Parkland Read online

  “Because we didn’t know if there were other shooters around the campus and we needed to take cover—we couldn’t just run away. I know a lot of kids just ran away to the local Walmart, but like—we had to run back inside. There were gates surrounding the bus loop and the gates were really high and we could not jump them. Who knows, there could be another shooting like— When I was running inside it was so scary because I didn’t know who was behind me. It could have been a whole team of shooters. You never know. It was really scary.”

  Many kids fleeing Columbine also encountered a chain-link fence, but it was only about chest high and they went right over. Teachers and other students helped kids who were having trouble. The tall fence around Douglas was considerably higher. It was erected for security—but it trapped many students inside.

  Cameron Kasky was one of the kids running with Jackie. They were good friends, but in different classes, on opposite sides of campus, thrown together by a series of coincidences. Broward County schools use a block scheduling system, meaning that students meet for periods one through four on silver days, alternating with five through eight on burgundy days. Wednesday was a silver day, which ends with drama class for Cameron—and drama fun for his younger brother, Holden, who has autism. The special-needs kids get out thirty minutes early, to get to the bus loop. On silver days, Cameron excuses himself to pick up Holden and bring him back to drama class, where he has a wonderful time. But Cameron was working on a song that day and lost track of time. Around 2:25, he realized his mistake and ran out of rehearsal to retrieve Holden. That put them across campus when the fire alarm rang. Fire drills were already stressful, because there were several kids with autism, and some of them have trouble dealing with situations like that. Then all hell broke loose: the screaming, running, and frantic calls to take cover in the school. Cameron and Holden sprinted. Cameron thought he could get them back to drama class, but a teacher, Ms. Driscoll, said, “Go into that room!”

  “We can make it to drama,” Cameron said.

  “No, go into that room right now!”

  Ms. Driscoll ushered in several of the kids with autism, and Jackie as well. Then she locked the door, shut out the lights, and they all crouched in the dark. Cameron looked for a weapon, chose a chair, moved to grab it, but the teacher said, No! Try not to make a sound.

  “Look Holden, we’re going to be here for a while,” Cameron told him.

  “I didn’t let go of that kid for an hour and a half. Everybody was spreading rumors,” Cameron would post on Facebook when he got home. “I heard at least three names dropped as to who the shooter was. We were all so distracted looking at our phones that we forgot somebody was shooting up our school.” Then kids started posting video. “People being shot. People bleeding. Dead bodies. All over Snapchat.” Kids were crying, texting their parents. “You could smell the anxiety. . . . We just wanted to hear that the shooter was gone. We didn’t want to be shot. We had no idea what that even entailed. We’re young. We don’t know real pain.”

  That went on interminably, then someone smashed the glass out of the door. “All the glass shattered,” Jackie said. Five hulking men burst in barking orders and pointing assault weapons. “They all screamed, ‘It’s the police! Put your hands up!’” It was terrifying, Jackie said. But she was most afraid for the kids with autism. “They were making noises, and some of them didn’t know to put their hands up when they were told to. My teacher had to tell the SWAT team and the police that there were kids with autism in the room, and they might not be able to follow orders, which is scary because if they had made the wrong move, who knows what could have happened.”

  2

  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is an unwieldy name. The kids call it Douglas or MSD. The campus is supersized too, and not much to look at. Its 3,200 students are dispersed among fourteen buildings, nestled among scrub oaks and acres of sports facilities. Most of the structures are homey-looking—two stories, cream colored, with arched roofs covered in brown Spanish tiles. They were constructed together when the school opened in 1990, and connected by breezeways, so they appear crammed together like an assortment of La Quinta Inns. The flagship building, at the corner of Holmberg Road and Coral Springs Drive, features a large rectangular edifice rising over the treetops bearing the school name and a diamond-shaped mural of a rainbow over the Everglades. Off to the side, two stand-alone buildings were added in 2009. One of them is an anomaly: a three-story structure that could pass for a parking garage—still cream colored, but with a flat, gray roof. That’s building 12, also known as the freshman building, where all the shooting took place.

  Emma González liked to write. The best profiles written about her were written by her. “I’m 18 years old, Cuban and bisexual,” she wrote in an early one. “I’m so indecisive that I can’t pick a favorite color, and I’m allergic to 12 things. I draw, paint, crochet, sew, embroider—anything productive I can do with my hands while watching Netflix.” When someone suggested she run for president, she joked that she’d already accomplished that. She had been president of Douglas’s Gay-Straight Alliance for three years. The alliance came up with a fun activity for Valentine’s Day: it created “Proclamation of Love” certificates, with a space to write in your name beside your recipient’s. Emma worked a lunch table encouraging kids to take part.

  The killer began his day very differently, but the horror he would unleash began long before. Tune in to the coverage of any mass shooting, and you will hear the word “snap” bandied about. Journalists can’t seem to resist the term: When did he snap? Why did he snap? What made him snap? I’m frequently asked to advise journalists on covering these tragedies, and my number one recommendation is to yank that word from the discussion. It’s not a terminology problem we’re quibbling over; it’s our basic conception of the shooters. These are not impulsive acts or bursts of rage; there is rarely a moment when the perpetrator flips from good to bad. It’s a long, slow simmer, a gradual evolution, or more often, a devolution.

