by Dave Cullen
He chose sunflowers because the night before the tragedy, Joaquin had asked him to pick up some flowers for his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. Manny’s last image of Joaquin is him holding the sunflowers as he hopped out of the car at school that morning, saying, “I love you, Dad.”
Tío Manny said it back, and added, “Dude, you make sure you call me back.” He wanted to hear Victoria’s reaction. “And he never called back. But I do know that Tori got the sunflowers. So, he had time to give them to Tori.”
Tori split the flowers in half, sealed them in epoxy, and made a necklace each for Patricia and Tío Manny, which they hold dear.
Tío Manny called his murals Walls of Demand. He planned seventeen. They were the first major initiative of Change the Ref, a nonprofit Manny and Patricia created in March “to raise awareness about mass shootings through strategic interventions that will reduce the influence of the NRA on the federal level.”
The name came from a basketball incident in the last days of Guac’s life. Gauc got called for a foul by a ref he felt had a grudge against him. Guac argued and the ref threw him out. He came back to the bench, where his dad was coaching, and asked for help. Manny contested the call and got thrown out, too. Guac thanked him on the ride home. Manny said, Don’t worry about it. That wasn’t just a bad call; it was a weird call. You can’t win with that ref. All you can do is change the ref. That’s what we need to do here, Tío Manny said. So many politicians getting so much money from the NRA. You can’t win if the ref is paid off. Change the ref.
The second wall went up in Los Angeles, a month later, and this time Tío Manny was ready to push it. He wasn’t sure how Patricia would feel about it, or Andrea. Were they really OK with any of this—their son and brother’s face appropriated, six feet high, the face of a political movement? So the day before the L.A. painting, they all sat down and struck “an emotional deal.”
“If any of us is not OK with it, then we stop doing it,” Manny said. “And that included everything. If I need to stop doing walls right now, you just let me know.”
They were on board. Joaquin would be proud. Tío Manny knew that was so. He pointed to a post Joaquin had retweeted in December. It cited the fifth anniversary of Sandy Hook, and it said that if you believe mentally ill people should have access to guns, let alone AR-15s, “then you need to realize the NRA has you brainwashed.” It wasn’t a one-off, Tío Manny said—they were close, and Joaquin was committed. “Sometimes I use this as an example that tweeting and retweeting is not enough,” Tío Manny said. “Me and Patricia are all the way for the rest of our lives and will not only tweet and retweet but also create and find untraditional ways to make statements.”
The next day, Tío Manny went for it. The L.A. mural featured four separate images of males of various ages. The first three are similar: young boys in backpacks, innocently walking down various streets. The oldest, in the center, Joaquin, is checking his phone, and all three are unaware of the giant gun scopes encircling their bodies, bull’s-eyes over their chests. Then Tío Manny painted a big crimson splotch over each boy’s point of impact. The fourth image was different: no target; a young man facing the other three, crying out in pain. Manny raised the sledgehammer, and drove seventeen bullet holes, one through each of their hearts. we demand 2 stop the bs, he painted around the boys.
He sped up the pace. Every few weeks Tío Manny painted another mural at a strategic moment. All were livestreamed. May 5, the NRA’s annual convention began in Dallas, and Tío Manny painted his mural a block from the convention hall. President Trump and Vice President Pence were both featured speakers, so Tío Manny expanded the scope, and featured Trump dressed as a circus ringleader and Dana Loesch as a clown clutching an AR-15. Joaquin was in the gun sights again. That drew lots of national media.
The murals were left as permanent markers, but the third wall, in Springfield, Massachusetts, was destroyed by vandals after three days. “We don’t actually really care that much,” Tío Manny said. That was part of the message, documenting the resistance, the anger, the attempts to silence Guac’s voice. “Someone destroys your good points just by showing power,” Tío Manny said. “It’s a reflection of what’s going on with the conversation.”
