During School Shooting, Teen Unlocks Mosque for Students

17-year-old Duaa Ahmad stayed calm, acted quickly during chaos at Wisconsin high school
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 6, 2019 9:00 AM CST
Chaos at a School, Followed by a Student's Calm Heroism
Screenshot from video of Duaa entering the security code.   (YouTube/NBC 26)

When students in an AP English class at a Wisconsin high school heard a gunshot Tuesday and the teacher yelled for the students to go, what followed was a complete state of confusion and chaos. One student, however, knew just what to do as she and her classmates at Oshkosh West scattered, seeking shelter: Fling open the doors to a mosque across the street. CNN reports that during the incident—in which a 16-year-old student was shot by an officer after stabbing him—Duaa Ahmad, 17, punched in the security code to the locked door at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community's Oshkosh chapter mosque, a code everyone who belongs to the mosque knows. More than 100 students crammed inside and were served water and coffee by Duaa and her father, Saad, who'd rushed over to the mosque after Duaa called him, the Journal Sentinel reports.

"That first hour was very stressful because we had no idea how bad the situation really was," Ahmad says. Video of Duaa entering the code on an exterior keypad, holding the door open, and ushering students in has since gone viral. "Good humans doing good things," one commenter wrote, per the Journal Sentinel. The students hunkered down at the mosque until teachers and police showed up to take them to a parent reunification site. Duaa tells ABC News she felt "lucky" and "grateful" to have been in the right place at the right time, though she insists she's no hero. "I just felt like I did what had to be done," she says. The Oshkosh Ahmadiyya Muslims group detailed the incident on its Facebook page, adding, "Our doors are always open." The student and cop involved in the shooting were both treated for non-life-threatening injuries. (More uplifting news stories.)

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