  The planning phase typically lasts weeks or months. In the case of the deeply depressed, it typically comes at the tail end of a far longer downward spiral into depression. The definitive study on school shooters reported that nearly 95 percent of perpetrators planned the attack in advance, just over half spent a month or more doing so, and some planned for an entire year. The Secret Service conducted that investigation in 2004, and studied every targeted school shooting in the United States until that point: thirty-seven incidents from 1974 to 2000. The FBI did a companion study with similar findings and has recently done more exhaustive work on the broader cohort of mass shooters. In all cases, same result.

  The Secret Service report made a startling statement, backed by all the others: “There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence.” Shooters encompass all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors, parenting styles, and so forth. However, most of the major studies have indicated that mental health disorders play a big factor. The FBI’s June 2018 study examined “concerning behaviors” in major mass shooters, and only one of those broke 50 percent: mental health issues afflicted 62 percent of all shooters studied. Depression, anxiety, and paranoia were the issues most frequently cited.

  “Mental health” covers a huge range of conditions, but for these shooters, it’s useful to examine two broad categories: those suffering from depression, and those with a profound mental illness, sometimes causing them to break with reality. The Virginia Tech and Newtown killers are prominent examples of the latter. The Secret Service study found much greater prevalence of depression: 61 percent of the school shooters had “a documented history of feeling extremely depressed or desperate,” and a staggering 78 percent “exhibited a history of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts” prior to their attack. From the perpetrator’s point of view, many of these attacks are best understood as vengeful suicides: a profound hunger for suicide, coupled with the overwhelming desire to lash out, to demonstrate pa
in and power in a final act.

  3

  The Parkland killer was a nineteen-year-old former student. He had been expelled from Douglas High for bad grades one year and six days earlier, on February 8, 2017. Three days later, he legally bought from a local gun store the Smith & Wesson M&P15 .223 he would use in the shooting.

  The shooter had a shockingly well-documented history of depression and mental health issues, dating back to an early age. He had been devolving for months, and acting out so aggressively that both state and local officials had been warned. After the attack, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel said his office had received about twenty calls concerning the perpetrator over the prior few years. In September 2017, the FBI had been notified of a YouTube comment bearing the shooter’s name, saying, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” In January, someone close to the gunman alerted the bureau that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting. It did not investigate.

  The shooter’s adoptive mother died in November 2017, which seemed to leave him distraught. He moved in with the family of a friend who was a junior at Douglas.

  Around the start of February, he was ready to act. A few weeks before Valentine’s Day, he drafted a simple plan: go shoot people at a local park. He never got as far as choosing which one, he would later tell the FBI. Why didn’t he do it? they asked. He gave no explanation. “I didn’t want to do it.”

  By February 8, the one-year anniversary of his expulsion, he had chosen a new course. He recorded a video on his phone that day describing the attack, another three days later, and a third on Valentine’s Day. “All the kids in the school will run in fear and hide,” he said. “From the wrath of my power they will know who I am.” He also expressed undying love for a girl mentioned by her first name: “I hope to see you in the afterlife.”

  “I’m going to be the next school shooter of 2018,” he said in another segment. “My goal is at least twenty people with an AR-15. . . . Location is Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. . . . Here’s the plan: I’m going to take an Uber in the afternoon before 2:40 p.m. From there, I’ll go into the school campus, walk up the stairs, load my bags and get my AR and shoot people down at . . . the main courtyard and people will die.”

  Aside from the courtyard, that’s how it played out.

  The father of the family he was staying with normally drove him to his adult education course, but that morning, the killer said he didn’t go to school on Valentine’s Day. He put on a Junior ROTC polo shirt. All the ROTC kids wore them on Wednesdays. He packed the AR-15 into a softback carrying case, and extra magazines into a backpack. He told the Uber driver he was going to music class, leading the driver to mistake the big bag for a guitar case. In the back of the car, the killer texted with the friend he was staying with, who was inside the school. It was normal chitchat. The final text came at 2:18 p.m.: “Hey yo, hey whatcha doin?”

  They arrived one minute later. He walked briskly to the freshman building, entering at 2:21. He walked down the hall, entered a classroom shooting, and then repeated that four more times. He killed eleven people in just two minutes on the first floor. At 2:23, he reached the far end of the hallway, just past the bathroom, and climbed the staircase. He spent just one minute traversing the second floor in the opposite direction, including brief stops to shoot up two more classrooms. No one died there. He climbed the next flight, to the third and top floor. By now, smoke from all the gunfire had set off the fire alarms. People were responding to the apparent fire drill, and the murderer encountered them both in the stairwell and in the third-floor hallway. He opened fire in both locations, killing six. At the end of that corridor, he tried something different. Although he had not pulled the fire alarm, he tried to take advantage of it. He had an optimal sniper position. Kids were pouring out of every building. He tried to break out the glass, but it was hurricane resistant and he failed. At 2:27, just six minutes after entering the building, he dropped his rifle and backpack, then ran down the stairs and out the exit.

