MAYFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — For Kylie Ossege, the 19-year-old college student who survived two deadly mass school shootings in Michigan — one as a senior at…
For Kylie Ossege, the 19-year-old college student who survived two deadly mass school shootings in Michigan — one as a senior at Oxford High School in 2021 and another 14 months later as a freshman at Michigan State University — Blaze stands as a source of comfort in a world otherwise shattered by bullets.
Ossege runs a brush along Blaze’s broad forehead, then gives him a kiss between the eyes.
“I feel very at home when I’m with him,” Ossege says of the 13-year-old American Quarter Horse she has owned since 2019. “He’s my best friend.”
A better friend than time, perhaps, which now gathers for Ossege like dust in a corner, a clingy bundle of haunting memories that she can neither forget nor sweep away: Fifteen minutes as she lay shot and bleeding in an Oxford High School hallway. Six weeks recovering in a hospital. Fourteen months between a deadly high school shooting and another at MSU. And daily physical pain she can never fully escape.
Ossege was severely wounded during the Nov. 30, 2021, attack on Oxford High School, about 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of Detroit.
She heard “something like a balloon popping,” then fell to the ground, where she laid next to classmate Hana St. Juliana, who died in the shooting. A heavy backpack filled with textbooks and a laptop weighed Ossege down. She was unable to feel her legs. Or move.
“It was the longest 15 minutes of my life,” she said.
Eventually, help arrived. Ossege was loaded into an ambulance and rushed to a hospital in nearby Pontiac, where she would spend the next six weeks recovering, longer than any of the six Oxford students and a staff member who were injured in the attack. Four died: St. Juliana, Justin Shilling, Madisyn Baldwin and Tate Myre, with whom Ossege had partnered at a bullying prevention program at the local middle school on the morning of the shooting.
The shooter was an Oxford student named Ethan Crumbley, whom Ossege says she didn’t know and whose name she will not utter. Instead, Ossege plans to deliver an in-person victim impact statement during his sentencing hearing on Dec. 8.
“I’m excited to have my words heard and my story heard,” said Ossege, who spent two weeks writing the statement that she estimates will take about 10 minutes to deliver.
