grim. For Columbine families, it was a request for dental records, because no one had cameras on their phones then. They had to run home to get them, something constructive finally, in an afternoon of feeling impotent, devastated about not having protected their child. Of course no parent failed that way, but most of them will tell you that’s what they felt.
At Parkland, it was a quick task: flip through your phone, or bounce around social media. Then, nothing. Hours of nothing. Positive ID is a painstaking process, and the police never want to risk a mistake. But they tend to leave families in the dark. Loved ones crave information, anything, even an overview of the process, what stage they are at, or how long it might reasonably take. Cops rarely divulge that sort of thing. They are trained to withhold information until the process is complete. What makes sense in routine cases can be inhumane when mass casualties arise.
At one point, Manuel Oliver got down on his knees to pray. Twenty minutes to midnight, Manuel finally blew. “Where the fuck is my son?!” he shouted.
Prayers stopped, heads turned. Manuel was pacing in front of a sheriff’s officer standing guard. “Let us know what’s happening,” Manuel pleaded. “Let everyone know what’s happening.”
Finally, word came. At 12:02 a.m., Sergeant Brown entered, flanked by additional officers. “Please excuse the delay,” he said. Then he outlined the procedure. One family at a time would be escorted to the adjacent room to learn their child’s fate.
“It’s been ten hours!” Manuel Oliver screamed.
It took another ten minutes for the process to begin. A pair of agents in the familiar navy FBI jackets, with the three yellow letters emblazoned in back, approached the first family and led them out.
It was glacial. The entire deceased list was complete, but the notification process dragged on past three a.m. The agents reappeared every fifteen to twenty minutes, and the waiting families often cried, held hands, or tried to change the subject. Then they braced for the reaction from the next room. “The screams and cries of some pierced through the walls, while others didn’t make a sound at all,” Univision reported. It’s hard to believe this was the protocol perfected. By one a.m., most of the families had moved out into the hallway, where the screams were less audible. Manuel and Patricia Oliver and their family were escorted out at 1:41. Joaquin was dead. No shouts were heard.
2
His friends called him Guac, for “guacamole,” because some of them had trouble pronouncing his name. Joaquin Oliver was seventeen. He was born in Venezuela, emigrated with his parents at three, and earned his US citizenship just a year before he was killed. He never lost his admiration for the Venezuelan national soccer team, and took part in a South Florida protest against President Nicolás Maduro. Guac was shy until middle school, when he suddenly turned into a colorfully exuberant kid. “He kind of went from a caterpillar to a butterfly,” his sister, Andrea Ghersi, said. Andrea had looked after him as a toddler, and they were very close.
Guac was a huge sports fan, first baseball, then basketball, his true love. His hero was the Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade. He dressed his first Build-a-Bear as Wade. Frank Ocean was often booming through his earbuds, and Ocean’s Blonde album inspired Guac to bleach his hair: long and blond on top, short and black on the sides, sometimes with a full black beard and mustache. His funeral was held at a huge mausoleum, with at least a thousand mourners, many of the boys in sports jerseys with “Guac” on the back in masking tape, and their hair bleached blond on top and shorn on the sides in solidarity.
College was on the horizon for fall, but Joaquin hadn’t settled on a school yet, or a major. Marketing maybe, like his dad, who ran a successful business fusing branding, marketing, and original art. Guac had just begun honing his voice as a poet and writer with his creative writing teacher, Stacy Lippel. “His writing always had such depth and emotion in it,” she said. “That talent was in him the entire time.” He was quite the social butterfly now. “If he wasn’t there in my class one day, it was very strange, very quiet,” Lippel said. Guac’s muse was often his girlfriend, Victoria González. He told his sister that Victoria was his soul mate, and wrote a poem about wanting to live forever, as long