In Loving Memory of the the Victims of the Parkland Florida High School Massacre
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Just 24 hours after a shooting that turned this city numb, Lori Alhadeff stood near 17 cream-colored angels with gold wings that lined the park stage where a vigil was held Thursday night. One of those angels represented her daughter, Alyssa, 14, who was killed in the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Trembling, she said she was there for her daughter, and she was there to talk to anyone who would listen. “My daughter is dead, but all these children out here have to go to school. A shooter should not be able to just walk in,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I hope she didn’t die for nothing.” 

 

people attend a candlelight vigil for victims of the shooting at nearby marjory stoneman douglas high school in parkland florida

 

At least 1,000 people attended a candlelight vigil Thursday night for the 17 people killed in a Florida school shooting, some of the mourners sobbing openly as the victims' names were read aloud. Seventeen angels took center stage and the friends, family and loved ones who talked about the victims that those angels symbolized.

 

Victims of Parkland School Shooting - REMEMBRANCE from Community of Lights on Vimeo.

 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 

 

Members of the football team at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked together on Thursday February 15, 2018 before a vigil to honor victims of the mass shooting at their school in Parkland, Florida.

 

Football Team at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

 

Members of the football team at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked together on Thursday February 15, 2018 before a vigil to honor victims of the mass shooting at their school in Parkland, Florida. 

 

Douglas Soccer vigil

 

All around this stricken community, residents were honoring the 17 victims, supporting the survivors, some of them still in hospital beds, and trying to make sense of a tragedy that had no logic. Among the grieving were broad-shouldered football players, who lost teammates, a popular assistant coach and the school’s athletic director. As the sun set, they formed a circle and locked hands with former players, praying for those who would never play again. They spoke of their dead coach, Aaron Feis, 37, who was also the school security guard and would greet students at the gate each morning, sitting in his golf cart with a thumbs-up and a smile.

 

David Hogg Journalist Student

David Hogg (17) Interviewed Fellow Students as they Hid From the

Shooting Rampage at their School


“He cared about us as people, not just as football players,” said William Pringle, 17, who had just escaped the school with a friend when they learned that their beloved coach had not. Tyler Goodman, 18, the quarterback, had seen the coach just before the shooting. “I love you, Coach,” Mr. Goodman recalls saying. It was Valentine’s Day, after all. “I love you, too, Bub,” Mr. Feis replied. “I’ll see you at 2:30.” It was the last Mr. Goodman ever saw of him.

 

Jamie's Dance School Started a Social Media Movement Called "Orange Ribbons for Jaime"

 

Ash Wednesday and Valentines Shooting

 

During the horror, Carly Novell, a 17-year-old senior who is an editor for the school’s quarterly magazine, The Eagle Eye, hid in a closet and thought about an awful family tragedy from before she was born. Her mother had told her about how her grandfather had survived a mass shooting in 1949 in Camden, N.J. His family had not made it. “My grandfather was 12, and his grandma and his mom and dad were killed while he hid in a closet,” Ms. Novell said. “They heard gunshots on the street, so my great-grandma told my grandpa to hide in the closet, so he was safe. But he didn’t have a family after that.” Interviewed on Thursday, she said: “I was thinking of him while I was in the closet. I was wondering what he felt like while he was there. My mom has told me he was in shock after it, too — that he didn’t remember how he got to the police station, or anything like that. I didn’t forget anything, but I was in shock and I didn’t understand what was going on.”

 

 Lavinia Zapata embraces her son Jorge

Lavinia Zapata Embraced her Son Jorge After the Shooting


She was not the only one struggling to make sense of the shooting rampage, which the authorities say was carried out by a former student, Nikolas Cruz, who appeared to have an obsession with guns.

 

Kids evacuating 

 

Huddled elsewhere in the school as Mr. Cruz stalked the hallways was David Hogg, 17, a lanky senior and aspiring journalist. He turned on the video recorder on his phone and pointed it at classmates hiding with him in a dark classroom. “So, what’s your message?” he asked. One after another, his classmates responded. “I personally have rallied for gun rights,” said one female student, her voice shaky, but forceful. “I wanted to be a junior N.R.A. member, I wanted to learn how to hunt,” she said. “But to have the bullet pointed at me, my school, my classmates, my teachers, my mentors, it’s definitely eye-opening to the fact that we need more gun control in our country.”

