March 24, 1998

1998Christopher Briney, American actor^[†]

Christopher Thomas Briney is an American actor. He is known for his roles in the Amazon Prime Video teen romance series The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022–present) and in the musical film Mean Girls (2024).

1998Damar Hamlin, American football player^[†]

Damar Romeyelle Hamlin is an American professional football safety for the Buffalo Bills of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Pittsburgh Panthers and was selected by the Bills in the sixth round of the 2021 NFL draft. Hamlin spent most of his rookie season as a backup before becoming a starter in 2022 following a season-ending injury to Micah Hyde.

1998Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, aged 11 and 13 respectively, open fire upon teachers and students at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas; five people are killed and ten are wounded.^[†]

The Westside Middle School shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on March 24, 1998, at Westside Middle School in unincorporated Craighead County, Arkansas, near the city of Jonesboro. Thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on the school, shooting and killing five people and wounding ten others. Both were arrested when they attempted to flee the scene. On August 11, 1998, Golden and Johnson were convicted of five murders and ten assaults, and were imprisoned until each turned twenty-one years of age. After the 1992 Lindhurst High School shooting that killed four people in Olivehurst, California, the massacre was the deadliest non-college school shooting in contemporary U.S. history until the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre. As of 2025, the incident is the deadliest mass shooting at a middle school in U.S. history.

1998A tornado sweeps through Dantan in India, killing 250 people and injuring 3,000 others.^[†]

A tornado is a violently rotating column of air that is in contact with the surface of Earth and a cumulonimbus cloud or, in rare cases, the base of a cumulus cloud. It is often referred to as a twister, whirlwind or cyclone, although the word cyclone is used in meteorology to name a weather system with a low-pressure area in the center around which, from an observer looking down toward the surface of the Earth, winds blow counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Tornadoes come in many shapes and sizes, and they are often visible in the form of a condensation funnel originating from the base of a cumulonimbus cloud, with a cloud of rotating debris and dust beneath it. Most tornadoes have wind speeds less than 180 kilometers per hour, are about 80 meters across, and travel several kilometers before dissipating. The most extreme tornadoes can attain wind speeds of more than 480 kilometers per hour (300 mph), can be more than 3 kilometers (2 mi) in diameter, and can stay on the ground for more than 100 km (62 mi).