Left Behind

Here’s the thing about tragedy; it never really goes away

On February 14th, 2018, I was working in the Digital Services department at the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) library. My office was small; there were only five of us in tota that handled the old documents and books that needed to be transferred to computers, a type of job that twists and bends the past and present.

While I was working, my supervisor, Page, told me there was another school shooting at a high school. I asked her where, and she said in Parkland, Florida. My heart dropped to my stomach, and a layer of frost crept up spine. I knew it was my high school because there’s only one in Parkland, and it was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD).

I graduated in the spring of 2017, one year before.

After I heard the news, I turned to the massive 24-hour news sites as well as local and national news. As I read and watched the news, an eerie calm came over me. I had been trained for an active shooter situation before as a student, and as had the entire staff at MSD, so they would know what to do. My high school also had an armed officer on campus, multiple security guards, and cameras. Everything would be OK, but an hour into the news coverage, I realized nothing was OK.

I held vigil on social media and went into overdrive; texted my friends who were still in the school, texted relatives of those friends. I hoped and prayed to hear something, anything. While I waited, I also texted my teachers who I’d grown so close to over my four years at MSD: Teachers who were my mentors, many whom I even considered my surrogate parents, were now in danger.

Life stalled. I kept hearing the same information over and over again, not getting anything of substance. Watching the news wasn’t helping either. So I did the only thing I could think of at the moment: I continued to work. I kept scanning documents and old books for the next two hours trying to keep my eye off the news reports until my shift was over.

At work, my colleagues expressed their concern for me, but I disregarded their offers to listen or to support me. There was no use getting worked up over something I couldn’t do anything about. I was helpless, and that scared me.

After work, I sat on a hard stone bench outside the library and pulled out my phone. I opened up my news app and I saw the video from inside the school. Bodies laid on the ground and were covered in blood. There were sounds of gunshots going off, which were recorded in a classroom that I had spent my fifth period in my junior year of high school.

Then I started to cry.

Tears ran down my face, and grief churned from the pit of my stomach and rose through my throat— it was like bile, bitter and harsh. I couldn’t make a sound. How could I? A couple of my friends who I had met at university found me on that park bench. They didn’t say anything; I didn’t say anything. They heard what happened. Nothing they could say would make the shooting better. They helped me back to my dorm, but my legs felt too weak to stand.

I called my brothers, who had also attended Douglas with me. We’re triplets, and we all shared the same grade. One picked up the phone. One didn’t. Both later admitted they didn’t know what they could say that would help. Neither did I.

Back in my dorm room, alone with my thoughts, I felt rage bubble up within me. I grabbed my cell phone, turned on the camera, and started talking. I talked about gun violence. I talked about how someone went to my school and shot my friends and peers. I talked for nearly seven minutes. Without thinking, I posted it and called it “My high school was shot up today.”

Within minutes I received thousands views, and many hateful comments. In fact, I had more negative comments than supportive. People were calling me a traitor, a liar, an actor, paid by the government to lie to support an agenda. I disabled the comments. How could I sit there, and let people say such terrible things about my school and me? How could I sit there and let people call me a traitor to humanity, an agent of the devil when my friends were dead?

I slept for the next two days, unable to attend class or eat. That weekend I got drunk for the first time, hoping to forget. But the next day I woke up, and life was still the same. My first thought was that I needed to go home. I needed to get a bus ticket down to South Florida to be with my family, to be there for my community and my friends, but I couldn’t. My parents didn’t want me to come home, midterm exams were coming up, and I couldn’t afford to miss classes. So, I stayed in Orlando.

The UCF community hosted a vigil. The speeches lasted an hour; I stayed for three.

They had posted pictures of the victims. People I knew, people I had known: Coach Feis, who always stopped me from making left turns out of the senior parking lot, but sometimes let me out early if I was skipping class; Nicholas Dworet, who I sometimes saw at the local pool, swimming; and Helena Ramsey, who I met in elementary school and played pretend games with; imagining us as superheroes who could defeat any monster we came across on the playground.

Funny how life changes so fast.

I came home for one weekend in March. There were only a few news vans left by the school, most of them done covering our tragic story. And as the media faded, I continued my life in Parkland: went around town running errands, visited local shops I loved as a high schooler. I couldn’t drive ten feet without seeing a banner of support, or a decal on someone’s car, or red and orange ribbons attached to trees, fluttering in the wind.

Today, the high school looks like a prison. The building where the shooting happened is boarded up, fenced in, and a police car is stationed outside the doors to keep people out. And when I drive on the highway, past the school, no matter whom I’m with (family or friends), words fail me. Silence fills the car, and we reflect on our tragedy.

In some ways, I felt and still feel incredibly guilty for so much: guilt for not going home right after I heard the news to be with my friends and family. Guilt because for a moment I thought it was only a matter of time before a shooting occurred in my own town, and now that the shooting happened maybe it wouldn’t happen again.

My guilt even extended to a school project I did in high school. I had always had an interest in school shootings. Call it morbid curiosity. I read books on Sandy Hook and Columbine; I watched documentaries on Virginia Tech and studied the timeline of the Pulse shooting. And in my junior year, I made my documentary on school shootings with my friend Daniel from my film class, for the C-Span Studentcam documentary contest. I interviewed the mayor of Parkland, the congressman at the time, and I talked my film teacher Eric Garner, who was later credited for keeping nearly 65 students safe and calm during the shooting.

I took video of students going about their day in the high school, in the building where the shooting eventually happened. Daniel and I won an honorable mention that year for our documentary, never realizing that one day our own school would be victim to a shooting. I mean what were the chances? I still can’t believe I made a documentary about school shootings two years before my own school would fall victim to one. But I can’t help to wonder that maybe, in that documentary, I should’ve pointed out security flaws. Maybe I should’ve done more research on safety protocols. I could’ve done more. I should’ve done more. I didn’t.

I went to the 2018 MSD prom with a friend who invited me, but rather than having fun, I struggled with sadness and remorse. I cried in the bathroom that night. Why was I able to go to such a beautiful event when so many others would never get to go? Life was unfair and cruel. It still is

I even got to attend graduation and watched my surviving friends graduate. But why did I have to refer to them as surviving friends?

I wasn’t directly involved in the shooting. I wasn’t in the classrooms, and I didn’t have any family there, so who was I to feel sad? Who was I to flinch at loud noises? I ask myself a lot of those questions now. But the one question that continues to haunt me is:

What happens after tragedy?

I didn’t want to be defined by the shooting. I didn't want my town to be defined by the shooting. So I joined March For Our Lives, and I went to the protest in DC. I participated in the die-in at Publix, I joined the MSD alumni group. All of these actions make a difference I think, but they make a difference for the wrong reasons: As Americans, we should never have to March for Our Lives, or fight for the right to be safe in schools, the right to see out our future.

Coming up on a painful anniversary, it’s hard to sit and reflect. People have moved on, but you haven’t. Your community hasn’t.

Life is different now. Whenever I go anywhere like the movies or to the store, I look for exits, places to hide, and weapons I can use to fight back with in case of an active shooter. I can’t wear my class t-shirt without getting sympathetic looks from strangers on the street. I can’t say I went to Stoneman Douglas without someone asking about the shooting. That’s what we’re known for now, that’s what we’re all known for, and that’s who we are: a town, a city, a family, students, and peers—torn apart by massacre.

Maybe that’s all we’ll ever be. What’s left behind in the aftermath; a broken communtiy never to be made whole again.