One-woman show on school shootings raises broader questions of gun violence

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They do happen, but mass school shootings are still unthinkable. Unimaginable. One doesn’t want to dwell on the worst that could happen, or the worst that has happened.

However, shootings in Kalamazoo that had been on the way down one year ago are way too common this year, it seems. Often the shooters are barely adults. In one alarming incident, a 16-year-old got a loaded gun into Kalamazoo Central High School Oct. 16. 

It’s unclear what the teen intended to do with the gun, but the shadow of his act and Kalamazoo’s current gun activity hung over a new drama, “1225 Shelby Road,” that ran Oct. 16-18 at Western Michigan University’s York Arena Theatre.

The production, a one-woman play examining the outcome of a school shooting, held a talk-back at the end of its run. Much of the discussion centered on the question the play raises: What can we do?

What can we do to prevent school shootings? 

For me, the play raises the question of what we can do in Kalamazoo to prevent the much more common individual-on-individual shootings.

They’re not quite an everyday thing, but in recent weeks it feels like they are an every–weekend thing. The violence is just as much of a horror to the victims, to the families who’ve lost a loved one, and to a community that’s traumatized. And like school shootings, often youth are involved, those in their teens to 20s. 

‘I’m definitely not doing that!’

“1225 Shelby Road” is a daring piece that could fall on its face from the heavy weight of its subject.

Wait — you’re going to write about a massacre at a high school, and you’re also going to play every role, a whole traumatized community?

Cricket Leigh has a wide range of professional experiences — she’s worked as a voice actor, and was the voice of Mai, the knife-wielding “blasé goth” of Nickelodeon’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” That often gets her out to comic-cons where she meets fans, “and they’re, like, weeping.”

Leigh is also a licensed social worker currently living in Portage.

What compelled her to write, and star in, a one-woman show about a school shooting?

“I had a dream about it, and it kept bothering me. It kept kind of hounding my subconscious. And I was like, I am not going to write about this. This is a terrible thing to want to research and write about. I don’t want to do it. And I kept ignoring it and ignoring it,” Leigh says.

In the dream, “I was performing as the perpetrator. I was in front of an audience as a shooter. I was explaining his point of view.”

When she woke, she thought, “No, I’m definitely not doing that! That sounds really weird, and nobody wants to see that play, and I don’t want to write that play,” she says.

But she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. “It just kept coming to me.”

Leigh did research and looked at the subject through the lens of a therapist. She did not write a part for Justin, her fictional teen shooter of the high school of Shelby Township, Michigan. Instead, she focused on the question that everyone has in the aftermath: “How could that happen?”

What would cause a young person to take so many lives? “The bottom line was there is not one trait that they all share, really, that you can say, ‘a-ha, this is the thing.'”

In her research, she saw that the shooters had depression and very low self-esteem — but that is common in teens. Such a phase could last months, Leigh says. Should we pester them with constant welfare checks, “like, ‘Are you okay?'”

Another common trait is that they never seemed violent before. Often in the aftermath, parents, teachers, and peers swear they didn’t expect the shooter to act out in any violent way. 

Director of the York Arena production, Joan Herrington, says, “I think Cricket really captures that in the play, that people are surprised, and looking back, there might be some clues that people could have been more proactive about, but nothing that would make you expect that that would be the outcome of whatever distress the individual is in.”

In “Shelby Road,” Herrington notices that Justin’s family, peers, and even random townsfolk seem to be in personal traumas that had been in place before the shooting. In the play’s school, “We look out at an array of young people who are evidencing some sort of mental illness challenge…  it’s not that uncommon.”

A traumatized community

Leigh did a staged reading of her script in Chicago in November, 2025. 

Herrington knew of the work.” I work professionally as a dramaturg and just offered (help) because we’re friendly; to say, hey, you know, I’d be happy to read it if you just want some input,” she says.

“Joan was so amazing as a dramaturg, and I needed that structure and help. And I loved our working relationship,” Leigh says.

With support from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, they brought “Shelby Road” to York, WMU’s intimate black-box space.

Students and alumni were on the production team. Leigh herself is a grad of WMU, though here she studied social work, not theatre.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, we caught the last performance of the run. In that dark space, it was a dark look into the aftermath of a tragedy.

