Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  “US Existing Single-Family Home Median Sales Price.” YCharts. https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_existing_singlefamily_home_median_sales_price.

  US Secret Service and US Department of Education. The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States. July 2004.

  Valle, Gaby Del. “David Hogg Is Mad as Hell.” The Outline. March 5, 2018.

  “Voters More Focused on Control of Congress—and the President—Than in Past Midterms.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. June 20, 2018.

  Wallace, Tim, and Alicia Parlapiano. “Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump’s Inauguration.” New York Times. January 22, 2017.

  Walsh, Joan. “6 Minutes and 20 Seconds That Could Change the World.” The Nation. March 28, 2018.

  Weiss, James. “5—The Ranches—The Heart of Parkland.” Parkland Historical Society. http://www.parklandhistoricalsociety.com/portals/the-ranches---the-heart-of-parkland.

  Witt, Emily. “Calling B.S. in Parkland, Florida.” New Yorker. February 21, 2018.

  Witt, Emily. “How the Survivors of Parkland Began the Never Again Movement.” New Yorker. April 17, 2018.

  Witt, Emily. “Launching a National Gun-Control Coalition, the Parkland Teens Meet Chicago’s Young Activists.” New Yorker. June 26, 2018.

  “Wolf Transcript.” CNN. February 21, 2018. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1802/21/wolf.02.html.

  “Women’s March On Washington.” Crowdrise. https://www.crowdrise.com/womens-march-on-washington/fundraiser/womens-marchon-washington.

  Notes on Sources

  The bulk of the material in this book comes from my own reporting, following the MFOL kids around the country and meeting and interviewing hundreds of people who interacted with them. I first made contact by phone on Sunday, February 18, when David put me on speakerphone with the entire group. I arrived in Parkland the following day. I stayed in regular contact until we finished fact-checking this book in mid-December. I spoke to nearly everyone in the group at some point, but I focused on a manageable number, and spent the most time with Jackie Corin, David and Lauren Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Matt Deitsch, Alfonso Calderon, Daniel Duff, and Dylan Baierlein.

  I did several formal interviews with all those students and with many others, but more often my interactions were brief, informal exchanges in the field, or checking in by text. I visited several kids in their homes, and got to know some of their parents. I also followed them on social media, and in the traditional media, observing how they interacted with people there. Cameron and Alfonso liked doing late-night Instagram Live chats, which are always fun—and I’m happy to report they’re exactly the same there as in person. Wherever the MFOL kids traveled, I tried to talk to as many people who were interacting with them as possible, including fellow Douglas students, youth activists, teachers, coaches, clergy members, mental health workers, survivors of other tragedies, academics, and political professionals. It’s all about hearing multiple perspectives, and I tried to cast as wide a net as possible.

  Most quotes from the kids are from my interactions with them—or occasionally from statements they made at events I attended. Exceptions are noted here, with brief citations for readability, and the full details are given in the bibliography. The main exception is Emma. She grew concerned very early that she was becoming the face of the movement, and she was determined to share the spotlight. She rarely did substantial interviews after that and never agreed to an in-depth interview with me. I observed her in person on well over a dozen occasions, and I got an occasional question, as well as recordings of her speaking to individuals and groups. The longest interview I got with her was about five minutes with a few other reporters in the media tent the morning of the DC march. Of course, I got stories and impressions from everyone in her orbit constantly. So I developed a good feel for her, but I had to rely on published sources for a lot of her quotes.

  I could not be everywhere, and I wouldn’t want to rely on my own impressions alone. So I am indebted to a great number of wonderful journalists whose work I relied on to fill in many pieces. They added so much more than details and quotes. I learned a great deal in the field just by comparing notes and impressions with smart reporters also immersed in this story, and by discovering fresh insights from reading their work. I want to call out two journalists in particular: Lisa Miller at New York magazine and Emily Witt at the New Yorker did deep dives into this story, and their work was invaluable.

  A few words on quotes and thoughts. I adhere to standard journalistic practices: everything in quotation marks was either (a) heard by me, (b) published by a reputable source, or (c) recorded on TV or other media. (I watched all the TV passages cited, but I often relied on published transcripts. However, the punctuation of spoken speech is subjective, and I frequently changed some odd transcript choices. I tried to preserve language the way the speaker delivered it. I also corrected mistakes in the wording, which is why online transcripts may vary slightly from what you see here.)

  I recorded most of my conversations on my iPhone, an e-recorder, and a notepad, typically all three. (I get nothing from Sony, but if you’re looking, I’ve been very happy with the Sony ICDUX560BLK.) Everywhere I went, I took photos and videos on my phone (a few thousand total), which allowed me to re-create the visuals with precision later. I edited quotes for length without inserting ellipses, and made minor edits for grammar and readability—obviously taking care to preserve (and clarify) the intended meaning. (For example, when someone used a pronoun to refer back to a name used earlier, I’ve substituted the name without adding brackets. I’ve also generally eliminated stumbles, midsentence backtracks, and so forth.) Whenever I say a person thought something, it’s because that person told me so.

