Parkland Read online

  The Parkland kids seem to have accidentally solved the problem of celebrity shooters simply by becoming bigger celebrities themselves. It took David Hogg twenty-four hours to become the first survivor to surpass his attacker in fame. Emma González went viral shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, the killer’s name has already been forgotten, and few people could pick him out of a lineup.

  He is irrelevant, but his mental health issues are not. The Parkland kids talk passionately about mental health when asked, but it is not their cause. They made two crucial decisions immediately: speak with one voice, and hammer one topic. They recognized that several different strategies for solving this problem are worth fighting for, all of them are daunting, and adversaries have stalled progress on each one by deflecting to the others. But one of these initiatives called out to them as the overwhelming priority. They chose guns.

  Part I

  Uprising

  Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.

  —Martin Luther King Jr.’s fourth principle of nonviolence

  1

  Valentine’s Day

  1

  Speed. That was the first answer to the question on everyone’s lips when this movement erupted, suddenly and unexpectedly, just one day after the attack: Why this time?

  They didn’t wait a moment. David Hogg was the first to reach the public. On Valentine’s Day, Laura Farber was gearing up for the film festival circuit. She had finished postproduction on her documentary feature, We Are Columbine, about her freshman class surviving that tragedy. It had taken nineteen years.

  David Hogg filmed his Parkland ordeal as he lived it. He laid down his commentary track in real time huddled in lockdown, and conducted his first on-camera interviews with the kids trapped alongside him. David was the news director at the school’s TV station, WMSD, and he had recently landed a gig as stringer for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Media was in his blood.

  After the SWAT team burst in, David fled the school and found his dad, a retired FBI agent. But they couldn’t find his sister, Lauren. His dad sent him home, finally—it was too dangerous—and when David got in his car he started screaming. He pounded on the dashboard and screamed “fuck” over and over. He screamed the whole way home. He was angrier than he’d ever imagined, but intent on finishing his documentary. “Action is therapeutic,” he thought.

  David’s dad got home with Lauren, and the teens’ mother, Rebecca Boldrick, met them there. Lauren was unscathed physically, but deeply wounded. “I was screaming and wailing like a possessed person,” she wrote. Their mother, who has a wicked sense of humor and refreshing candor, later described the sound as “subhuman.” Lauren had lost two close friends. “They said they were missing, but I knew they weren’t missing, they were dead.” (The next day, their deaths would be confirmed, along with those of two other friends: Jaime Guttenberg, Alaina Petty, Alyssa Alhadeff, and Gina Montalto.)

  David announced he was going back. He needed B-roll footage, exterior shots. He had the intimate horror on film, but splicing in cops and paramedics in chaos would seriously goose the intensity. David understood the media. He had done this before. And he needed to address the news vans he could already picture rolling in. He had to vent this anger. And he had to escape Lauren’s subhuman wail.

  No way, his mom said. His dad got more aggressive and blocked the door.

  “Dad, I need to do this,” David said. “If they don’t get any stories, this will just fade away.”

  David can be a force of nature, and one way or another, he was getting back to that school. “Well, we’re not taking you,” his dad finally said.

  David hopped on his bike, and pedaled furiously back.

  Twenty years. The pace has changed. So has kids’ connection to media. In the Columbine age, teachers sought to make their students wiser media consumers. The members of David’s generation spent much of their waking lives on Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube—they were already amateur media creators. David was semipro.

  David got his B-roll and approached the news vans. At 10:05 p.m., he was live with Laura Ingraham on her prime-time Fox News show, with Ash Wednesday ashes on her forehead. For seven minutes, David dutifully answered her questions, highly composed, but looking a bit nervous, head nodding rhythmically through some extended questions. Ingraham mostly asked about his experience that afternoon, and what he knew about the killer, which was secondhand. But when she started to wrap with “Our emotions are with you—” he interrupted.

  “Can I say one more thing, to the audience?”

  “Yes.”

  David took a long pause and then a deep inhale, began to speak twice, and took another moment to get it right. “I don’t want this to be another mass shooting. I don’t want this just to be something that people forget.” He said it affects every one of us “and if you think it doesn’t, believe me, it will. Especially if we don’t take action to step up and stop things like that. For example going to your congressmen and asking them for help and doing things like that. For example—”

  “All right.”

  She cut him off, but he finished the thought: “Going to your congressmen.”

  First call to action on national television: February 14, 2018, 10:12 p.m. EST. Less than eight hours after the shooting began.

  2

  David Hogg startled America. Day one victims didn’t talk that way. They were still in shock and mourning, sometimes lashing out in anger. Stepping back to assess the wider malady, and leaping straight from diagnosis to prescription—that was days or weeks away. David was different, and by noon I would discover he was only the tip of the spear.

  David kept talking, all evening, to one news van after another. He pedaled home after midnight. He tried to sleep for a few hours, and then a car pulled up at his curb. ABC had booked a predawn interview on Good Morning America, and then CNN had him on its morning show, New Day. Alisyn Camerota, the program’s anchor, met him in front of the school shortly after the sun rose.

