to your congressmen and asking them for help and doing things like that. For example—”
“All right.”
She cut him off, but he finished the thought: “Going to your congressmen.”
First call to action on national television: February 14, 2018, 10:12 p.m. EST. Less than eight hours after the shooting began.
2
David Hogg startled America. Day one victims didn’t talk that way. They were still in shock and mourning, sometimes lashing out in anger. Stepping back to assess the wider malady, and leaping straight from diagnosis to prescription—that was days or weeks away. David was different, and by noon I would discover he was only the tip of the spear.
David kept talking, all evening, to one news van after another. He pedaled home after midnight. He tried to sleep for a few hours, and then a car pulled up at his curb. ABC had booked a predawn interview on Good Morning America, and then CNN had him on its morning show, New Day. Alisyn Camerota, the program’s anchor, met him in front of the school shortly after the sun rose.
That’s when David Hogg hit my radar. I was at the Time Warner Center, CNN’s headquarters in New York, watching a live feed on an elevator monitor. I had done an interview on the same show and watched David as I rode down to the lobby. I didn’t get off. There was little foot traffic, so no one disturbed me, and I watched it straight to the end.
David is a thin, wiry senior, a dead ringer for a young David Byrne, though slightly better looking. Same angular face, but higher cheekbones, cleft chin, and exceptionally thin snub nose. They even share the big mop of dark brown hair, piled high on top, shorter on the sides. David normally slicked his back, but didn’t mess with product that morning, or change his black V-neck T-shirt. David stood beside Kelsey Friend, a freshman, on camera, as she described her experience rushing back inside to take cover in her classroom:
“My geography teacher unlocked the door and I ran in thinking he was behind me, but he was not.”
“What happened to your teacher?”
“He unfortunately passed away in the doorway of our classroom.”
David’s mouth dropped open, just a little, and his eyes widened. Then they closed and he grimaced as Kelsey continued: “I heard the gunshots and I heard the shooter walk down the hallway shooting more kids. I heard a young man, crying for his mother, dying. It was just hard because you don’t imagine this happening to you. . . . I thought at the beginning that this was just—it was a drill, just a drill, until I saw my teacher dead on the floor.”
Kelsey believes her teacher, Scott Beigel, saved them by blocking the door, giving the kids time to huddle around his big desk, so the room looked empty.
“And how long did you stay like that?”
“If I’m going to be honest, it felt like five years. More than that. I was so scared. I wanted to go home.”
After five more minutes of that, David’s mouth was clenched. But he told his story calmly, with none of the anger that would come to define him. It flickered on his face, when he paused midsentence to label the experience—“This atrocity”—and when the gunman entered his story as “this sick person” who pulled the fire alarm. (That detail was widely believed but was ultimately proved false. Smoke from all the gunfire set off the alarm.) Douglas High is a large, decentralized campus, with 3,200 students in fourteen buildings. David was in environmental science class, about two hundred feet from the freshman building. Kids heard gunshots, so his teacher closed the door, but then the alarm rang. “We started walking out without even thinking about it twice. . . . When we were walking out towards our designated fire zone, there was a flood of people running in the opposite direction, telling us to go the other way. So I started running with the herd.”
The herd was wrong. They were headed straight for the freshman building. “Thank God for a janitor that stopped us,” he said. “They funneled us all into the culinary cooking classroom, about like forty students I’d say, if not more, and because of those heroic actions and the actions that she took, just a split-second decision, in thirty seconds, she saved my life and she saved easily forty others there.” David hadn’t yet learned her name, but thanked her again. “I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m