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