  That’s when David Hogg hit my radar. I was at the Time Warner Center, CNN’s headquarters in New York, watching a live feed on an elevator monitor. I had done an interview on the same show and watched David as I rode down to the lobby. I didn’t get off. There was little foot traffic, so no one disturbed me, and I watched it straight to the end.

  David is a thin, wiry senior, a dead ringer for a young David Byrne, though slightly better looking. Same angular face, but higher cheekbones, cleft chin, and exceptionally thin snub nose. They even share the big mop of dark brown hair, piled high on top, shorter on the sides. David normally slicked his back, but didn’t mess with product that morning, or change his black V-neck T-shirt. David stood beside Kelsey Friend, a freshman, on camera, as she described her experience rushing back inside to take cover in her classroom:

  “My geography teacher unlocked the door and I ran in thinking he was behind me, but he was not.”

  “What happened to your teacher?”

  “He unfortunately passed away in the doorway of our classroom.”

  David’s mouth dropped open, just a little, and his eyes widened. Then they closed and he grimaced as Kelsey continued: “I heard the gunshots and I heard the shooter walk down the hallway shooting more kids. I heard a young man, crying for his mother, dying. It was just hard because you don’t imagine this happening to you. . . . I thought at the beginning that this was just—it was a drill, just a drill, until I saw my teacher dead on the floor.”

  Kelsey believes her teacher, Scott Beigel, saved them by blocking the door, giving the kids time to huddle around his big desk, so the room looked empty.

  “And how long did you stay like that?”

  “If I’m going to be honest, it felt like five years. More than that. I was so scared. I wanted to go home.”

  After five more minutes of that, David’s mouth was clenched. But he told his story calmly, with none of the anger that would come to define him. It flickered on his face, when he paused midsentence t
o label the experience—“This atrocity”—and when the gunman entered his story as “this sick person” who pulled the fire alarm. (That detail was widely believed but was ultimately proved false. Smoke from all the gunfire set off the alarm.) Douglas High is a large, decentralized campus, with 3,200 students in fourteen buildings. David was in environmental science class, about two hundred feet from the freshman building. Kids heard gunshots, so his teacher closed the door, but then the alarm rang. “We started walking out without even thinking about it twice. . . . When we were walking out towards our designated fire zone, there was a flood of people running in the opposite direction, telling us to go the other way. So I started running with the herd.”

  The herd was wrong. They were headed straight for the freshman building. “Thank God for a janitor that stopped us,” he said. “They funneled us all into the culinary cooking classroom, about like forty students I’d say, if not more, and because of those heroic actions and the actions that she took, just a split-second decision, in thirty seconds, she saved my life and she saved easily forty others there.” David hadn’t yet learned her name, but thanked her again. “I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m alive today.”

  David thought it was a drill. Everyone thought it was a drill—“An extremely realistic one,” he said. They soon discovered it was not. “This was life or death.”

  “And how did you find this out? From—”

  “Our phones. We’re looking it up.”

  Their phones told them the worst of it, possibly all of it, but at the time no one knew what was happening in the freshman building nearby. “We need to realize there is something seriously wrong here, and policy makers need to look in the mirror and take some action,” David said. “Because ideas are great but without action ideas stay ideas, and children die.”

  In the next six minutes, David demanded action twelve times. “Any action at this point, instead of just complete stagnancy and blaming the other side. . . . We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action.”

  That was the moment. February 15, 2018, 8:22 a.m. EST. David Hogg called out Adult America for letting our kids die. The uprising had begun.

  3

  I got home and flipped through channels on the TV. David Hogg was popping up around the dial. Conservatives were already chiding the Left for “politicizing” the mourning period, before an “appropriate” time had passed. A steady parade of Parkland students called out “thoughts and prayers” for the stall tactic it was. Politicians were going to think and pray and legislate to keep the deadly system precisely the same. What had begun with good intentions after horrors like Columbine rang hollow nineteen years and 81 mass shootings later. The Parkland kids welcomed thoughts and prayers in addition to solutions, not instead.

  Sunday, the journalist in me got ahold of David Hogg’s number, and began texting. We spoke that afternoon, he put me on speaker, with the entire Never Again group. I wondered where they were, exactly, and learned later that it was the extended sleepover in Cameron’s living room. David was funny, self-deprecating, and incredibly cheerful. He said he was still in shock, and felt the pain worst through Lauren, who was devastated. But they had found a purpose; it was right there in their name, and he seemed electrified by it. They all did.

  David told me it was too late to get a seat on the buses to their first rally in Tallahassee, but I could caravan up with them. Tallahassee? Wasn’t the march going to be on Washington? That was weeks away, he said—their first big insurrection would be underway in forty-eight hours.

  “I’m taking the lead on that,” a girl said. She introduced herself as Jaclyn Corin.

  She was conducting an organizational meeting the following day, and David promised to follow up with the location. But remind him, repeatedly, he advised. They were getting buried in press calls. I kept trying, and landed on Monday to a single cryptic text from Cameron: “Pavilion by the amphitheater at Pine Trails Park.” Huh. I figured his friends would understand that, but . . . My first taste of the months to come.

