CLEVELAND, Miss.—Lawson King, a sculpting major at Delta State University, is in his 10:00 a.m. ceramics class, goofing off with friends. It’s Monday, Sept. 14, 2015, and the talented young artist is in his first year in the art program. Unbeknownst to him, the sight and sound of police cars flooding the campus will soon interrupt the class.
Down the street is Jobe Hall, the building that houses history and social studies. On the second floor, Chuck Westmoreland, a history professor, is 10 minutes into teaching a group of around 35 students.
The auditorium-style classroom is filled with 50 seats and three rows of long tables that are bolted to the floor. There are two small closets on each side of the back of the classroom and a computer on a black rolling cart that sits about four feet from the entrance. The wooden door is closed with a lock system that can only be secured from the outside.
Bang. Bang.
The class is quiet. Westmoreland stops in the middle of his lecture. He walks outside in the hall to investigate the noise. There is no scuffle. No altercation. Nothing. Simply silence. Returning to the classroom, he asks the students, “Did y’all hear that?”
“We did,” they respond.
Unsure of where the metallic sound came from, the professor resumes his lecture. About three minutes later, campus police officers rush into the hallways with their guns drawn, demanding everyone get down.
There’s an active shooter in the building.
Frantically, Westmoreland and the students implement active shooter protocols that the professors learned beforehand in training. Students are stuffed into the closets in the back of the classroom. Others lay on the floor.
The computer monitor is unplugged from the wall, and the cart housing it is wedged in front of the door. Westmoreland and a few brave students hold chairs to throw at the assailant in the event he enters the classroom.
About 10 minutes later, campus police officers return and tell the students and the faculty member to evacuate the classroom with their hands up. They leave their backpacks in the room. Swiftly, they are ushered down the stairwell and out of Jobe Hall to the nearby music building.
On that day, Ethan Schmidt, a professor of history who specialized in Native American and colonial history, was shot and killed in his office on the second floor of Jobe Hall by his coworker, social studies education professor Shannon Lamb.
Lamb had killed his significant other, Amy Prentiss, in Gautier the night before. Zig-zagging across state lines, he drove up to Memphis after killing Prentiss and then back down to Cleveland, where he killed Schmidt.
Lamb fled the scene without being caught by local authorities. After a state-wide manhunt, the gunman crossed over into a wooded area in Greenville and took his own life after telling police that he “wasn’t going to jail.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, Delta State University was placed on a campus-wide lockdown. Don Allan Mitchell, an English professor and honors program director, was responsible for returning backpacks to students.
Ethan Schmidt was a graduate of the University of Kansas, where he received his doctorate of philosophy in history. He was an author of two books and taught at Texas Tech University before coming to DSU in 2013. He was married to Liz, with whom he had three children—Connor, Dylan and Brianna.
Since his murder, the University of Kansas has created the Ethan A. Schmidt Memorial Fund, providing grants to graduate students in the history department.
A decade later on Sept. 15, 2025, King, Westmoreland, and Mitchell attended a vigil outside Jobe Hall with a small group of faculty members commemorating the legacy of Ethan Schmidt and his impact on the campus.
‘Love in the Darkest of Times’
Professor Westmoreland, a good friend of Ethan Schmidt’s, led the vigil and opened the event with a moment of silence for past and present tragedies the campus has faced. Earlier that morning, Trey Reed, a Black student, had been found hanging from a tree—unleashing a new wave of tragedy on the campus.
Still, the vigil for Schmidt went forward as planned.
Don Allan Mitchell read from his prepared notes
“No one, absolutely no one, should die as Ethan Schmidt did,” he said. “We all have a choice: the violence of words or the pathway of love. May we continue to show love to as many people as we can for as long as we can.”
Westmoreland, full of emotion, led the conversation with a strong voice. He acknowledged the sense of community and love that was present at the vigil.
“When I look around this circle right now, I see a community of people who showed love in the darkest of times,” he said.
Chuck Westmoreland and Ethan Schmidt were more than colleagues. They were best friends. They were as close as brothers. Some of Westmoreland’s fondest moments with Schmidt were watching basketball together, both outside and inside the office. Westmoreland was a fan of Duke University and Schmidt was a passionate Kansas Jayhawks fan. Two men bonded by profession. By basketball. Separated by an unmotivated act of violence.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever healed. You never get over something like this. You have to move forward. What I try to do with this event is to continue to be a community that remembers and rallies around Ethan and the Schmidt family,” Westmoreland said.
Broken Arrow
Lawson King spoke with the Mississippi Free Press after the vigil. He described the events of that day and the emotions he felt as a student.
“It just really affected me, and as an artist, I just had the need to respond,” King said.
On Nov. 4, 2017, King crafted a sculpture that sits outside of Jobe Hall, named Broken Arrow. King expressed that the art piece was made as a symbol of peace to remember Ethan Schmidt’s legacy.
“The broken arrow is a sign of peace. (That is) just how I’ve thought to express that feeling. I had so much that I needed to get out, and I think that I just worked diligently to kind of use that as a therapy of sorts,” King said.
During an American Historical Association discussion before his death, Schmidt said he valued “the fact that inquiry for the sake of inquiry is honored in the profession.”
“To be a historian,” he said, “is to grapple with the very core of what it is that makes us human. Our triumphs, our tragedies, our flaws, and our strengths are all laid bare by the scholarly study of history, and without this kind of inquiry, there is little hope for mankind.”
This story originally mispelled Professor Don Allan Mitchell’s name. We apologize for the error.
