Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  Developers created it by dredging up tons of sand and piling it into craggy finger peninsulas, surrounded by deeper canals, until the map looked like a suburb of cul de sacs, with blue waterways in place of the lanes. In 1963, Parkland was incorporated, and cane farms began to rise from the swamp. In the 1980s and 1990s, the farms were carved up and paved over, to create an outdoor wonderland dotted with high-end homes. The town’s original charter demanded 2.5 acres per dwelling, a requirement relaxed later, but that set the tone.

  Parkland remains a cozy bedroom community, with 23,000 residents as of the last census, but still just a handful of shops, restaurants, and gas stations, mostly on the perimeter. It has several spacious parks, where coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, and iguanas roam among the scrub oak, Australian pine, and numerous varieties of palm. Pine Trails Park was just expanded the past decade, with baseball, football, and soccer fields; basketball courts; children’s playgrounds; and the outdoor amphitheater for live shows. The town is young and vibrant, with 30 percent of the population too young to vote, and less than 11 percent old enough to retire.

  It’s not cheap to live in Parkland, but there are affordable neighborhoods close by. Douglas High draws a big chunk of its student body from Coral Springs, a larger commercial town across the Sawgrass Expressway whose median income is about half that of Parkland. Ethnically, the Coral Springs kids brought MSD into almost perfect alignment with the country: 59 percent non-Hispanic white, 18 percent Latino, 12 percent black, and 7 percent Asian—within a point or two in every category. (Parkland was 13 percent Latino and 6.5 percent black.) But Douglas families were still far more affluent than most Americans, with 22 percent of the school’s students eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program, versus 52 percent in the United States as a whole. Successful families were drawn to Parkland for the nature, fishing, and outdoor recreation, and above all, the schools. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Douglas in the top 7 percent of high schools in Florida and the top 12 percent in the United States.

  It was 1990 when Parkland had drawn enough residents for Broward County to erect a high school on the former swampland. The residents named it after the champion of the Everglades, whom they now held dear. Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to 108, and had turned 100 that year. It’s a suburban legend that Stoneman Douglas rejected the honor or even demanded that construction be stopped. But her biographer was never able to confirm how she felt about it, and said she “had always thought it was a bit of an insult.”

  Stoneman Douglas lost the Parkland battle, but the “developers’” encroachment ended there. The high school named in her honor, or dishonor, stands as a marker to what transpired, and an outpost against the perpetual threat. When a gunman struck, the Parkland kids saw poetic justice in the long arc of history, recasting their school so eloquently in the image of its namesake. They had also lost a horrible battle at Parkland, with a human loss this time, but like Stoneman Douglas, they were resolved to mark Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as the final outpost in a generational war.

  The kids worked feverishly Saturday morning, while Cameron’s mom raced in from the airport. Finally, she could wrap her arms around her boys, the hugs of a lifetime, and . . .

  “When I got home someone put a camera in my face,” she said. “I just wanted a moment alone with my kid. Just to celebrate. There was like a room full of students and there was Cam. It kind of took away the intimacy.”

  Quick hugs, then they were on the move. They had to drive to Fort Lauderdale, for a rally there at one o’clock. It had a clunky title: “Rally to Support Firearm Safety Legislation.” They could do better. It was the first political rally most of them had attended, so how crazy that many of them were going to speak. It was organized by multiple groups, mostly moms: Moms Demand Action, Women’s March Florida, the MSD PTA, etc. It wasn’t a huge crowd, several hundred people, but the news vans would supply millions.

  Cameron, David, and Delaney all gave speeches, and all were enthusiastically received. But that rally will always be remembered as the moment Emma González called BS.

  4

  Emma had been thinking about gun safety legislation Wednesday afternoon, before the shooting. She had been thinking about the NRA. She was taking AP US government, and the lesson that day had been the role of special interest groups. They discussed how lobbyists use money to influence politicians toward their agendas—good agendas, like Sierra Club, Emma thought, and gross ones, like the NRA. She hated the NRA. An hour later, she was in lockdown in the auditorium. That night, she discovered that several kids she knew were dead.

  Thursday, she went to the vigil. That was painful. “I just wanted to see everybody,” she said. “It was a day full of tears, but really good tears in a way.” Her friend David Hogg was burning up the airwaves all day, and Anderson Cooper’s producers had booked him for the show Thursday night. They asked him to recommend other articulate students, so David texted Emma, and she said yes. Adulatory texts started streaming in soon afterward. “Wow, people are listening to me,” she thought.

  The organizers of the Fort Lauderdale rally noticed the texts, and asked her to speak. “I started writing it at eight o’clock last night and I didn’t stop writing until I got out of the car this morning,” she said later that afternoon. And then she gushed about other big things in her life. “I just got my license, I just got into college.” She was thinking a lot about college. A small liberal arts school, New College of Florida, had offered her admission and reached out immediately after the shooting to see if she was OK. That impressed her. “I’m like two seconds away from accepting,” she said.

