Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  4

  David Hogg was exhausted. He couldn’t even find time to schedule all his interviews—mine had been double-booked with 60 Minutes, and then frantically rescheduled thirty minutes prior. The National School Walkout was set for March 14, the one-month anniversary. He was planning to walk out for seventeen minutes and walk back in. He was thrilled to see it happening, but grateful not to be in charge this time. David had been crisscrossing the country on a month-long tear. So many interviews. “Probably over a thousand,” he said—on every conceivable network, in every language, on every continent. “I’ve done Venezuela, Colombia, Norway, Germany, Sweden. . . . I’ve done about ten in Australia alone.”

  “Is it getting any easier?” I asked.

  “Nah. It’s just as crazy. I’m just getting more tired.”

  “Are you sleeping at all, or eating much?”

  “No to both.”

  “Is there any end in sight? How long can you keep that up?”

  “I can keep going till the day I die.”

  Although . . . his body had other ideas, he admitted. The pace had just taken him down. “I was sick for the past four days. Sinus infection. And that just knocked me out, so I just laid in bed for like three days and didn’t answer anyone.”

  It was one p.m. on a Monday, and he wasn’t in school. “I woke up late and was just like, eh, whatever. So I’ve kind of just been moseying around, cleaning up my room finally because it hasn’t been cleaned in like a month.” He liked order, hated a mess, but everything was on hold. He had put one thing in order, when he was too weak to do anything else.

  But he was plowing ahead with interviews, defiantly presenting indefatigable David. Scheduling was a nightmare. David was better with concepts than keeping track of things. He later met Michael Bloomberg and asked how he does it. “He was like, ‘I have a scheduler,’” David said.

  He finished an hour with me and hopped on his bike to race to the other interview. Ten million people would see a boisterous and assertive David on 60 Minutes that Sunday. No clue that he had just collapsed.

  Several of the kids were showing early signs of burnout. And David wasn’t burned out, just down. He had plenty of fight left in him long term. He knew he was in a marathon, but kept sprinting anyway. Pacing himself, that just wasn’t in his character—or not a trait he had developed yet. He was seventeen.

  Jackie was a year behind David, but had developed that skill years earlier. She was self-aware, set realistic goals, and kept a constant eye on pace. Her eight o’clock bedtime was out the window now, because sleep wasn’t coming anyway. Most of them were still struggling with sleep. So Jackie found other ways to pace herself.

  “I’m not getting burnt out,” she said. “Honestly I’m kind of jumping on stuff more. In the beginning, I was exhausted because I was nonstop going going going and now it’s slowing down and I’m like, ‘What now?’” She had just gone to the Seventeen Families art exhibit, where Tío Manny had done his first mural. “I posted pictures of it on Twitter, and I kind of like broke down,” Jackie said. “I hadn’t thought about why I was fighting for a few days and it kind of came back to me. It kind of gave me another motivation. I think everyone’s getting even more into it now. In the beginning, we all weren’t friends.” Most of the kids were friends from drama club or news, or both. She and Sarah Chadwick were the only two from neither, she said. “Like I knew Cameron and Alex but I didn’t know anyone else. I was scared, I didn’t know who to talk to, I was a ball of stress. But now that I’m friends with everyone, I can actually talk to them.”

  Most of the kids were outgoing, and they bonded quickly. A few in the group were reserved and took longer. David. David took the longest.

  Jackie laughed pretty hard at the notion of David as an angry kid. Alfonso also had an angry TV persona, which was even more absurd. “They’re so opposite!” she said. She hunted around on her phone for silly videos of David from the group chat. “They’re hilarious.” She found one of David doing something like a Zoolander impersonation, high-stepping down the hallway at the secret MFOL office, mugging at an imaginary camera. She replayed it for me several times, howling each run, but wouldn’t forward it. “I can’t. He would kill me.” Another contrast to his public persona; David was a very private person.

