This isn’texactly how Zeke Woulfin pictured his last two weeks of high school. "I keep thinking about how the last day of school in the past, when the last bell rings, everyone cheers, they throw their papers up, and everyone runs down the hallways and runs out of the building," he told me in a recent interview. "They party and hang out, and I really wanted that feeling this year. I was really excited for that."
On May 29th, Zeke was walking to lunch with a friend when they heard the fire alarm. They were confused at first – usually the school gives them a heads-up when there’s a fire drill. He and his friend looked around, and saw teachers running out of their classrooms. "I could see their faces, like they were shocked. They were like, 'Everybody get out, get out, get out!' Rushing us out the doors. So I was like, oh, this is definitely real. And then, as I'm running out, I hear a freshman girl saying that she saw like black smoke coming out of the downstairs bathroom doors."
When they got outside, they found their classmates. Everybody lined up, and the teachers took attendance, just like they’d practiced during fire drills. At first, it wasn’t clear anything out of the ordinary had happened. "We were all kind of just hanging out, and a couple of my friends started trying to play hacky sack. And the teachers were like, "Stop, you have to stop, like this is serious."
Kids started gossiping, trying to figure out what had happened. In the hours after the fire, some students started sharing links to a TikTok account, where an anonymous poster claimed to have set the fire. "He would post, like, Chinese lettering, saying, like, 'Oh, this person saw me do it and couldn't stop me.' Just posting weird videos. We were like, oh, is this kid like, like, why did he, why would he say he did it? Like, he's drawing attention to himself, but it turns out it was just a troller."
Police later interviewed the kid who posted the videos, and determined it was not the person who started the fire.
As the investigation into what happened continued, Zeke and his classmates found themselves in a familiar position: going to school remotely. It was a familiar experience. "I missed most of sixth and seventh grade, it was completely online," he recalls.
But, this time around, he says it’s not as isolating as life was during COVID. "People are able to hang out. A lot of my friends and me have been going to each other's houses and doing Zooms from there. So we're still able to socialize. We're making the best of it. I think that's the most important thing. It's like, yes, this is horrible that we can't go back to school. It really sucks that we can't have, like, a proper last day of school. But you just have to make the best of the situation."
Zeke’s trying to keep things in perspective. He and his fellow seniors will still get to do a lot of the things they were looking forward to. They’ll still have their prom this weekend, which is happening at a country club. They’ll still have an in-person graduation ceremony – it's being held outside the middle school, which wasn’t damaged by the fire. All things considered, Zeke says, it’s not so bad. "It's only a week and a half, and then it's over, and I think there's more larger, larger problems to deal that need to be dealt with, for sure."
For Zeke, one of those larger problems is the harsh way some people are talking about the kid who's accused of setting the fire. In social media posts and comments on news stories about the fire, many people in the community have called for harsh penalties. During a preliminary hearing in Dutchess County Court last week, a lawyer representing the sixteen year old said his father died by suicide about a year ago, and that he struggles with autism. "I feel empathetic towards him, because a father passing is one of the, like, that's that is the most horrible thing, like that's one of the most horrible things that could ever happen to you," said Zeke. "Also having autism is really hard to deal with, and it's not as easy to, like...it definitely makes the situation more understandable."
Zeke is quick to add that he doesn’t think that’s an excuse for what happened. And he might feel differently if someone had been badly injured in the fire. "As a human, you have to be empathetic, because you never know what someone's going through. You just have to think about other people's perspectives. You can't immediately just be like, 'Oh, he needs to go to jail, he needs to be punished for this. In my personal opinion, which might be controversial, I don't think he should be put in prison or jail for this. I think what he needs is help, and I think that's a big problem in our country is that people that do things like this need help more than punishment. Because the punishment will only make it worse and make them make them want to do it more, or make them act out more."
After last week's court hearing, the suspect was released into his mother’s custody. There will be another hearing next week.
As for Zeke, he’s mostly excited about the future. He’s going to Lousiana State in the fall. "I'm studying fisheries and aquaculture, which I'm looking forward to extremely, because I'm really passionate about fishing and the environment and conservation. So I'm looking forward to taking that further and hopefully becoming a fishery scientist or a biologist of some sort in my future."
