From state, a gesture of comfort

Connecticut town to get load of toys

— JONESBORO - Fourth grade student Meagan Cremeens found security in stuffed animals when students and teachers were shot at Westside Middle School on March 24, 1998.

Now, Cremeens, 25, wants to help comfort those affected by last week’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., by sending stuffed animals. Twenty children and six adults were killed Friday at the elementary school.

Cremeens quickly organized a drive in Jonesboro to collect the toys and, by Tuesday evening, more than 4,000 had been gathered. They will be taken by tractor-trailer today to the Connecticut town.

“Even as a fourth-grader then, I realized this was a big deal,” Cremeens said of the shooting that left four stu-dents and a teacher dead.

Ten others were injured when Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, fired at students as they left the middle-school building during a false fire alarm.

“We were getting animals from all over the planet and notes that they were praying for us,” she said.

Cremeens was in the elementary school during the shooting, but her sister, Brittany, was at the nearby middle school.

Brittany Cremeens left the building through a different exit and was not in the line of fire, but for several minutes, Meagan Cremeens didn’t know whether her sister was safe.

It’s a fear she still remembers.

“Our sense of security at that school was ripped out,” she said. “The same has happened to those children in Sandy Hook.”

Cremeens contacted Pam Herring, the mother of Paige Ann Herring, 12, who was killed during the Westside shooting.

“It’s a small gesture of love,” Herring said. “It’s one thing we learned how to do - we’re passing our love on to Connecticut.”

On Monday evening, about 500 people attended a downtown Jonesboro vigil for those killed in Connecticut. Those attending donated several hundred teddy bears, rabbits, tigers and other stuffed animals.

“Unfortunately, there is a kinship that binds us together,” Jonesboro Mayor Harold Perrin said of Jonesboro and Newtown during the vigil. “We experienced the same horror of a school shooting.”

In a letter he will send to the mayor of Newtown, Perrin wrote, “We are diligently praying for you.”

Cremeens set up several locations for people to donate the stuffed animals.

On Tuesday afternoon, workers at Southwest Church of Christ in Jonesboro sorted through the donated toys, picking off price tags and sorting them by size.

Other workers attached notes written by schoolchildren to each stuffed animal with a pink ribbon.

“We love you” and “We’re praying for you,” read several of the notes.

“We hug each animal before it goes,” said Patti Clark of Jonesboro. “We want them to know these animals are loved, and we’re passing that love on to them.”

“It makes you cry,” added Angie Swanner of Harrisburg, who helped tie notes to the toys. “You can really feel their sympathy.”

Several of the stuffed animals being sent to Newtown were originally given to medical personnel who tended toinjured Westside students 14 years ago.

“They held on to them for this long,” Cremeens said. “So many of us still have those animals. That means something to us.”

Cremeens said she hopes after the toys are collected at several other stops in Jonesboro early today, there will be more than 10,000 stuffed animals to send. The truck will leave Jonesboro this afternoon.

“These animals mean so much to us,” Herring said during the vigil Monday evening. “They gave us security then. We know they work.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/19/2012

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