"This teacher and this counsellor stood there face-to-face not knowing if he was going to shoot them," the local sheriff, Donny Youngblood, told a press conference Friday. "They probably expected the worst and hoped for the best, but they gave the students a chance to escape. The heroics of these two people goes without saying. They could have just as easily have left students, and they didn't. They knew not to let him leave the classroom with that shotgun."