4
Change the Ref launched a second big initiative in April, one even more creative. They partnered with the ad agency Area 23 to create a site that would convert Tweets or Facebook posts into letters to congresspeople in Guac’s handwriting. Users could then print them from the site, or let it handle delivery.
The idea was based on the Congressional Management Foundation’s finding that personalized postal letters were the most effective means of influencing congresspersons’ votes. Guac’s handwriting added a special poignancy, for both the sender and receiver. “We are giving a voice to Joaquin,” Tío Manny said. “So he can talk.”
Thousands of Guac letters were submitted to Congress in the first few weeks. David Hogg and Emma González were two of the first correspondents. The project won three awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the most prestigious event in the advertising and marketing worlds.
Through it all, Tío Manny worked closely with the MFOL kids. Same cause, different strategy. “We think it’s more powerful if we do separate things,” Manny said. They coordinated, publicized, and reinforced each other, and they appeared together at key moments. The kids wore Change the Ref buttons and wristbands, making sure they were prominent in their photo shoots—to honor Guac, and to spread the word. Emma began embroidering a great big Change the Ref patch, stitching it onto the bomber jacket she would wear at the March for Our Lives, right across her chest, just above where the podium would rise, so millions of eyes would catch it in every shot. Tío Manny added MFOL logos to many of his murals, and wore a March for Our Lives wristband on his left hand, his painting hand, so that all the close-ups would capture their bond. Each group understood branding and cross-promotion. They wanted to convey how deeply they supported each other—to the public, and to each other.
The kids adored Tío Manny. They even waived the no-adults policy at their meetings for him. Even their parents were forbidden, no exceptions, except for him. “I just got a call from Cameron, asking me to come over today to have some pizzas with them,” he said during an interview. “That’s the kind of relationship we have. Patricia and I feel better by believing that Joaquin is one of them. ‘My kid is right here, fighting along with you guys, making a big noise. . . .’ And Patricia and I feel honored as parents of one of the kids who is leading the movement.”
10
Exhausted
1
David Hogg was angry. Everyone agreed on that. Media profiles were popping up everywhere on the kids now, almost exclusively on the big three, and journalists had typecast them quickly. Cameron and David were assigned clichés: class clown and angry pugilist. Emma was unique: some sort of tiny, fiery truth god, exposing bullshitters with the intensity of her brown eyes. The Outline ran a big piece headlined “David Hogg Is Mad as Hell,” over a photo of him grimacing. “His anger was palpable from the moment he walked into the room,” the author said. “He said ‘fuck’ so many times during our interview that he jokingly said he hoped it wouldn’t be televised.” The Outline piece was well reported, and generally perceptive, but that take on David—true?
It was tough to reconcile with the bubbly, playful David I had chatted with that first weekend. He was equally joyous and agreeable on follow-ups that week. But when I interviewed him in mid-March, David was spitting fire. “Politicians have been allowed to become corrupt, abused their power, and kept their power, to allow the slaughter of their citizens,” he said. “These politicians have shown that they want to be on the wrong side of history and that’s absolutely fine—we’ll be sure to smear them in our history textbooks that we write, and that will be their legacy and how they will be forever remembered, as the cowards that many of them are—that want to take money from special interest groups
instead of putting their constituents’ lives in front of their political agenda.”
He peppered random answers with allusions to his Twitter accusers, spitting out terms like “libtards,” “Nazis,” and “crisis actors.” The digs were getting to him. He was angry at the system rigged against young black boys, repeatedly decrying the “school-to-prison pipeline.” That was a signature phrase of the Peace Warriors, and while David had missed the meeting at Emma’s house, the concept quickly permeated the group.
David kept saying he was an angry person and a nihilist. His mother rolled her eyes. He was never an angry person, Rebecca Boldrick said. Now, though, he’s like a pit bull. If David were a comic book character, he would be Bruce Banner, appearing in public as the Hulk.
The anger was new, but David’s obsessiveness went way back. “Oh my god, like he will get really into something like drone photography, and for like three months he’s just maniacal about it,” Rebecca said. “And then something else comes up and he’s just totally into that.”
