ONE COOL WOMAN!

If you're Antoinette Tuff, who works in the front office at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy just outside Atlanta, you don't run. You talk. As a go-between, she relayed the gunman's demands that police refrain from using their radios and "stop all movement," or else the suspect would shoot. By the end -- with police themselves having never directly talked to him -- Tuff and the gunman were talking about where he would put his weapon, how he'd empty his pockets and where he'd lie down before authorities could come and get him. Without her calm, ongoing voice many children would now be dead. (Photo: Copyright Control)