Dressed all in black and brandishing an AK-47, mentally ill gunman Michael Hill walked into an Atlanta, Georgia elementary school determined to kill.
But in an amazing act of courage school bookkeeper Antoinette Tuff had other ideas.
Over the course of an hour the 51-year-old mom-of-two calmly and compassionately convinced the troubled 20-year-old to give himself up before he harmed himself or anyone else.
Now those tense 60 minutes have inspired the short film, DeKalb Elementary, which has been nominated for an Academy Award on Sunday.
The nomination comes amid an intense gun debate in the United States following a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people last month.
Antoinette Tuff helped talk down gunman Michael Hill walked into an elementary school in Atlanta in 2013. Hill had walked into Ronald E McNair Discovery Learning Academy with an AK-47, telling Tuff, a bookkeeper at the school, he was going to shoot
Antoinette is thrilled about the film even though, at the time of this exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, she had yet to see it.
‘I’m glad that my life has been able to inspire others,’ says Antoinette, who has also been portrayed by singer Toni Braxton in the Lifetime Movie, Faith Under Fire, which premiered in January.
‘At the end of the day the more we get the word out and it’s told the more we can be able to help others in that process.’
For Antoinette the morning of August 20, 2013 started like any other day.
She got up at 5am, read her Bible and then cooked breakfast for her then 22-year-old son Derrick, who is partially blind, wheelchair-bound and has Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a neurological disorder.
Juggling three jobs just to pay her bills, she headed off to start her first job as a bookkeeper at Ronald E McNair Discovery Learning Academy.
That morning she was asked to do an innocent task that could have cost her life.
Antoinette says: ‘My principal comes in to ask me if I can relieve the secretary in the front, while she gets her lunch.’
At 12.40pm Antoinette hurried to the reception area along with a teacher who needed help with some paperwork. What happened next became headline news around the world.
‘We go to the front and, as we’re sitting there, in comes Michael Hill, dressed in all black with an AK-47, ready to kill and destroy,’ she says.
Tuff’s story is now the inspiration behind the short film Dekalb Elementary, which is nominated for an Academy Award
As Tuff spoke to the gunman in the school’s office, children were evacuated from the school and police surrounded the building
Tuff called 911 after Hill encouraged her to do so – telling her he wanted police and media to know what he was going to do
‘At first I thought it was a joke until he said: “This is for real. We’re all going to die today”.’
That Tuesday afternoon – just eight months after 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and gunned down 20 children – another mentally ill man, of the same age, walked into another school, armed with nearly 500 rounds of ammunition, prepared to kill multiple people, including himself.
But that tragedy was averted purely because of the actions of one woman.
It was the words Antoinette soothingly told Hill, the gun-toting man who threatened to kill her that stunned the nation.
Captured on the 911-tape, Antoinette can be heard telling the suicidal shooter: ‘It’s going to be all right sweetie. I just want you to know that I love you…OK?’
She also said: ‘I thought the same thing, you know, I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me.
‘But look at me now. I’m still working and everything is OK.’
In her 2014 book, Prepared For A Purpose: The Inspiring True Story of How One Woman Saved an Atlanta School Under Siege, Antoinette reveals – not only what happened that day – but her own personal hardships, which she believes allowed her to empathize with the shooter.
Her husband Terry, the man she had been with for 33 years since they met when she was 13, had left her for another woman and in November 2012 she tried to commit suicide by walking into oncoming traffic.
In fact, minutes before Hill walked into the school, Antoinette received a phone call from the bank telling her she was going to lose her house, her car and her furniture if she didn’t immediately pay $14,000.
The incident in Atlanta (a scene from the day pictured above) came just eight months after 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and gunned down 20 children and six teachers
‘We filed bankruptcy a few years before that and in the divorce decree he was responsible for paying that debt off,’ she says of her ex-husband, alleging that he broke the agreement.
‘I was bawling, crying, trying to get my emotions together not knowing what I’m going to do and trying to get back to work,’ she says.
Fast forward a few minutes later and despite staring down an AK-47, Antoinette didn’t even scream.
‘He [Hill] was already unstable so me screaming was going to make us both panic. We’d all have been dead,’ she says.
‘I was asking God to lead me in what to say. I didn’t know I [sounded] calm because on the inside I was literally screaming at God: “What do I do?”‘
Hill’s family later confirmed he was taking the drug Adderall to treat his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and that he also had bipolar.
Antoinette says: ‘He told me he had not taken his medication and that he was mentally ill.’
Shortly afterwards, while waving the gun around, Hill told the teacher who was with Antoinette to leave and let everyone in the school know he was there.
Antoinette says: ‘She looked at me as if to say, “OK, do I leave?” I told her to go because he was getting agitated and I didn’t want her to agitate him by not going and then he starts shooting.’
Antoinette wasn’t alone with the gunman for long. The cafeteria manager came to get some paperwork soon after.
‘He didn’t see Michael at all,’ she says. ‘He came in talking, bubbly, saying: “Hey, how are you doing today?”‘
Police investigators are seen at the front entrance of McNair Discovery Learning Academy after a shooting incident in Decatur, Georgia, after Hill turned himself in to police
The cafeteria manager only knew something was wrong after Michael Hill announced himself and, brandishing his AK-47, ordered him to move behind the counter with Antoinette.
