New Girl star Jake Johnson has described how his mother nearly stopped him from going to school after receiving a bad gut feeling – one day before a shooting occurred on campus.
In 1988, 30-year-old Laurie Dann shot and killed a boy and injured five other students at Johnson’s elementary school in Winnetka, Illinois.
Johnson, 45, was not physically present at school when the attack occurred, but the memory of his mother’s intuition has remained with him to this day.
The feeling struck his mother the day before the shooting took place, but Johnson’s mother was eventually persuaded to let him go to school as he would away on a field trip.
‘I was sitting next to my mom, I was in fourth grade,’ he recalled on the Dope as Usual podcast. ‘Out of nowhere, my mother turns to me and goes, “You’re not going to school tomorrow.”‘
New Girl star Jake Johnson has described how his mother nearly stopped him from going to school after receiving a bad ‘gut feeling’ – one day before a shooting occurred on campus
‘And I go “huh,”‘ Jake continued. ‘But we were going on a field trip tomorrow, we were going to Little Vietnam, we were in the burbs… I really wanted to do it,’ he added.
Eventually Jake’s mother decided to let him attend.
Tragedy struck the next day, with Jake recalling how Dann entered the school and shot numerous children. One of the students was killed.
‘The next day, this is a true story. May 20, 1988 — a woman walks into my elementary school through the door that my class was in,’ Jake described.
‘A woman walked into the school wearing a robe and nothing underneath…The room was empty, she walked through, walked down the hall, walked into another room, shot seven kids, killed one of them. True story.’
Jake’s mother remains mystified as to the gut feeling.
‘To this day, my mom cannot explain why she did not want me to go to school,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I had a feeling in my gut if your kid goes to school today, you’re never going to see him again.’
Had Jake been in the classroom, he believes he would have been sitting by the door she walked through and would have made a remark about her.
Tragedy struck the next day, with Jake recalling how Laurie Dann entered the school and shot numerous children. One of the students was killed
Johnson pictured in New York in 2017
Johnson has numerous acting credits to his name but is perhaps best known for his role in New Girl
‘I used to get in a lot of trouble as a kid and I used to always talk so the teacher pushed me in the far right corner so I sat away from the other kids and I was right by the door,’ he said, adding that he ‘would have commented’ on her.
‘I would have said something, I would have tried to show off, I would have tried to get laughs,’ he continued. ‘There’s no question.’
Johnson has numerous acting credits to his name but is perhaps best known for his role in New Girl.
The actor starred opposite Zooey Deschanel as her love interest Nick Miller from 2011 to 2018.
One of his more recent roles was in the HBO series Minx.