  Jackie wasn’t surprised by David’s image, though. “I just met that side of him,” she said. It was mid-March. “We actually had a conversation—he said that he didn’t like me at first either, because I come from the side of the school—” She considered how to put it. “My friends are kind of crazy. I’m in the student government kind of group—it’s like parties and stuff like that. And David’s like a TV production person, so he didn’t like SGA. A lot of people don’t like SGA. I personally am not really friends with them anymore because they kind of dropped me after this. So he always thought I was like a stereotypical annoying girl, and then he realized I wasn’t, and then I realized he wasn’t a serious person all the time.”

  5

  Alfonso hardly ever sounded serious. He could riff on anything. “Alfonso’s really on all the time,” Ryan Deitsch’s brother Matt said. “It’s hard being on all the time.” Alfonso made it look easy, and he could flip from silly to serious and back midsentence. An astute New York magazine feature had described Alfonso as “comparatively conservative.” Many of the kids had Republican parents, but few of the kids were, so I asked Alfonso if that was accurate.

  “Yes, surprisingly.”

  “In what way?”

  “You know how when you’re this age, everyone’s like, ‘I’m a Republican; I’m a Democrat’—there’s no actual thought. In general I say I’m pretty center. Like on social issues I go pretty liberal, and on fiscal issues, sometimes I’ll go conservative.”

  He dissed both parties at length. “So both are evil entities, let’s get that out of the way. One of them tried to use me for political gain, and then the other is just showing their face because if not the country would hate them because we’re kids who honestly did survive a school shooting and I’m joking a lot now, but—”

  He was thinking out loud, really, and he plunged ahead awhile longer and then asked to clarify: “What I mean by using us is, first, we are using [the Democrats] to our advantage. Realistically, they’re giving us a very nice platform, they’re letting us speak to their leadership which are people in power. Before this, I would’ve probably never voted for that party, and now I’m considering it, I’m really thankful that they at least reached out to us, like we didn’t have to jump so many hoops to speak to them, like the Republican Party. And the Republican Party, generally, I don’t feel agrees with our viewpoint, so it’s understandable that they don’t want to talk to us.”

  That was becoming a problem. By March, nearly all the MFOL kids were bringing it up nearly every interview. They were eager to work with both parties, and knew that lots of Republicans quietly supported them but couldn’t risk the association. Ryan Deitsch commented on that danger that same week: “When you take a selfie with a bunch of kids that went there to speak their minds and have their voices heard and then it’s like, ‘I was just with Never Again—vote for me next election—’”

  “We have not endorsed political candidates nor shall we ever,” Alfonso said. “That is a rule we have made. That’s why we’ve spoken to both leaderships—I mean as much as we can, because one of them doesn’t want to talk to us as much, and we’re trying to work with them. Honestly, if a Democratic senator and a Republican one asked me to talk to them at the same time, I’d probably speak to the Republican.”

  6

  Daniel Duff was planning to walk out, and excited about it—and tickled that he was going to lead the walkout at a distant school, thirteen hundred miles away. His cousins in Pennsylvania had hatched a plan. Colin and Kyleigh Duff were students at Parkland High School (no connection), and Daniel was helping plan the walkout there. Colin and Kyleigh asked Daniel to record a short video, saying who he was, why he was walki
ng, and why it mattered. Colin and Kyleigh’s classmates were over the moon. One of the kids leading the national movement was personally involved with their walkout. The school administration got on board. “So they’re going to meet in the auditorium, watch me, and then they’re going to walk out,” Daniel said, still a bit incredulously. It was a big school too—about three thousand kids. Daniel wasn’t a leader at the MFOL meetings, more of a foot soldier. But he would be so much more for these kids. “I’m going to be like the voice of a walkout, I guess,” he said.

  Daniel described the plan gleefully, while still scripting it. Two days later, he was morose. He had stayed up way too late on rewrites and recording, and hated the result. “I was so tired, and I had my March for Our Lives shirt on and everything,” he said. “And I watched the next morning, and I was like, ‘I look way too tired and you can clearly see me reading the script.’ So I’m going to redo it once I get home.”

