Parkland - Dave Cullen Page 0,44

Project since 2016. She was astonished by the responses from conservative Republican focus groups in Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, in March.

“They wanted commonsense gun reform, and everyone at the table owned a gun,” Jordan said. These people had fought gun control their entire lives. They were not ready to embrace the entire gun safety agenda, but were ready for something new.

“Can we knock it after we’ve tried it?” one voter asked. Another one said, “I think enough people see these stories and think, ‘I might not agree with it, but if you think you’re doing something to prevent that from happening, give it your best shot, because I’m tired of watching those stories.’”

Jordan had spent much of her life with these people. She grew up in a small town in Mississippi, surrounded by guns in her home. She called herself a Second Amendment absolutist until Parkland. Then she had had enough. She was taken aback to see how many of her fellow Mississippians had, too. “I think the NRA is out of step with gun owners,” Jordan said. “Gun owners are all for commonsense reform; they don’t want to see their children mowed down in schools.”

9

Change the Ref

1

Ten hours after the Parkland shooting, Manuel Oliver lost his temper. “Tell us something!” he yelled. It had been a horrible day.

Manuel Oliver and his wife, Patricia, were repeating a ghastly process first improvised in 1999, improved through repetition, yet still horribly inadequate. When a SWAT team rescued hundreds of Columbine students, school administrators had to wing it. They loaded the kids onto school buses, drove them to nearby Leawood Elementary School, and announced the rendezvous point through the local media. Leawood was mobbed by frantic parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and neighbors—complete chaos. So they directed everyone to the auditorium, and marched the kids across the stage. That was great for the kids whose families had arrived, greeted by ecstatic screams from the crowd, and groups rushing forward to envelop them in hugs. It was deeply retraumatizing for the lonely kids who walked the stage to silence. Vital data collection was also haphazard. Police had no triage procedure for questioning or sorting survivors. Astute officers questioned some kids fleeing Columbine, and ran promising leads over to lead investigator Kate Battan, but most fell through the cracks. Battan was racing to establish the killers’ identities while drafting search warrants. The killers’ homes had to be locked down immediately. No telling if more bombs, weapons, or coconspirators were still on the loose. Both lives and evidence were at risk.

So, like everything else in the school-shooter era, smarter protocols were devised, and every cop and administrator in the country got training. In 2018, the Heron Bay Marriott, five miles from Douglas High, was chosen as the rendezvous point in case of an emergency. The first bus arrived about 4:30 p.m. As kids stepped off, they were greeted by a cop who logged their names and birth dates on hotel stationary, and asked if they had witnessed the shooting. Nos were sorted to the huge conference room, where anxious parents waited. Yeses went to smaller rooms, where FBI agents waited to question them, then on to the reunion area. Many families had reunited elsewhere, but it allowed investigators to gather in a systematic way a great deal of information missed at the crime scene.

Inside, the process had come a long way too, but it was still brutal. In tragedy after tragedy, when the last bus unloads and the stragglers stop arriving, everyone looks around, counts the remaining families, and does the math. This is the moment where parents from prior tragedies described praying for a critical injury, or bargaining with God. The death count is usually public by this time, and it gradually aligns with the family count. The last best hope is that their child is coming out of surgery in some hospital, and miraculously calling out their name.

By seven thirty, the buses were long gone from the Heron Bay Marriott, and the reunion room had that sparse feeling of desperation. Miguel and Alex Duque translated fresh intel into Spanish for their parents, and an eight-year-old boy stepped up to translate into Chinese for Peter Wang’s family. Around eight, several prayer circles formed: an African American family, a Jewish family led by several rabbis, and Joaquin Oliver’s family saying the rosary. At 8:40, Sergeant Rossman appeared to ask the families to email photos to match against bodies still in the school. That was