The format had each character speaking to an unseen documentary crew, filming a piece on the shooting.

Leigh starts with Bonnie, a retired teacher, who is the “puzzle champ of Shelby Township,” and is obviously someone who stays occupied and active in her community — and she can’t quite escape the news of what happened, can’t stop dwelling on it, can’t stop thinking “why?” Bonnie goes from chipper to tearful. 

Leigh did put some humor in the work, but there’s not much relief from the darkness. 

Deb, for example, is a humorous character: the abrasive and gossipy convenience store clerk. She used to sell chips and pop to the young shooter, so of course she knows all about what happened. 

Then she mentions that her family has distanced themselves from her, and she “carries,” and sometimes she thinks about “checking out.”

There seems to be a lot of psychic damage in Shelby Township. 

We meet Justin’s father, Charlie — Leigh plays him as a guy who fears showing softness, man-spreading as he sits — and mom Melanie. Both describe Justin as having been “an easy baby,” never cried, always seemed “self-sufficient.” It’s clear they had hoped whatever troubled him was just a phase.

The community members have opinions, ranging from the sheriff, who wishes for the death penalty for Justin, to the school counselor, who had concerns about this quiet kid. “If this was my son,” a character starts to say, and then has a hard time coming up with a conclusion to that thought.

The people in Shelby Township struggle to think of a way to fix this before it happens again. Maybe we should pray, love, get our kids some help with their emotional well-being, they say.

Justin’s teen peers are simply bewildered. He played soccer with them, but then he took his father’s gun and shot eight classmates, including the girl he had a crush on?

‘We lost our village’

“1225 Shelby Road,”  appropriately, doesn’t give easy, or any, answers to the question, “why?”

It does provoke thought and discussion.

For the last performance at York, Leigh and Herrington brought in guests for a talk-back: Taneka Dumas, who formed  Mothers of Murdered Sons (MOMS) in Kalamazoo after her son Montine Wiley Jr. was shot and killed last year while working as a security guard at Green Door Distilling, and Mabel Hoskins, vice president of the Southwest Michigan chapter of National Alliance of Mental Illness  (NAMI).  

Dumas is trained in community violence intervention, advocates against gun violence with HOPE thru Navigation, partners with ISAAC and others on “Peace Smoke”-style anti-violence gatherings. 

Dumas says, “I try to look at it from the side of the guy that killed my son — it’s really hard to forgive him.” The shooter was 18 and is now doing 28 to 60 years in prison. 

Dumas says the teen who killed her son “had mental health problems.”  What she sees in Kalamazoo are “a lot of kids that are hurt for a lot of different reasons, whether it’s because there’s not a father in the home and the mother works a lot of time.”

Dumas continues, “There could be more going on that we may not see, or are afraid to touch on…. The fact is, we lost our village.”

That’s “the village where somebody could say something to somebody’s child, and then they could take them home and, (a parent) would deal with the child,” Dumas says.

“Nowadays it’s not like that. People are scared to deal with individuals because you don’t know what the kid might say to you. You know if you take them home, you might have to fight the parent. So a lot of people are scared. They step back and don’t get involved in a lot of things that they could because of the way these kids are.”

Dumas describes a new type of village that she and other anti-violence groups in Kalamazoo have been building over the past decade. 

There are Pastors on Patrol, out working to defuse violence and acting as a liaison between the KDPS and the community. 

The Pastors, area churches, and KDPS have a gun amnesty program, Dumas says. 

If one has found a gun in their home or elsewhere, she says, simply “make a phone call. One of us will come pick the gun up, we’ll take it to a church, and then they put it in a lockbox.” KDPS will then retrieve the gun for dismantling, with the promise that no questions will be asked, no arrests made. 

In the area of mental health, Hoskins says, “We see a lot of students who do not know that it’s okay to speak up…. They don’t feel comfortable going to their parents for whatever reason that might be. They don’t know that they have a safe adult within their school district.”

Teens are more vulnerable now than earlier generations, Hoskins points out. “They’ve been through an awful lot. And there aren’t really a lot of resources out there to help them deal with the changes that have happened. You look at a 17-year-old, and six years ago, when we were going through COVID, that’s when they were fundamentally developing their social skills — and they missed it all.”