She ticked through several obsessions, all visual. “Like making movies, and editing things.”
David was doing interviews constantly, calling himself the de facto MFOL press secretary, so the anger never cooled. And there was another factor: living beside Lauren. “I couldn’t stand to be around my sister in this same house with her crying incessantly and knowing that I couldn’t do anything to help her four friends that had died,” he said. “That was one of the hardest things for me, because whenever I would call my mom, my sister would pick up and she couldn’t even speak, she would just be crying, for like four days straight, she could barely even speak. And as cowardly as it is I couldn’t stand to be around her knowing I couldn’t do anything.” So he threw himself into the movement nonstop. “That’s my way of dealing with it.”
And it was helping, he said. It helped to channel his rage into something constructive, and it helped to engage with all these creative new friends at MFOL. “It’s kind of like our own therapy group,” he said. “We’re all kind of misfits. Oh, we are absolutely huge fucking misfits. Like you hear the square peg in a round hole, we’re like a fucking mutated octagon trying to go in there.”
David was pursuing a career in words, but often thinks in shapes. “Did you know David’s dyslexic?” his mother said. “I always like telling people that. I am, my dad was, it runs in the family.” Rebecca had watched David struggle, failing to read until fourth grade. Teachers wrote him off, he said, “telling my parents I would amount to nothing, like I was some kind of broken toy.” Rebecca wants other kids to know that dyslexia doesn’t have to stand in their way. She is as fierce and stubborn as David, and they butt heads constantly, but she was amazed by what he had done. David also inherited her quirky sense of humor. He said he had no time for laughter anymore, but he confessed that John Oliver was still getting through. “Just cause he’s, like, fucking hilarious. That’s my dream job right there, working to expose the ridiculousness and corruption and just how frankly stupid these politicians have become.”
Little things amused David. He paused midrant to chuckle over the name of a Norwegian interviewer, Fjord. That got him on a roll. “The French always talk very slowly with the French accent”—he amused himself briefly, tossing out various French words like “croissant,” then flipped right back—“and I’m like, ‘Get the message through, man! Like I want to fucking talk to you, but I can’t if you take so damn long.”
More than once, David grew irritated at me lingering on a topic and snapped, “Next question!”
2
The kids were on a wild ride, and their parents were buckled in with them. At home the kids were often uncommunicative. That left the parents feeling rudderless.
Parents had been invited to an early meeting, and the kids said it took three times as long: concerns about everything, I have an issue with . . . The kids had heated discussions of their own, but they were on the same wavelength, with their own silly process that moved along at their own pace. So parents were banned.
Since the parents had been banished from the kids’ meetings, they were holding some of their own. Mostly just to compare notes, make sure the kids were all right. The parents were often thrown together on the kids’ relentless touring schedule. Rebecca got to know Jeff Kasky on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles, and she could definitely see where Cameron got his sense of humor.
David’s mom, Rebecca, described her life as “a whirlwind,” which was an improvement on the “shitstorm” she experienced in February. David’s remarkably calm father, Kevin Hogg, was a retired navy pilot. He had then served as an FBI special agent at Los Angeles International Airport until he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. He retired again with disability benefits and moved the family to Florida, where the cost of living was lower. David transferred to Douglas in the middle of freshman year, and it took two years before he felt like he fit in.
Kevin had kept his diagnosis private out of embarrassment, Rebecca said. The concept of privacy was laughable now. The TV cameras were trained directly on David, but the Internet was obsessed with his dad. “FBI special agent” was catnip for conspiracy theorists, even with a “former” in front of it. Wild stories abounded, and no secret from his past was too obscure for a meme.
Retirement simplified chaperoning duties. David was on the road constantly, and they never let him travel alone. Rebecca worried about the pressure on David—but Lauren was her big fear. At least Lauren’s pain was visible. David’s trauma was hard to read. Anger blacked out everything.