  Emma stepped up to the podium in a black spaghetti-strap top, black bra, half-a-dozen wristbands of assorted shapes and textures, and no hair. A paper flyer stating the time is NOW! was taped to the podium, and three microphones were clamped on top, one securing an American flag. A woman stood beside Emma holding a fourth, watching her intently throughout the speech, biting her lip as it began.

  Emma tapped a stack of papers, and then held them up with a big smile: “I know this looks like a lot, but these are my AP gov notes.” Everyone there should be home grieving, she said. “But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.” She raised her hands to mark air quotes around “thoughts and prayers.” And with that line, Emma drew the first wild cheers of her young activist career.

  Since the Second Amendment had been written, she argued, “our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.” Then she quoted a teacher: “When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is, ‘My right to own a gun outweighs your student’s right to live.’ All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.”

  Every country had troubled teens, and mental health issues, yet mass shootings were such a uniquely American problem. As she pointed out, Australia had one mass shooting, in Port Arthur in 1999, then passed sweeping gun laws and had not had one since. She went on to say, “Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are.”

  Emma described a chilling interview she had watched that morning, in which a survivor was asked whether their child would go through lockdown drills. Adults seemed resigned to that fate, but her generation said no way. They were sick of studying inaction—they’d been studying it their entire lives. Her AP government class had conducted three debates on it already that year, and it raged on in closets on Wednesday, while students hid from the gunman killing their friends. If students learned anything, “it’s that if you don’t study, you will fail,” she said. “If you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead.”

  She castigated Republican senator Chuck Grassley for sponsoring a bill preventing the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated as mentally ill. She decried th
e NRA’s influence on politicians. “To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you!” She was eight minutes into the speech, still wiping away tears with the backs of her hand, but her sadness was dwarfed with a rising and fierce resilience. The crowd was behind her now, chanting back repeatedly, “Shame on you!” Emma waited them out, rubbed the back of her head, and smiled for the first time since she had begun.

  “The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us,” she said. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS.” She raised her fist and pumped it to each syllable, to wild screams: “WE! CALL! B! S!” As she repeated the chant, the audience yelled it with her: “They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.” She waved her notes in defiance at that last one, still wiping away the tears. Then she called on the audience to register to vote, to call their congresspeople, and to “give them a piece of your mind!”

  It had been eleven minutes and forty seconds. Emma knew she had struck a chord with the hundreds assembled there, but had only the slightest conception of what she had just accomplished. “I had no idea that my speech was going to be broadcast nationally,” she said later. “My mom killed her battery trying to film it ’cause she didn’t think it was going to be anywhere.”

  Emma had been to political rallies. She had heard great speeches and used them for inspiration. She also had done some creative writing and had ideas of her own. “I knew I would get my job done properly at that rally if I got people chanting something,” she said. “And I thought, ‘We call BS’ has four syllables, that’s good, I’ll use that. I didn’t want to say the actual curse words. This message doesn’t need to be thought of in a negative way.”

  CNN carried the speech, and it instantly went viral. By nightfall, Emma was a national sensation.

  5

  After the rally, everyone went back to Cam’s house. They chose five kids as leaders and chief spokespeople: Cameron, Emma, David, Jackie, and Alex Wind. But there was no question the first three were the media stars. “We are the three voices of this,” Cameron told the New Yorker. “We’re strong, but together we’re unstoppable. Because David has an amazing composure, he’s incredibly politically intelligent; I have a little bit of composure; and Emma, beautifully, has no composure, because she’s not trying to hide anything from anybody.”

  Emma put it more succinctly: “All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid.”

  Cam’s mom, Natalie, helped them settle in and let them have their space. “The first person that I didn’t know that made an impression on me was Emma,” she said. “Her beautiful, giant eyes. They look right into you.” Most girls give you what they want you to see, she said: their makeup, their hair. “But she just gives you her eyes. She had this nymph-like lightness, like a dancer, the way they almost don’t hit the floor, they just tinker.” Emma was often fond of thrusting her arms up and out, in imaginary dance moves. “She never met me before and she just gave me this big hug, like, ‘Thank you for opening up your home,’” Natalie said.

  They had their plan, and the Sunday-morning news shows seemed like the place to unveil it. So many choices: Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday. They booked them all.

  Most of them slept over at Cam’s. The media dubbed the weekend the Slumber Party. Some of the kids bristled at that: the only relationship it bore to a slumber party was that hardly anybody slept. Eating was an issue—remembering to. TV news crews were filming nonstop, and started bringing them food, which reminded them to eat. “I saw this ice cream, and it looked so good,” David told me Sunday. “And then I realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast, I hadn’t eaten lunch, and it was five o’clock.”