Leigh adds, “And then you’ve got to add the extra appendage of cell phone, social media, and AI, which takes the place of human connection, right?”

An audience member speaks up to say they’ve “suffered with depression my whole life.” They didn’t seek help when younger, didn’t want “some marker on my medical history that said, ‘oh, you’re crazy.'” One doesn’t want to ask for help in a culture that calls for us to “pull up your bootstraps. You’ll be fine!”

Even now, there’s a lack of pediatric psychiatrists in the country, Hoskins says. “I think there’s, like, three pediatric psychiatrists in northern Michigan, and there’s none in the U.P.”

“Society in general does not recognize, and they have a hard time understanding, that mental health issues are a disease of the brain,” she says. The brain is simply another part of the body that needs care, but, “the brain just isn’t understood as fully as the heart.”

Whose fault — teens, parents, society?

The audience discussion ranged widely.

One thing the room agreed on is that parents need to be involved in their kids’ lives. 

Hoskins says, when her children were teens, she’d say, “I’m not your friend. I don’t care if you like me or not. But you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”

A woman who says she’s taking a concealed weapons class, and that her husband carries when going out, says too many parents “want to be their kids’ friend.” She knows her 14-year-old’s password, so “I’m constantly on their phones looking at it…. I am insane about it.”

And if a child doesn’t have nosy parents? It might take a village, or at least a lot of hyper-aware school staff.

A long-time school social worker spoke up to say that staff, “the lunch lady, the janitor, the teacher,” are trained to build connections with students, and to be aware of issues that could lead to trouble. If comfortable, “Kids will spill a little bit of their story,” he says. “It’s easy to see something, say something.”

Among the audience, there was agreement that parents should share the blame in most school shootings, as was the case of the parents of the Oxford High School shooter in Oakland County.

Don Cooney, former Vice Mayor and Kalamazoo City Commissioner, spoke on his own son being shot at 17. 

“I know what it’s like to be home one night and somebody knock on your door and say, ‘Your son was shot.’ And to get to the hospital and they say he’s already on the operating table,” Cooney says. His son survived, but had physical injuries and trauma.

When he was commissioner, the City was active in anti-violence methods, he says, with the stance, “We will help you if you let us. We will stop you if you make us.”

Cooney notes that he recently spoke with the director of the new Boys and Girls Club in Edison. By 10 a.m., “the place is full, and I got to send kids home because I can’t take care of them,” the director told him.

“We have to look at what kind of a world these kids are coming into,” Cooney says. “What kind of jobs are out there for these kids? What kind of investment are we as a society making in our kids?… We got resources in this society that we’re not investing in our people. So the complexity of this issue is local, and it’s national.”

An observation

Some audience members ask Dumas why they haven’t heard of any of these grassroots anti-violence programs and resources. “How are they advertised?” one wondered, repeatedly.

Dumas says that the groups she’s involved with would like to bring their message into schools, but many members have lived experience with violence, victims as well as perpetrators who’ve changed their ways. “They don’t like to let felons or people with records into the schools.”

The groups do work with local churches, and they often meet with the KDPS on ways to intervene in youths’ disputes before they become violent, Dumas says.

They’ve held anti-violence rallies this year on the Northside, Edison, Eastside, and for the first time in the Vine Neighborhood, after the April killing of Telonn Horton at the Davis Street Park. 

They usually communicate and promote their efforts through social media, Dumas adds.

Just an observation, but it seems that some of Kalamazoo’s communities aren’t aware of how the city’s Black community is stepping up to find ways to divert youth from violence. 

The death of Michael Wilder, as I’m working on this piece, reminds me that this effort has been underway for a long time. 

Wilder, who died at age 53 Oct. 28, had spent 15 years as an anti-violence advocate. He used his past experience of being on the wrong side of the law to connect with Kalamazoo youth and divert them from turning to guns to settle beefs. 

He, MOMS, HOPE, ISAAC and others rarely advertise their work to the rest of Kalamazoo County.  When they have successful interventions, that usually doesn’t get on the news — but Kalamazoo shootings always do.