Student: Marysville-Pilchuck teacher heroically stopped shooter

A shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School Friday afternoon left one victim and the gunman himself dead. Four other victims were hospitalized with gunshot wounds.

The student shooter was allegedly motivated by a spoiled romance.

Erick Cervantes is a student at the school who witnessed the shootings, from the events beforehand until the moment the gunman shot himself — after being confronted by a heroic woman, he told KIRO-TV.

Cervantes thought the woman was a "lunch lady" who worked at the school, but she was later identified as a first-year social studies teacher. Cevantes confirmed to Natasha Chen of KIRO-TV that teacher Megan Silberberger was the woman he saw in action.

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“I believe she’s actually the real hero. She’s the one that intercepted him with the gun. He tried either reloading or tried aiming at her. She tried moving his hand away and he tried shooting and shot himself in the neck,” Cervantes said.

He said the gunshots followed a verbal altercation.

“It started off with an argument, but then I looked back and there was just gunshots and just people falling down,” Cervantes recalled. And immediately after the gunshots, the (woman) intervened, he said.

“She heard the gunshots first and she came in running through the door, right next to it,” he recalled.

Cervantes said there was no prolonged struggle between Silberberger and the gunman.

“It wasn’t (a) wrestle. She just grabbed his arm, and it lasted like two seconds, and I heard another shot."

Cervantes said it was the shot that killed the gunman with his own weapon.

Randy Davis, the president of the Marysville Education Association, said he taught at the school for 20 years and knows Silberberger as someone who student-taught last year and just started her first semester as a social studies teacher.

Davis described Silberberger as “Your classic first-year teacher with high enthusiasm, a lot of passion for what she does.”

He told KIRO 7 he felt “sadness that she had to do it. Very proud of her efforts and her motivations.”

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