed put. She noticed the victim was staggering towards the school and recognized that he was in need of medical attention.
“It was my friend,” she says. “I had to make sure he was OK. I couldn’t leave.”
Hamilton, who is in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, or JROTC, led the victim to a bench and called 911. Then, she removed her JROTC belt and tied it around the leg of her injured peer, creating an improvised tourniquet.
“I needed to stop the bleeding,” Hamilton explains.
“I kept telling him, ‘You’ve got to keep talking to me,’ and he was like, ‘Don’t let me go,’” she recalls.
Hamilton wasn't going anywhere.
When paramedics arrived, Hamilton says they asked her to stay with the victim and keep holding his hand. She says they also commended her for “keeping him conscious.”
The victim was taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition, but was later updated to non-critical, according to NBC affiliate Action News 5. Earlier this month, the station reported that two 16-year-old boys were arrested in the case and charged with several crimes including attempted first-degree murder and unlawful possession of a weapon. TODAY.com reached out to the victim’s mother but did not receive a response
Master Sgt. Lonnie Coleman, a JROTC instructor at Kirby High School, is praising Hamilton for snapping into action.
"We teach first aid here — and we’re proud of her for using a technique she learned,” Coleman tells TODAY.com.
Hamilton says she hasn’t been sleeping that well since the Nov. 30 incident. Zoe Touray says she can relate to what Hamilton is going through.
On November 30, 2021, Touray was a senior at Oxford High School in Oakland County, Michigan, when a gunman opened fire. The attack claimed the lives of four students: Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Madisyn Baldwin and Justin Shilling.
Touray, now 18, vividly remembers the sound of a man trying to enter their classroom, and the fear in her teacher's eyes.
"Someone came and jingled the door handle and asked us to open the door," Touray recalls to TODAY.com. "We escaped through a window and started running." (They later learned that the person at the door was an undercover police officer.)
"I don't cry in front of people, it's not a thing that I like to do," she says. "I think that's the first time I've ever cried in front of friends."
Touray experienced nightmares for weeks. She also had trouble asking for help.
“I had a really hard time,” she said during an interview with NBC News in June. “I didn’t really want to talk to my family much. It was more like being in my bed at home all day until somebody called me to hang out.”
But Touray says she has found comfort via her involvement with gun control advocacy. Touray is a youth member of March for Our Lives, which was founded by teens after 17 people were killed in a shooting at high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
"It's been very therapeutic for me — talking to people who have been through the same thing and understand me completely because they're also survivors," Touray tells TODAY.com.
She says her heart goes out to C'Azia Hamilton and the victim Hamilton helped in Memphis.
"I'm outraged. Kids deserve to feel safe at school — kids deserve to feel safe after school when they go to a gathering spot," Touray says. "It makes me feel disheartened that America just cannot solve this problem."
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