 

Nikolas Cruz Mug Shot


The gunman was still at large, and yet those in hiding kept trying to make sense of it all. “If you looked around this closet and saw everyone just hiding together, you would know that this shouldn’t be happening any more,” said another female student, her eyes wide and fear visible on her face.

 

 

Interviewed later, Mr. Hogg offered remarks that captured the sentiments of many of his classmates. “On a national scale, I’m not surprised at all,” he said. “And that’s just sad. The fact that a student is not surprised that there was another mass shooting — but this time it was at his school — says so much about the current state that our country is in, and how much has to be done.” The violence must stop, he said. “We need to do something. We need to get out there and be politically active,” he said. “Congress needs to get over their political bias with each other and work toward saving children’s lives.” “We’re children. You guys are the adults.”

 

 

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vigil florida shooting

 

Peter Wang West Point Heroe

Marchforourlives

 

RELATED:  THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES IN IMAGES

 

 


 

Gun Control Now

 

Instead of 10th-grade English and 12th-grade calculus, the teenagers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., had another funeral to attend. When the grim ceremony was over on Tuesday morning, they hugged their parents goodbye, stashed their backpacks in the bellies of three buses and set off in grief and hope to demand gun control measures from state lawmakers more than 400 miles away.

 

STUDENTS REACT TO FLORIDA VOTE TO BAN ASSAULT WEAPONS

Students React to the State Decision Not to Vote for a Ban of Assault Weapons 

 

As they were getting on the road, the lawmakers in Tallahassee swiftly rejected an effort to debate an assault weapons ban in a party-line vote that said much about how far apart most Democrats and Republicans are when it comes to guns. In the balcony, some Parkland students who had already made it to the Capitol could be seen crying, hands smothering mouths. It was an early reminder that failure might very well become familiar for these latest, youngest gun control activists, as it has for so many others. Republican lawmakers plan to consider more modest proposals, including raising the minimum age to buy assault rifles, before the session ends in March. Yet a kind of optimism — or maybe just an inability not to believe in their own power — was in the humid air. “This shooting is different from the other ones,” said Daniel Bishop, 16, who sat side-by-side with his sister on the second bus. “Sandy Hook, they were elementary school kids who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Virginia Tech was 2007, a different time. But this one, I just have a gut feeling — something is going to change.”

 

Logan Locke 17 joined students in a 400 mile trip to state capital

Logan Locke (right 17) on the 400-mile trip to the State Capital


There was little to suggest yet that anything would. But in Battle Creek, Mich., in Bakersfield, Calif., in Toms River, N.J., in Iowa City, and all over South Florida, the flickers of underage protest this week seemed to augur something new: a coast-to-coast challenge to the idea that the Snapchat generation was too young, too frivolous, for politics. “We definitely have a moral obligation to do something, considering that so many innocent people that we know passed,” said Mr. Bishop’s sister, Julia Bishop, 18. “These adults, these politicians, these lawmakers, these legislators, they were supposed to protect us. And they didn’t.” Many of the protests around the country have arrived semi-spontaneously, apparently ignited by the impassioned pleas of young Parkland survivors in the hours and days after the shooting last Wednesday. Facebook and Twitter have amplified attendance; Snapchat and Instagram have documented the marches, signs and chants.

 

Protect Lives not guns

 

Some on the left were hopeful that the unsullied voices of teenagers, cutting through the usual tussle over whether gun control advocates were politicizing a tragedy, would move previously unbudgeable lawmakers. Still, the students have faced questions from some conservatives over whether they are being exploited by the left. Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday asked on Twitter, “Should the media be promoting opinions by teenagers who are in an emotional state and facing extreme peer pressure in some cases?”

 

 

Students on the Busses

 

On the buses, pillows and sleeping bags had been mushed into the seats, and candy and doughnuts were passed from row to row For now, however, there is momentum. From South Florida to Bellingham, Wash., local walkouts were proliferating. A national event has been planned for March 14, the one-month anniversary of the Parkland shooting, when students and teachers plan to leave class for 17 minutes, one minute for each victim. On March 24, students will protest in Washington at an event organized by March for Our Lives, the group formed by Parkland survivors, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from celebrities. Another mass walkout is scheduled for April 20, when students will commemorate the 19th year since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.