  He had killed seventeen people: fourteen students and three staff. Seventeen more were physically injured by his gunfire.

  No police engaged him. The school resource officer, sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson, was branded a coward for taking cover outside in the melee. He said he was unclear where the shooting was coming from, and believed it was outside. Peterson would resign eight days later.

  The mass murderer walked to the Walmart half a mile away, and bought a drink at the Subway inside the store. That was rare. Few perpetrators escape mass shootings alive. Police officers arrested him there about an hour later, at 3:41. They took him to a hospital, where he was checked out and released back into police custody.

  Broward County sheriff’s detective John Curcio questioned him for several hours, and he made a full confession. But he blamed a “demon” voice in his head that instructed him and said, “Burn. Kill. Destroy.” He described himself as “worthless,” “stupid,” and a “coward.” He repeatedly said he wanted to die.

  4

  Social media exploded that evening. Classmates took to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, pouring out their ordeals and demanding that we, America, “do something!” But what?

  David Hogg didn’t have the answer—but he could picture one of the tools. So he got to work on his documentary, to help survivors enact some plan. The next morning, in that first CNN interview, Alisyn Camerota asked David how he had the presence of mind to begin a documentary while awaiting possible death.

  “When you’re in these situations, you can’t really think of anything,” he said. “You’re kind of just frozen there, kind of like—Anyways, I was really thinking about, ‘What has my impact been, what have any of our impacts been?’ And I realized I hadn’t really had one. I thought to myself: ‘If I die today, I want my impact to be— If I die, I want to tell a good story. I want to show these people exactly what’s going on when these children are facing bullets flying through classrooms. And students are dying trying to get an education. That’s not OK. That’s not acceptable. And we need to fix that.’”

  Camerota returned to the documentary. “It’s so graphic, we can’t play it right now.”

  For Jackie Corin, the movement started with a Facebook post. It was hard to get her mind off her friend Jaime Guttenberg when she sat down at her computer that night. Jaime was an aspiring ballerina, a younger version of herself, whom she had grown close to on the dance competition team. Jaime was still dancing and still a freshman, and she had been in the freshman building. She was now officially “missing,” that horrible euphemism for “probably dead.”

  Jackie’s Facebook post began, “Please pray for my school,” worked up to a call for stricter gun laws, and ended with, “MAKE IT STOP.”

  “The end of my little message was that we need to make a change,” she said later. “I obviously didn’t know how. I had no idea.”

  Cameron vented on Facebook, too, starting with “I’m safe.” He wrote that on the ride home, to his mom’s home, with his dad, Jeff Kasky. Jeff didn’t live there, but was determined to ensure Cam got home safe. It was a friendly divorce, and the Kasky boys live with their mom, Natalie Weiss, and her husband, Craig. But Natalie and Craig were on a cruise vacation.

  During the lockdown, Cameron called his dad, and then Natalie on the ship. Natalie had gone to the ship’s spa, she said. “I came back like all on cloud nine and then he said, ‘You have to sit down,’ and I just started saying ‘No no no no no no no,’ and then he told me ‘active shooter,’ and the nightmare just didn’t stop until I saw him again.”

  Cameron said he had to go and then Jeff called, and then the FBI, and they had all sorts of questions, like “Was your child there?” “Whom can you reach?” “Whom can you speak to?” and she didn’t know anything. She kept thinking, “Whenever you get hurt, you fall, you’re a kid, you want Mom.” So she was failing as a mom. She couldn’t shake the thought, until something scarier occurred to her: “I’m so far
away, but all [the parents] are too far.” She thought about dads she knew who would have run recklessly into the school. None of them could have helped. “I feel like it has to be forgiven. We had moms that were at work, moms that were at home, and nowhere was close enough.”

  Natalie said all this three months later, in a leisurely interview in her living room, and it seemed like she had mostly forgiven herself. That day was so fuzzy. She wasn’t even sure where she had been. Somewhere in the Caribbean. When the call came, her surroundings evaporated. “It was like a book slammed shut. When he said ‘active shooter’ and ‘I’m hiding in a closet with Holden,’ everything else was surreal.”

  They would not be home until Saturday. Natalie was desperate to hug her boys. She was trapped on a boat. They searched for a faster way back, but couldn’t find a way. “There was so much guilt,” she said. “Should I be put on a helicopter? Can I afford a helicopter? What do I do? I knew he was safe. I knew he had his dad. But as a mother, it was like torture.”

  She had been going to therapy since the shooting—made sure the whole family went. “You need it now. If you don’t do it, you’ll just need it ten times more in the future. We made that a priority.”

  Cam got home with his dad, got right to a computer, and began posting on Facebook. He summarized the carnage, anxiety, and false rumors in one long, horrifying paragraph. And then he got political: “There are two less obvious awful things here. First of all, [Marco] Rubio and [Rick] Scott are about to send their thoughts and prayers. Those guys are garbage and if you voted for them, go to hell.”

  He added several more thoughts, and concluded: “Please don’t pray for me. Your prayers do nothing. Show me you care in the polls.”