THE DAY A KILLER CAME TO TRACK PRACTICE

The attack on a group of Oklahoma high school runners killed three teammates. Two years later, the survivors are still figuring out how to heal.

- JOHN BRANT

WHEN IT CAME TIME TO DESIGN THE MEMORIAL PARK FOR THE THREE HIGH SCHOOL RUNNERS KILLED IN THE HIT-AND-RUN ATTACK-AN ATTACK, NOT AN ACCIDENT-IT WAS JEFF HORN’S JOB TO LEAD THE PROJECT.

“I can’t say I was happy to do it,” Horn says, “but I knew it was my duty.” Horn serves the Moore School District in Oklahoma as assistant superintendent, overseeing operations. He’d undertaken a similar assignment several years earlier.

A suburb of Oklahoma City with a population of 63,000, Moore lies at the heart of Tornado Alley, the defining meteorological feature of the Southern Great Plains. Often during the spring, the great continental cold and warm fronts collide, funnel clouds form, and destruction to varying degrees upends the town. Residents respect and fear tornadoes, but accept them, for all their fury, as a cost for living in the close-knit suburb; confronting their threat engenders a deep sense of community.

In May 2013, however, the area’s tolerance for tornadoes was put to a supreme test. A mile-wide, 200-mph-wind, EF5 twister tore through Moore, tangling livestock with trees and not so much flattening office buildings and blocks of neighborhoods as erasing them. The disaster killed 25 people, including seven children at Moore’s Plaza Towers Elementary School.

Designing the memorial plaques for those kids proved a gut-punch job. “An educator’s bedrock, first-and-last duty is to protect the young people in your care,” says Horn, a 34-year veteran of the school district. Still, the 2013 tornado had been a classic force majeure, an act of nature, or as many in the Moore community believe, an act of God. The memorial plaques told a terrible story, but one that people could understand. “I thought there’d never be a tornado that awful again,” Horn says. “And I’d never have to design a memorial for more dead schoolkids.”