Experiencing fear, choosing compassion: Forty years later, community still feels weight of shooting at Concord High

Forty years ago, Cynthia Davis was in her classroom at Concord High School, teaching as usual, when a voice suddenly crackled through the intercom. 

It instructed teachers not to let any students in or out of their classrooms, to lock the doors, pull down the shades and wait. Today, the situation would be recognized as a lockdown, but back then, the word wasn’t part of regular school vocabulary.

Six months pregnant and with her four-year-old daughter attending the childcare center in the school’s basement, Davis worried and wondered why the building was being sealed.

Then, she heard it — the sound of four gunshots.

In that moment on Dec. 3, 1985, she felt the weight of two responsibilities at once. Inside her classroom were 30 students looking to her for safety. Two floors below was her little girl, completely out of reach. All she could do was wait.

“It’s what is seared in my brain, just the feeling of isolation, the feeling of responsibility and the fear for what’s happening,” Davis said. 

That was the day 16-year-old Louis Cartier Jr. — a former student who had dropped out barely two weeks earlier — walked into Concord High School with a loaded shotgun.  

For the people who were present in the building, the moment didn’t simply disrupt the school day’s routine; it altered how they viewed their lives, their sense of safety and the decisions that would follow them for years to come.

Cartier arrived at the school around 8:30 a.m., wearing a green jacket over a black T-shirt, blue jeans and a belt lined with shotgun shells, according to police reports. 

Students and witnesses told officers that Cartier seemed to be looking for someone who had been bothering him.

For 10 to 20 tense minutes, police attempted to communicate with Cartier as he held a student hostage.

Officers urged him repeatedly to put down his weapon and tried to talk him down, but he refused. The standoff escalated, and police ultimately shot Cartier in the arm and head.

He died in the hospital the next day. Attempts to reach Cartier’s family for this story were unsuccessful.

Before the shots rang out

That morning, Cartier roamed the hallways with a shotgun in hand and a bottle of wine, having already taken two students, Pat Lena and Scott Hayes, hostage. 

For Lena, the ordeal left an impact he couldn’t have anticipated. 

After Lena told Cartier he would get him a ride home, Cartier released him. Lena then bolted to the principal’s office and ducked under a desk.

He said he still remembers the sound of the four gunshots that day.

Lena was once firmly opposed to guns, but he now sees the issue differently.

“I don’t blame the gun today,” he said. “I know that it’s a mental illness. It’s not the gun that pulls the trigger; it’s the individual and what’s going on with the individual, and I firmly believe that.”

Lena, like most students, had very few interactions with Cartier. That morning, he and Hayes arrived late to school, and by the time they stepped into the hallways, the building was already locked down.

While the attorney general’s investigation in 1985 didn’t determine Cartier’s exact motive for bringing a loaded gun to school, most student witnesses recalled that he had been bullied, often called names because of his appearance.

Despite being held hostage as a teenager, Lena doesn’t view Cartier as a malicious person but rather as a high school student who was different, someone who simply needed extra attention.

It’s a lesson he passed on to his own son, who also attended Concord High School, hoping that empathy and understanding would make all the difference. 

If there’s one thing he could tell his younger self, it would be: “Be more compassionate, love this kid for where he’s at, and not just him but all of the loner kids who didn’t have many friends.”

A lasting impact

The events of 40 years ago, and the scourge of school shootings that followed, unmistakably altered the educational environment.

In the almost 15 years that Barb Higgins has been on the Concord Board of Education, a lot has changed about the school system. Higgins remembers a time when she could just walk into any school in Concord — no buzzers, no security checks.

Now, safeguards and protocols are stricter, a response to the growing prevalence of school shootings across the country. Still, some things feel the same to her.

“When I was little, we got under our desk for nuclear air raids because of all the Cold War crap,” Higgins said. “Now you get under your desk because somebody’s walking in the hall with a gun. So, sometimes I think human behavior is such that nothing changes.”

For Davis, who remembered Cartier as a quiet, difficult-to-reach student who sat at the back of her classroom, the shooting had a personal impact. 

She said Cartier often kept to himself, and the classes she taught him are now a blur. Many in the community also remembered him as someone who generally stayed on the sidelines and showed little interest in school activities.

Afterward, Davis realized just how little she truly knew him.

“I really felt like this student had passed before me, and I never really got to know him, and he was gone,” Davis said. “I think it probably turned me into a teacher who needed to get to know her students better.”

Susie Goodwin, a junior at the time of the shooting, came face-to-face with Cartier on the first floor when she was taking an attendance slip to the main office.

Cartier aimed the shotgun at her chest, she said.

“I looked at the gun, and then I looked into his eyes, and I was like, ‘Buddy, how dare you?’” Goodwin, now 57, said. “ I was very surprised by my own reaction. I was surprised I didn’t lose it, freak out or anything like that.”

She said the principal, Charles Foley, then grabbed her, and they hid behind a long counter. From there, she could hear the police trying to talk down Cartier, and each gunshot rang in her ear.

It wasn’t until she was 19, when her brother fired a gun into the floor, that the memories came crashing back. Goodwin started feeling claustrophobic and realized she’d been pushing down what happened all those years ago.

The way she reacted made her mother realize just how deeply the events of that day in 1985 had affected her. Goodwin decided to get counseling and finally face the trauma she’d been denying.

“I’ve learned how to cope with it, and for me, it’s a tragic memory because that kid didn’t deserve to die,” she said. “He needed help, but he didn’t get it. For me, it’s made me stronger.”

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