CEDARVILLE — More than 900 students graduated Saturday from Cedarville University — the largest in its history.
Among the graduates was Logan Cole from West Liberty.
You wouldn’t know it but five years ago Cole almost lost his life.
It was a day he will never forget.
“It was January 20, 2017, and it’s the day at which I was a victim of a school shooting,” Cole told News Center 7′s Haley Kosik.
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It was a normal Friday for the busy high school junior, as he got ready to leave for a mock trial competition.
Before they were going to head out, Cole decides to make a stop at the bathroom.
“I decided to go to the bathroom to check my hair, because I was all dressed up in a suit and tie and I wanted to make sure I was looking good,” he said.
But as he was about to leave the bathroom things quickly changed.
“I see a masked person with a shotgun leveled at me and I just get shot right in the chest and then spin around and get shot in the back,” Cole said.
Cole fell to the floor, busting his mouth on the bathroom floor.
“I remember seeing parts of me on the wall from the shot and coughing up blood and things like that, that made it pretty real,” he said.
The shooter was Cole’s classmate at West Liberty-Salem High School.
Even at a moment when his life was in danger, Cole thought of others.
“I said, ‘you don’t have to kill anybody, you haven’t killed anybody yet, don’t kill yourself or anybody else, just please go get help,” Cole remembers saying to the shooter.
A teacher found Cole and called 911.
The shooter handed over the gun and was arrested.
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Cole spent 15 days in the hospital and had to wear a neck brace for three months.
He still lives with a physical reminder of that day — the around 100 shotgun pellets still inside of his body.
The pellets are also poisoning Cole but he knows that day could have ended a lot differently, and considers himself blessed.
“Like with gun violence and school shootings and things like that, a lot of the times it doesn’t end great. It doesn’t end the way mine ended,” he said.
Cole said his time at Cedarville University has really helped him come to terms with what happened to him.
“I have forgiven the shooter, I know I have and it’s been a process for me,” Cole said.
On May 7, five years after he almost lost his , Cole graduated from Cedarville University with honors.
HIs plans for after graduation include working for his family’s packaging business in Urbana and getting married to his fiancée in July.