For ten years, Columbia Renix wore black glasses. The thick square frames became part of her identity.
But when she shopped recently for a new pair, she walked past her usual. She didn’t want to glance in the mirror and see the version of herself from April 15.
A bullet grazed the math teacher during the Wilmer-Hutchins High School shooting that day. It streaked past the right side of her face, barely missing her eye as the force knocked her glasses off. The lens shattered, tiny shards scratching her eyelid.
Now, two months later, she jumps at the sound of door-knocking. She pushes off panic attacks in the grocery store. She wears new clear-framed glasses, trying to adjust to a different vision for her life.
“I’m still processing every day,” Renix said.
Renix’s worker’s compensation claim was denied, and she hasn’t been back to the school since the day of the shooting. The 30-year-old single mother is living in a swirl of questions: Will she make next month’s rent? How did that bullet miss her face? Can she return to teaching?
Renix taught for nearly a decade but spent only half a year at Wilmer-Hutchins. At first, getting the job felt like some sort of divine intervention.
She was a few months postpartum when she took her infant daughter and her rescue dog Champ on their first t adventure. She walked with them to a neighborhood park, where she made small talk with a friendly fellow dog owner.
The dog owner turned out to be a high school principal — and she was in need of a geometry teacher.
Renix started a few weeks later, dragging her stacks of books and her mini fridge onto the Wilmer-Hutchins campus.
She brought the fridge because she was still breastfeeding and needed to pump every couple of hours. Many afternoons, she’d step out of her math classroom to wash her pump in the adjacent science lab.
That’s where she was when she heard the pops.
The second Wilmer-Hutchins shooting
The noise hit first, then a burning sensation on the right side of her face.
Renix didn’t process what was happening before another teacher urged everyone to hide.
The teenagers jumped on their phones immediately, dialing their moms and cousins and friends: There’s been a shooting.
It was the second time some Wilmer-Hutchins students had to make these calls. The high school was the site of a separate targeted shooting a year prior. The teen who opened fire inside the school in 2024 was sentenced this week to five years in prison for injuring a classmate.
Despite the stricter security since that shooting, police say an armed 17-year-old student got onto campus on April 15 after another teenager propped open a door for him.
Tracy Haynes Jr. allegedly “began firing at the students indiscriminately striking 4 male students,” according to his arrest-warrant affidavit. The students survived.
The affidavit mentions Renix briefly: “A 5th person was injured when a stray bullet entered a classroom and grazed a staff member (teacher) on the right side of her face, inches away from her right eye.”
In the gunfire’s aftermath, with her glasses shattered, Renix saw shapes rather than people. Still, she could make out the police officers with their big guns. And she could tell students were crying.
Renix’s phone and car keys remained stuck in her classroom. She was desperate to let her mom know she was OK and to get home to her baby girl.
Finally, she said, an officer brought Renix her things. She has not stepped back in her classroom since.
‘I would’ve missed that’
For weeks after the shooting, Renix rarely left her apartment. Everything made her nervous: Strangers, loud noises, big spaces.
But Renix needed diapers.
So she took her baby girl with her to WinCo Foods, thinking they could load up on the essentials.
As they strolled through the store, Renix started feeling hot. It was hard to breathe as her mind looped: What if something happens? What am I supposed to do? How do I get my baby out of here?
She pushed through the panic attack, bought the diapers and made it home.
Renix has found her own set of solutions: She’ll grocery shop at 11:30 p.m., when the aisles are empty. She’ll go to the park in the middle of the day — it’s hot, but at least most everyone else is inside with their air conditioning. Champ goes out during off-hours, too.
It was walking Champ that unleashed her tears after the shooting. She looked down at her lab-pit mix — the affectionate cuddler who somehow knew she was in labor before Renix realized it herself — and wondered, “If I wasn’t here, who would have taken you out?”
Renix stopped herself from spiraling about what would’ve happened to her daughter, the child she named for herself. Renix knows her family would’ve taken baby Columbia in, but the idea of the little girl growing up without her mom hurt too much to contemplate.
The almost-one-year-old just started walking. She smiles and gurgles as she ambles around the apartment in her diaper. “I would’ve missed that,” Renix said.
What comes next?
It’s hard for Renix to think about leaving the classroom forever. “All I know is teaching,” she said.
She loves when kids arrive at that “aha” moment. She loves explaining to them that math is as much about building confidence as it is about memorizing formulas.
It’s hard to imagine ever returning to the classroom either. She doesn’t feel safe going into a school.
She’s disappointed in the way Dallas ISD officials have responded. Renix provided The Dallas Morning News with documentation showing the denial of her worker’s compensation claim.
The paperwork notes that school district officials dispute that the injury “stops you from getting or keeping a job that pays what you earned before your injury.” The extent of her injury was also disputed.
DISD officials don’t comment on personnel matters, according to a district statement provided by spokeswoman Robyn Harris.
“In general, workers’ compensation claims are reviewed by a third-party , not the district,” the statement read. “For a claim to be approved, it must be ed by medical documentation from authorized healthcare providers. If that documentation is incomplete or not submitted, a claim — or parts of it — can be delayed or denied.”
Texas has been scarred by some of the nation’s deadliest campus shootings: Robb Elementary. The University of Texas at Austin. Sante Fe High.
Less seared into the state’s psyche are the other examples of gunfire that have injured students and teachers on campus, like at Wilmer-Hutchins two years in a row.
But in each of those incidents, children and educators have been traumatized by a gunshot piercing a place that’s supposed to be safe.
Texas AFT spokeswoman Nicole Hill said she worries about the way campus violence impacts teachers’ mental health and is disappointed in a general lack of structure around how educators are provided help afterward.
“It is incredibly traumatic to go through something like this teacher has gone through,” Hill said. “And we don’t have a system set up to actually people who experience something like that.”
For now, Renix is focused on healing. She’s in counseling and taking medicine for anxiety. One goal is to feel safe enough around large crowds that she can comfortably go watch her sister, a rapper, perform.
She’s soaking in time with her daughter and planning for her first birthday. The baby’s colorful toys — and her babbling voice — fill up Renix’s bedroom.
But there, tucked away in the ading bathroom, sit the broken glasses.
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron and Phyllis Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.