  They had a modest website running by showtime Sunday, with a GoFundMe page to accept donations. They would need to set up a foundation to manage the money, which meant attorneys, accountants, and paperwork, but all that could wait. Raising the money could not. They had a tight window—saturation media coverage of the worst tragedies lasted three to five days, and Sunday was day five.

  Sunday morning, the five leaders ran the network gauntlet. Their plan was out there now, and nobody laughed at them. Even the hosts seemed to take it seriously. All they had to do now was pull it off.

  4

  Tallahassee

  1

  Monday. Jackie had a day and a half to get her buses on the highway. “The hardest part of it was honestly getting together the one hundred kids,” she said. “They have parents that are concerned—they’re letting their child go on a trip with only a dozen chaperones to the state capitol. I was on my phone the whole weekend, just making sure all of the students’ parents were comfortable sending their child seven hours away.”

  Most of the kids were dressed up at the organizational meeting in Pine Trails. They had come straight from a funeral. “Two, in fact,” one girl said—for Luke Hoyer and Alaina Petty. It was a big crowd, well over a hundred, because many moms came by—to show their support or to make sure the kids felt comfortable, or both. Many said they had volunteered to chaperone, but their kid had vetoed that.

  Jackie started the meeting. Her thin voice didn’t carry, so she hopped up on a chair to shout over the crowd and gently chastise serial chatterers in the back. It’s not easy to quiet a mob of boisterous teens, particularly without offending them, but it was the first of countless times over the coming months that I would watch Jackie pull it off.

  She outlined the basics of the trip. Expect media everywhere, she said. Several TV cameras were trained on her as she spoke, and cell phones were raised high. Any random student could expect to be dialed into two or three lenses at any given time. It was day six.

  Jackie asked the media to be respectful: If a student doesn’t want to talk, let him be. She asked if everyone knew which Publix grocery store they were meeting at—“the one by the Walmart.” (She didn’t mention that it was the same Walmart the killer had walked to after the attack. Everyone knew.) She called for questions.

  “Attire?”

  Oh, right. She’d meant to hit that. It had been a big topic with Lauren Book and Claire. Lots of the kids assumed they should dress up, but that felt all wrong. As soon as you start dressing up, you tend to match your speech and manner to that: formal and unnatural. The trip was about giving voice to high school students, so they should look like and speak like students. Jeans and T-shirts, Jackie said—no dresses, no ties, definitely no suits. And pack light: just toiletries, a fresh T-shirt, maybe a towel. There were shower facilities, but not much time to use them. Wake-up time was already predawn. The Red Cross had just come through with a hundred cots, so air mattresses could stay home.

  The governor’s office called that night. Governor Scott was in. Dream fulfilled. The question was, where to fit him in? The schedule was packed, right up to five p.m., and if they got the buses rolling promptly they were already looking at one or two a.m. to Walmart, even later to their homes. But it was the governor offering two hours, in groups of a few dozen, rotating in and out. They added him to the schedule from five to seven p.m. It would be a very long night.

  Jackie said the enormity of it began to dawn on her that evening. Not because of all the kids hushing each other to hear her, or a bank of cameras trained on her, following her every step. It was Google. “I used to google my name and nothing would come up,” she said a few days later. “I was just a little kid and nobody knew who I was. And now google even ‘Jaclyn,’ and ‘Corin’
is like next to Jaclyn Hill’s name.”

  2

  The Publix lot was mobbed by noon Tuesday. Cameron came to juice the crowd, though that hardly seemed necessary. Jackie was besieged by kids and moms lining up with last-minute concerns. Jackie’s mom, Mary Corin, shadowed her, frequently dispatched by Jackie on quick errands, and often turning to her for advice. Her daughter was clearly in charge.

  The crowd swelled to hundreds, with parents, onlookers, and media. It was so much louder than the meeting: the buses were running, diesel engines lumbering, and a helicopter buzzed overhead. Jackie had to announce team assignments, so kids could link up with chaperones and board the right bus. They had no megaphone, no way to be heard. They needed a plan B, and they needed it fast.

  “Let’s hop on a car,” Cameron said.

  Jackie gaped. “You’re joking, right?”

  While Jackie was assisting a mom, Cameron had found the owner of a big black SUV, asked if they could use it, and was already clambering onto the roof. Jackie followed him up. “I was terrified,” she said. “But whatever.”

  Cameron, a natural, threw his whole body into his delivery. He lurched so far forward, I was afraid he might tumble onto the asphalt. When he hopped down, sweaty, those kids were ready to storm the Bastille. Then he turned it over to Jackie for the mundane practical stuff. Ten teams: first she called the chaperones, who raised their arms, then the kids, who gathered round.

  Back on the pavement, kids were already lining up with new issues. Most were fixable, just relentless. Some kids just wanted to switch groups, to hang with friends. “No,” Jackie said softly. “Get on your bus.”