  The walkout was in two days, and his uncle would have to edit it, but he was going to record it over. He had to get this right.

  11

  Walkout

  1

  This was turning into a huge deal. Twenty-five hundred schools had organized school walkouts, in every state, and the media was all over it. But in Parkland, the school administrators had erred on the side of caution, and decided it would be a quiet affair.

  That’s not what happened. Kids disobeyed their faculty. They moved fast, busted out of school, and merged several protests on the fly through shouts and texts and social media. The change came suddenly. At 9:59, one minute to walkout, few of the thousands who would flood into Pine Trails Park within the hour had any idea they were headed there.

  Here was the plan: Each school participating was asked to walk out and observe seventeen minutes of silence on Tuesday morning at ten a.m. local time: one minute for each of the fallen at Douglas High. How they conducted it, and what might follow, was up to them. Every school had to deal with its administration, and the responses ran the gamut across the country. Many administrators threatened detentions or suspensions for the insubordination. Others supported the kids and worked with them, but safety was a big concern. At Douglas, the plan was to walk out to the football field; play “Shine”; hear a short speech by Ty Thompson, the principal; observe the seventeen minutes of silence; and then file back inside. The entire event would take about half an hour. Everyone would be safely sealed off behind the tall chain-link fence, still festooned with flowers, brown and crumply now. The press, a constant presence and a growing irritant, would be kept at bay.

  Other local schools were even more restrictive: walking “out” to the corridors inside. But all these plans suffered from the same glitch: most of the kids hated them. What was the point of limiting the protest to seventeen minutes? And reporters could be super annoying, but wasn’t this exactly the wrong moment to shut them up? This was a show of force—why seal off the messengers?

  Susana Matta Valdivieso, a seventeen-year-old Douglas student, decided to do something bigger, even if her classmates couldn’t participate. She spent weeks organizing a multischool rally at North Community Park in Coral Springs. She lined up kids to speak from several schools, and coaxed Rabbi Melinda Bernstein to offer an invocation and lead a moment of silence. Bernstein was also bringing a microphone and portable speaker set. Angel Lopez helped publicize it on his @browardstrong Instagram account. Angel was a recent graduate of Coral Gables Senior High in the neighboring suburb, who began organizing after the attack. The site was a short walk from Douglas, whose students had been warned not to set foot off the campus. Violators would be locked out and marked truant for the remainder of the day.

  Not good enough. A small rebellion was brewing. Lauren Hogg first got wind of it on Instagram that morning. A Snapchat message was flying around during first period that read: “After the 17 minutes, please march with us to Pine Trails. 17 minutes is NOT enough.”

  It was unclear how many students were ready to test the administration. They liked Mr. Thompson, and they had been through a lot together. Most kids later said they had been undecided, waiting to see if it amounted to anything. As they filed back in from the football field, no one seemed to be making a break for it. But everything changed when their young siblings made a move just down the street.

  Westglades Middle School abuts the Douglas campus just beyond its football field. Its students were grumbling too. “We had organized a walkout,” said eighth-grader Christopher Krok. “The school said OK, but they put us in the field—which we thought wasn’t enough. That won’t show anything.” He and his friends hatched their own plan, which was also flying around social media that morning. “I didn’t think anyone would actually do it,” eighth-grader Justin St. Piere said. No one did. Only the four organizers were on board, and they were pretty iffy. That was so far fewer than at Douglas, where the rebellion was faltering—but these four actually walked.

  It started with Christopher Krok, who led the rebellion in full military uniform—US Army dress greens. Christopher was the young commander of Westglades’ Junior ROTC program. He said they had been plotting all morning, but he wasn’t sure they would go through with it until “about two seconds before it started.” He nodded at his friends around him. “Ryan, Spencer, me, and my sister here, we were like, ‘Let’s just walk out.’ We got stopped by security and the principal and we just said, ‘No, we’re going.’”