All the parents worried about what their kids had taken on. A twenty-year national crisis loaded onto the shoulders of traumatized kids? It seemed to be helping them—but it seemed like a lot. “I’m terrified,” Emma’s mother, Beth González, said. “It’s like she built herself a pair of wings out of balsa wood and duct tape and jumped off a building. And we’re just, like, running along beneath her with a net, which she doesn’t want or think that she needs.”
Rebecca worried about packages. Every week a huge new stack of letters showed up at school, and some came directly to the house. Their address was out there; that was unnerving. Most of the mail was positive, but the bad ones were threatening.
Mail delivery was Kevin’s favorite part of the day. David could be harshly contrarian and rebuffed all of Kevin’s attempts to help, but he had conceded the mail. It piled up fast, and what a nightmare to process it all. When would David have time?
That’s a common problem. Shooting survivors often describe unforeseen guilt. Public support means everything, but it quickly becomes a burden too. Even when it’s 98 percent positive, it’s the vicious 2 percent you remember. You never know which envelope will be toxic, and they go right for the jugular. Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis said he let thousands of letters build up, and he felt obligated to at least read them all. So he assigned himself a quota of twenty-five a day, but that was overwhelming. “My counselor said that was putting me in a bad place,” he said. So he boxed them up and put them away for a few years. (That story had a happy twist. He finally pulled the boxes out in 2002 while going through a divorce. One of the letters was from his high school girlfriend. They reconnected and they’re now married.)
Kevin foresaw some version of this. Plus there were checks in there, and random bits of cash like $5 bills—not to mention heartfelt wishes from people who deserved a reply, or at least a read. Kevin devised a little system, sorting everything in an old cardboard box. The tricky part was sometimes discerning where the money should go. Most of the writers were clear—for David’s college fund, or for the movement, or to treat himself to something nice—but sometimes Kevin had to make a judgment call. David could make some choices later, but at a minimum, every contribution would get a thank-you, no matter how small. It was the $5 donors who could probably spare it least.
Working his box made Kevin happy. David would thank him some day.
3
Misfits. Dav
id kept calling them misfits—and theater geeks, drama nerds, and journalism fanatics. He loved the image of the misfits fighting back. “I think it’s very true,” his mom said. “They’re used to being outliers and they don’t care about being different.”
Some of the other MFOL boys were using the misfit label too. A few days later, I met three of them for a long group interview. As I tossed out some of David’s phrases, Alfonso and Ryan Deitsch giggled and agreed. Daniel Duff looked a bit taken aback. Finally he spoke, hesitantly. “Are we? Misfits?”
Ryan let out a howl. “We are totally misfits!”
“The fact that you asked that question proves you’re a misfit,” Alfonso said.
Ryan kept riffing. “You have to ask if you’re the weird guy on the bus.”
Daniel decided to go along. “Yeah, we’re like the drama club and the TV club.”
“Can we be honest? Those are not the popular clubs,” Alfonso said. “Although, me, I was an exception. I feel like that’s all I have to say.” He said it with a big smirk, and then let out a hearty laugh.
But I sensed Daniel had it right. We have all seen our share of teenage misfits, and it’s hard not to wince. These kids had huge circles of friends, and Alfonso was constantly trailed by a pack of girls. I bounced the idea off Jackie and she was incredulous. “Who’s a misfit?” she asked. When I mentioned Alfonso, she laughed. “Come on. Those boys were overplaying it.” They were comedians, so they had fun with themselves. The real outcasts weren’t laughing.
Jackie was battling different stereotypes. She was blond, petite, and pretty, a deadly combination. “I’ve gotten the dumb blonde,” she said. It reared up often on Twitter. She avoided feeding the trolls, but she was touched when friends defended her. Her friend Adam was irked by a post saying she obviously hadn’t paid attention in class. “Adam Alhanti tweeted that comment and was like, ‘Actually, Jackie’s class president, has an SAT score of 1510 and a GPA of 5.2.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, Adam.’ They’ll go after everything they can to demean me, but it’s not working.”
