Classes resumed Wednesday at a Pittsburgh-area high school where authorities said a student stabbed or slashed 21 others and a security guard a week ago while rampaging through a hallway with two kitchen knives.
Before school began, some students gathered at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday on the football field behind Franklin Regional High School to pray and to support one another.
After that, as day broke and other students drove to school -- or were driven on buses or by their parents -- they were greeted by well-wishers from a nearby church who were holding signs of support saying things like "Courage" and "It's a new day."
Karen Ingersoll said she has two children who graduated from the school and two daughters still attend it.
"I think they were ready to go back," Ingersoll said, though she acknowledged there's more healing to come.
"My youngest can't sleep alone yet, she's still sleeping with her sister -- she was a witness" to some of the attacks, Ingersoll said.
School and public safety officials have been steadily working toward getting things back to normal, said Dan Stevens, spokesman for the Westmoreland County emergency management department.
On Monday, teachers met with a crisis intervention specialist before spending the day at the school getting re-acclimated to their surroundings. On Tuesday, parents and students were invited to an open house of sorts where they were able to tour the building, which had to be cleaned after the bloody attack. Members of the community gathered at a park Tuesday night for a prayer service.
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Suspect Alex Hribal, 16, is being held in a juvenile facility but is charged as an adult with aggravated assault and attempted homicide in the stabbings. Police have said he took the knives and attacked students at random as they arrived at school. Four students remained hospitalized.
Students at the middle and elementary schools, which share a campus with the high school, returned to classes a day after the attack, Stevens said, adding that, since then, the focus has been on returning things to normal at the high school.
"Getting back to school today is going to be a very good thing for them," Stevens said.
About 30 members of the Newlonsburg Presbyterian Church next to the school showed up to support the returning students, lining the street near the high school's entrance. Among the other signs they held read "Just know you're not alone," and "Prayers for healing."
Ingersoll, whose sign read "We (heart) U," said therapy dogs present at the open house will be at the school all week.
The school's spring break is this weekend, so students will attend classes Wednesday and Thursday, will be off Friday through Monday and will return Tuesday. Ingersoll said the gradual return to a normal schedule should help.
"I feel so bad for the teachers. Some of them looked so shell-shocked," she said.
Parent Joe Grajewski, who held a sign reading, "FR You are loved," said he came out to support his two children who attend the school, because, "I think every little bit helps. I think sometimes kids feel alone, especially teenagers."
Hribal's attorney acknowledges the boy took two kitchen knives from home and randomly attacked his victims before classes began April 9. He claimed the teen was dazed "like a deer in the headlights" hours later and doesn't fully grasp what he did.
Deepening the mystery of what set off the violence, attorney Patrick Thomassey said Hribal had no history of mental illness or troublemaking, didn't abuse drugs and was no outcast at school, where the lawyer described him as a B or B-plus student.
"In a case like this, it's pretty obvious to me that there must be something inside this young man that nobody knew about," Thomassey told The Associated Press.
The local prosecutor, meanwhile, said Hribal remained an enigma.
"We have very little information about him," Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck said, "except for the fact that he was a student, his age, and how he was as a student."
On Thursday, authorities seized the computer belonging to Hribal's family.
The slender, dark-haired boy who looks younger than his years was jailed without bail on four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault. Authorities are prosecuting him as an adult, but Thomassey said he will try to have the case moved to juvenile court.
Thomassey said he plans to get his client examined by a psychiatrist before a preliminary hearing on April 30.
"I think his mental state now is unstable. I'm not sure that he recognizes the enormity, if that's the word, of what has occurred," Thomassey said. "And I think in his own mind he's trying to figure out what happened here, as we all are trying to figure out what the heck happened here."
The attack seemingly came out of nowhere, the attorney said.
But a school security consultant said it is often the case that school attacks are perpetrated by kids who officials say weren't on their radar.
"In incident after incident, when you start peeling back the onion, you find there were some indicators, there certainly were some issues. But it takes some time to find," said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services.
"Often times, it's not the kid who's the class clown or acting out the most, but the kid who's changed, who's turned more introverted or withdrawn," he said. "I think the one consistent theme across all of these is mental health."