  Google Maps matched a Pine Trails Park, 1.9 miles from the school, so I raced to it, and asked my way to an outdoor amphitheater, but there were dozens of tents and gazebos that could qualify as a pavilion. As I dashed about, asking kids, and focused on my objective, I noticed crosses and Stars of David in every direction, each one piled with memorabilia, and realized I was standing inside the sprawling memorial. A wave of sadness knocked me to my knees, and all I could feel was Columbine. This one had promised to be different, but these spontaneous memorials are horribly familiar. All the memorials include flowers, candles, and teddy bears, but each tragedy has its own iconography: thirty-two Hokie Stones at Virginia Tech, painted bedsheets and small cardboard angels at Newtown, and the line of enormous crosses towering over Columbine atop Rebel Hill. As I took in the lush park on the cusp of the Everglades for the first time, I saw them under the huge awning of the outdoor amphitheater: seventeen life-size angels, in flowing white gowns, with gold wings and halos, brilliantly lit from within.

  The sun was setting and a storm threatened: rolling thunderheads streaked in amethyst by the sun’s dying rays. Hundreds of mourners roamed the area. Most were silent or whispering in hushed tones, but a group of young women sang out loudly to their savior, lilting sopranos riding the gentle notes of an acoustic guitar: “Yours is the kingdom / Yours is the glory / Yours is the Name above all names / Now and forever God you reign.” They were beautifully backlit by a bank of stadium lights in the distance; their shadows stretched across the field as they raised their arms to the heavens, which were opening just then to sprinkle us with a gentle shower. No umbrellas; no one seemed to notice or care.

  The voices were heavenly, as beautiful as their refusal to surrender, for that moment at least, to the pain devouring much of the crowd. A girl staggered by, trembling, other kids sobbing, a few giggling. A Chihuahua pranced by and snapped at a Jack Russell terrier, their owners exchanging smiles, tightening the leashes and hurrying on. A group settled down with hearty plates of stew served up fresh from the Red Cross tent nearby. Every stage of grief.

  2

  Lightning Strike

  1

  Jackie was annoyed when the fire alarm sounded. Again? They had already drilled that day. And she had a lot on her plate. Jackie was junior class president, and Valentine’s Day was a fund-raising opportunity. She personally delivered the carnations to freshman classes, and what a joy that was. Some kids were expecting them, but others were overwhelmed. She had hurried back from the freshman building, with just twenty-one minutes left of study hall, which she needed because she had gotten a B plus sophomore year—“My one B plus my entire life”—and she wasn’t going to let that happen again. Valedictorian was out, but she could still graduate in the top 1 percent, and she was going to. She had loaded down her schedule with five AP courses, but she loved a challenge, and learning, and it mattered. She had even given up dancing. God, that had been hard. “Dance was my life and my love,” she told me. She had started at the age of three, with her best friend, Jensen, and they were inseparable: camping, preschool, and dance, dance, dance. “I did everything: musical theater, ballet, lyrical, jazz, tap, hip-hop—it was like my whole world.” They performed Don Quixote and The Nutcracker, and her passion was pointe. But student government forced a reckoning. Jackie ran for class vice president as a freshman, won, and then served as class president every year after. Dance had been her first love, but when she hit sixteen, she had to cut it loose.

  The alarm sounded at 2:19, twenty-one minutes before the final bell. Jackie was seventeen. “We ran out to the bus loop and then—We were really far out,” she said. “We were near the gates, towards the far end.” It was two weeks later when Jackie first described this to me, and to that point, she was her typical, deliberate self. Then it all spilled out in a jumble: “Then I turned around and my friend said she heard like— Everyone was screaming and running back inside and I was really confused, and then m
y friend said she heard a gunshot, and I was like, ‘No, no you didn’t,’ because I didn’t hear it and I usually have good hearing, so I was in denial, and I was in denial for like the first fifteen minutes while we were hiding when we got back into the room, because I had no idea it was real, and my mom is an elementary school teacher down the road. And she wasn’t on lockdown for fifteen minutes! Because they weren’t aware. So I was texting her and she was like, ‘Relax, Jackie, this is not real, we’re not on lockdown, we would have been on lockdown by now.’ And then she texted me after like fifteen minutes, ‘This is real. Active shooter. Just listen to your teacher.’ I was kind of gaining all my information through Twitter. We weren’t supposed to be talking or on our phones, but I couldn’t just sit there in the darkness for two hours, so I didn’t listen, which is really bad. So I was just on my phone on Twitter and I was just getting updates, like from the helicopter view, and I was just watching like kids run out and we were stuck in there until almost five p.m. We were one of the last people the SWAT team broke out. We were sitting in the dark for quite a long time, which was really scary.”

  A distressing factor in so many Parkland survivors’ stories is the fact that they ran back inside, toward the danger. For several years now, the Department of Homeland Security has championed the simple “Run. Hide. Fight.” concept, with the key proviso to attempt them in that order. Hide only if all escape routes are blocked; fight only as a last resort. Otherwise, run, run, run! So why did they go back inside?