‘He was not moving as fast as Michael Hill wanted him to,’ she says, ‘so now he’s firing the first shot to let him know this is not a play gun.’
The bullets hit the floor and ricocheted across the room, but remarkably no one was hit. The cafeteria manager clutched his heart and, in a moment of compassion, fearing he would have a heart attack, Hill told him to leave.
‘So that puts me and Michael Hill in the office by ourselves,’ Antoinette says.
The fact that she was alone in the reception with the gunman was a miracle, according to his lone hostage.
‘That’s the busiest time of the day for the school,’ Antoinette says. ‘We usually have kids in the front office, parents everywhere.
‘On a normal day it would have been jam-packed. [But] not one child was there and not one parent.’
The school children’s safety was never far from her mind so for an hour – even though she had opportunities to escape – Antoinette refused to leave, preferring to let Hill stay in the reception area with her. Instead, she followed his instructions.
‘He tells me to call 911 and the news stations to tell them he was going to start shooting,’ she says.
It was by following this order that Antoinette was able to maintain a connection with the outside world.
‘I’m on the phone with them [911] and we’re going back and forth and he tells me to hang up,’ she says.
Tuff said she helped calm Hill down by telling him about her own troubles – she had attempted suicide the previous November. Hill is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for a slew of charges, including aggravated assault and making terroristic threats
‘But I did not. I put the phone on the desk and started communicating with them without him knowing that I am. So they can…have eyes on the inside situation.’
Twice, during that hour Hill went outside and started firing bullets at the police outside leaving Antoinette with an opportunity to slip behind him and escape.
She was also desperate to go to the toilet and – despite Hill giving her permission to do so – she stayed put.
‘I had to go to the bathroom so bad,’ she says. ‘I was under the table shaking because I was scared and shaking because I had to go to the bathroom.’
Asked why she didn’t run to safety, she says she feared that if the gunman came back into the room and saw her not there he would run down the hallway and start spraying bullets.
She says: ‘When you have 870 kids and over hundred and something staff members in that building I’m not thinking about any situation but that.
‘You’ve got lives at stake that are actually depending upon you to make the right decision.
‘So I’m not thinking about anything else other than how to get this young man to be able to surrender so we all are able to get home to our families – not just us, but him too because he’s a person.’
In the end Antoinette swears she didn’t tell Hill to surrender and that he decided to give up of his own volition.
The short film (a scene from it pictured above) was inspired by Tuff’s 12-minute 911 call and security footage
Director Reed Van Dyk did not talk to either Tuff or the intruder Michael Brandon Hill before or while making the film. Pictured above, a scene from the film
She says: ‘For whatever reason, in the midst of our conversation he decided he was going to put his weapons on the counter. I do not know what he was thinking.’
But in her book she admits that after Hill said he should have gone to the hospital for help rather than come to the school with a gun, she reassured him, saying if he told the cops he hadn’t harmed her he would walk away with his life.
Lying on the floor in front of her with his hands behind his back Hill told Antoinette she could tell the 911-operator the police could come in and take him.
A pack of armed officers wearing helmets soon rushed into the school.
‘There were so many police officers,’ she says. ‘You see it on TV but never in real life. They’ve got guns everywhere. It’s like a war movie.’
Only once the police had taken Hill away in handcuffs did Antoinette allow herself to scream.
‘I was so doggone terrified all I could say was: “Oh Jesus”,’ she says. ‘Now I was breaking down on the outside like I already was on the inside. I was screaming.’
Antoinette has been called a hero. In January 2014 President Barack Obama invited her to attend his State of the Union address.
Now based in Dallas, Texas, she has since started the non-profit Kids on the Move for Success, a scholarship and mentoring program.
She has also become an inspirational speaker and advises people on what to do if, God-forbid, they find themselves in a similar situation.
Writer and director Reed Van Dyk made the 21-minute Dekalb Elementary with the help of a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation. The film has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards to be held Sunday
Tuff has also been portrayed by singer Toni Braxton in the Lifetime Movie, Faith Under Fire, which premiered in January. Braxton is pictured in a still from the film above
‘First of all they have to have compassion about it,’ Antoinette says she tells people. ‘They have to have confidence and then control…
‘I’m not going to say that those tactics are going to make you survive because you never know what’s going on in the other person’s life.
‘But what it can do is make you have a sense of control of what’s going on in your life, and that’s the most important [thing].
‘What helped me was that I had a sense of control with it…even though it was out of control.’
Despite praise from everyone from law enforcement to Obama, Antoinette remains humble. She feels that part of the reason she bonded with Hill is because she understood him.
Her November 2012 suicide attempt – narrowly averted because her ex, who she was on the phone with at the time, convinced her to go home – gave her a window into the shooter’s pain.
She has had no contact with Hill since that August day. He is serving a 20-year prison sentence for a slew of charges, including aggravated assault and making terroristic threats.
In the past Antoinette has been reluctant to talk about gun legislation and, when it comes to discussing her reaction to the recent spate of mass shootings, she says she focuses on prayer.
She has said in the past: ‘The only thing I know is that God prepared me for a purpose that day and that’s what I’m focusing on.’
DeKalb Elementary, directed by Reed Van Dyk, has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards to be held Sunday.