 

Berkley HS Students Walk Out

Berkley California High School Students Walk Out in Support of

Stoneman Douglas High School Students

 

Hundreds of students from West Boca Raton High School in South Florida walked out of class and onto the roads, bound for Stoneman Douglas High, in a march that took Broward County officials by surprise. The authorities abruptly assembled a law enforcement escort for the students, said Todd DeAngelis, a city of Parkland spokesman. They also organized water stations along the way to help students, who walked nearly 11 miles, beat the heat. “These kids may look like they’re summer campers,” said Paul Corin, whose daughter, Jaclyn, helped organize the Parkland caravan to Tallahassee. “But they are fierce warriors.” In Bakersfield, Calif., about a dozen students and 80 adults marched on Presidents’ Day in support of stricter gun laws. The same day, more than 200 students in Iowa City marched out of school, walked to the Old Capitol downtown and gathered to read the names of the Parkland victims.

 

Ryan Deitsch greeted by State Senator Lauren Book in Tallahassee

Ryan Deitsch Being Greeted by State Senator Lauren Book in Tallahassee, Fla.

 

“The N.R.A. has got to go,” they chanted. “Not one more,” they chanted. “At this point, you’re either with us or against us,” said Lujayn Hamad, a senior at West High School, according to The Iowa City Press-Citizen. “We are dying, and I’m not going to stand for it anymore.” Some of the students of Toms River, N.J., also spent part of Presidents’ Day, a school holiday, massed on the steps of the squat, red brick public library. A young man who described himself as a 16-year-old junior led the crowd in chants of, “Enough is enough! Enough is enough!”

 

We Call BS

 

“This is what it’s come to,” he said. “In this country, kids are typically expected to take a back seat to what goes on in politics and policy, and what’s going on right now — it can’t happen like that any longer.” Accusing Congress and state legislators of inaction, he advocated stronger gun restrictions. The other option, he said, was turning schools into armed camps where “I have to be aware if there’s a loud bang in the school, do I know where to go?” The adults who “have the responsibility to take care of these things” have failed, he said. “It’s our generation’s responsibility.”

 

Tyra Hemans held a sign on the steps of Leon HS

Tyra Hemans, 19 on the Steps of Leon High School in Tallahassee, Fla.

 

On Tuesday February 20, 2018, at least 20 students walked out of Harper Creek High School in Battle Creek, Mich. The principal stood with them, and the district’s superintendent was on hand. Students left class or held gatherings all over South Florida on Monday and Tuesday. There was American Heritage School in Plantation. Olympic Heights High School in suburban Boca Raton. Park Vista Community High School in Lake Worth. Fort Lauderdale High School in Fort Lauderdale. McArthur High School in Hollywood. At South Broward High School, students aimed to participate in a protest almost every day to make their point. They started with a protest at their school in Hollywood last Friday, and then rallied in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday and at Hollywood City Hall on Monday, said Rachel Donly, a 16-year-old sophomore. “We don’t think anyone is truly listening to us yet,” said Ms. Donly, whose father is a teacher. “So we don’t want to give up. We’re just going to keep fighting.”

 

Jared Moskowitz at Leon HS Tallahassee

 State Representative Jared Moskowitz Speaks During a Meeting at Leon High School in Tallahassee 


On the Parkland buses, pillows and sleeping bags had been mushed into the seats. Candy and doughnuts were passed from row to row. Laughter occasionally poked through. But the people the students were traveling for — their fallen classmates, coaches, teachers — were never far from their minds. Anthony Lopez, 16, a junior, was sitting alone in the back. He had scratched out a wish list he planned to deliver to lawmakers: 

  • “Ban on military grade weapons (assault weapons, etc.)” he had written.
  • “Universal background check, stricter,” he had added.
  • “Raise age for gun ownership (20+), unless for sport or hunting (16+).”

 

 

memorials florida high school massacre

 

Then the news arrived that the Florida House had refused even to consider a ban on assault weapons. How could lawmakers ignore the activism that had lit up social media, the students wondered.

 

Parkland Making History

 

 

 

Trauma surgeons, hospital directors, and other first responders to gun violence advocate for research and policy reform in Kim A. Snyder's documentary, "We Are All Newtown."