School Board Hostage-Taking Caught on Video

If there was a prize for America's bravest school board member, Ginger Littleton would be a shoo-in. Video of yesterday's hostage-taking incident at a Florida school board meeting shows that after gunman Clay Duke ordered everybody apart from six men to leave the room, Littleton returned to the room and swung a purse at him. Duke, who later shot himself after being injured in an exchange of fire with a security guard, swore at her but didn't shoot, CNN reports. Nobody except Duke, a 56-year-old ex-con, was harmed in the incident.

As board members and superintendent Bill Husfelt tried to reason with him, Duke rambled about grievances including sales taxes. "He said his wife was fired, but we really don't know what he was talking about," Husfelt tells the AP. "I don't think he knew what he was talking about." Duke then opened fire on the superintendent and board members at close range but missed them all before the security guard bolted in. "God was standing in front of me and I will go to my grave believing that," Husfeldt says.
(More Clay Duke stories.)