  They made it past the principal, out to the street, where they expected to be on their own. Back inside, there was a standoff. The hallways were full from the walk in, so hundreds had watched the four escape. The principal was furious. Kids were afraid to follow, but then a few bolted. Another stare-down, another burst. The kids were still intimidated, but growing nervier by the second, and the breakouts got bigger, the intervals shorter, until the dam burst. A wave of students poured onto Holmberg Road, and the staff gave up.

  The kids ran down the street until they reached Christopher Krok, who was extolling the need for stricter gun laws to the assembled reporters while making his way down Holmberg Road toward Douglas High. Dozens of boys in army uniforms followed, many twelve and thirteen years old, and under five feet tall. They wore various ROTC rank insignia, and were talking to reporters nearby too, demanding a ban on military assault weapons and passionately describing sensible gun regulations—focusing on the “well-regulated” militia authorized in the Second Amendment. They said there were about fifty-five students in their unit, and they believed virtually all of them walked out.

  They kept walking down the street, and the pace quickened as the wave caught up with them and they realized this was really happening, the whole freaking school, it looked like—and then some kids started running, soon everyone was running, laughing, no idea where they were headed, but they were really going there!

  Reporters kept asking where they were going; kids kept shrugging.

  “I honestly have no clue,” St. Piere said. “I’m just following the group.”

  Finally, a kid at the front of the pack yelled, “Pine Trails!”

  None of them actively tried to signal the Douglas kids. They did not plan to rev up from a leisurely stroll to a stampede right in front of Douglas, just as its students were retreating back inside. It just worked out that way. But the Douglas kids noticed.

  At Pine Trails that afternoon, Douglas kids confirmed that it was the excitement beyond the fence that sparked their sudden decision to go. Their little brothers and sisters had taken to the streets to support them—that was the spark. And just as at Westglades, it was suddenly a wave. They followed the Westglades pack to Pine Trails. Seemed right, among the memorials. They hadn’t been there in a while. Nearly two miles away, but they didn’t mind.

  The memorials were all still standing, but weathered and withering, the teddy bears, soggy and a little smelly after days of relentless spring rains. Each victim’s name was hand-painted on a sign, faded now, and Peter Wang’s was torn loose, lying on the ground. Freshl
y printed signs posted everywhere announced that everything soon would be collected for long-term preservation.

  When the kids arrived, there was a lot of milling. No one seemed quite sure what to do now that they were there. But Susana Matta Valdivieso was ready. She had made a split-second decision as she watched her classmates bolt. She hit social media: Reroute! Angel Lopez and others helped spread the word. She chose a position in front of the angels and started her first speakers. Early arrivals walked over to see what was happening, and a crowd formed. The rabbi threw the microphone and speakers into her car, raced over, and hooked them up. Then it seemed official. That was the remarkable thing about the Pine Trails rally. It was spontaneous—organized, reconfigured, and expanded on the fly via Snapchat and Instagram, but with seeds sown long before.

  Angel Lopez made it, frustrated that so few from his own school had. “The kids that were daring jumped the gates,” he said. David and Lauren Hogg arrived and held up an improvised sign. David said he had first gotten wind of it when he saw students heading for the doors. He was going to skip it, because he was so behind in school, but needed to cover it as a journalist. And then the fever grabbed him, and he was coaxed to the microphone and delivered the second-most-memorable speech of the event.

  As the rally progressed, a little girl burrowed her way to the front, where I was holding out my phone to record the speaker. She wore a maroon justice sweatshirt, big white headphones around her neck, and red cat ears on her head. She rose just a little higher than my waist. Her name was Aarayln Hughes. She leaned in meekly to whisper to me. “Excuse me, sir. What if I want to speak?” She thought I was in charge. I wasn’t yet sure who was in charge, but Susana seemed to be directing people to the microphone, so I nodded toward her. Aarayln looked distraught. She had already summoned all her courage. I leaned down and encouraged her to scoot past me. I bet she’ll let you speak if you ask, I said.