  Prologue

  1

  Nearly all Jackie Corin’s quotes in this book come from my interviews with her. Exceptions are noted. We did around ten formal interviews—some in person, but usually by phone—plus several dozen follow-up calls and texts. We met in person over a dozen times. Up until October, we checked in every few weeks at a minimum. Then I let her focus on the election and me on the final rewriting and editing of this book, and I remained in contact sporadically until early December. In general, I tried to get her impressions of any event two different ways: (1) within a few days (or while it was happening), and (2) much later, to see if her impressions had changed. Many of the events in the book involving her I witnessed firsthand, others she told me about. She described the North Carolina rally in the opening scene.

  2

  Until the final draft of this book, the first portion of this section read, “discovered that post-traumatic stress can strike without experiencing a trauma directly.” Dr. Frank Ochberg was kind enough to vet sections of the manuscript medically and advised me to change “experiencing” to “witnessing.” He served on the committee that first created the concept and diagnosis of PTSD, and said it actually had been a major point of debate whether secondary observers like me experienced an event. The committee concluded that we do, and experience has borne this out. It’s telling that I still don’t fully believe I experienced it without having been in the building. It’s a lesser experience—secondary—but still very real, and enough to take me down.

  This story harkens back to Columbine and to my two decades on the wider story. I am frequently asked why I chose it, so I’ll use up my cliché quota early: I didn’t, really; it chose me. I was a freelancer living in Denver, just returning to part-time journalism after two decades. I happened to sit down for lunch just as the Columbine reports were hitting local news. Shots had been fired, but no injuries confirmed. I figured it would be nothing, but I hopped in my car just in case. First I left a voice mail for Joan Walsh, an editor in San Francisco I’d done one story for, apologizing for bothering her. I had never heard of Columbine, but my then-boyfriend had a vague sense of where it was. He sent me
down Highway 6, with several possible exits to choose from, and I figured I’d fumble my way there. (It would be years before I owned a cell phone.) Driving toward the mountains, I spotted a ring of helicopters in a tight circle to the south. That was alarming. I tried to line them up with the best exit, and I drove toward them until I hit a police barricade. I pulled into a strip mall and asked the cops which way the school was. They pointed and said, “That way,” and I ran toward it. I had no idea what I was hurtling into.

  The iconic photograph was published in the Rocky Mountain News, which deservedly won the 2000 Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography for its collection of twenty Columbine photographs. The Rocky went bankrupt and its site disappeared, but the photos are all collected at the Pulitzer site mentioned in the bibliography.

  The CNN ratings I document are from 1999, and which I included in Columbine. We rechecked the number of consecutive New York Times front pages from its archives.

  All information on the Columbine shooting in this book comes from Columbine, which we carefully vetted at the time. Many basic logistical details about the attack in it come from the Jefferson County sheriff’s report, but see the endnotes for details.

  I have consulted with many trauma experts about norepinephrine, and vetted this passage with Dr. Frank Ochberg. The quote is from my interview with him in November. I relied on several sources to summarize the attack. Three were particularly helpful: “What Happened in the Parkland School Shooting” (New York Times), “What Happened in the 82 Minutes” (Chicago Tribune), and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s official report.

  I read a wealth of news material on the suspect, but relied heavily on a series of articles in the Miami Herald, which did a stellar job. They included: “‘You’re All Going to Die’ . . .” and “Uber Driver Says . . .” The New York Times also published several informative articles: “Parkland Shooting Suspect Lost Special-Needs Help” “[His name], Florida Shooting Suspect, Showed ‘Every Red Flag,’” and “‘Kill Me,’ Parkland Shooting Suspect Said.” I also incorporated details from “Teacher Told Students to Run” (CBS News).

  The figures for mass shootings in America come from Mother Jones’s open-source database of mass shootings since 1982.

  4

  We published an expanded edition of Columbine in 2016 with a new epilogue. In it, I document how frequently mass shooters cite Columbine and its killers as their inspiration, and copy their costumes, technique, timing, imagery, and so forth. I discuss the false Columbine narrative of those killers as heroes for the downtrodden, which so many perpetrators have bought into. Others have written about this as well.

  The figures for numbers of mass shootings and Americans killed in mass shootings are pulled from Mother Jones’s database on American mass shootings. We included data from Columbine (April 20, 1999) through the Chicago Mercy Hospital shooting (November 19, 2018).

  1. Valentine’s Day

  1

  I have been talking to Laura Farber about her Columbine documentary for several years, since its inception phase. It eventually debuted at the Minneapolis Saint Paul International Film Festival in April, and has since won a string of film festival awards.

  David and Lauren Hogg, and their parents, discussed their Valentine’s Day experiences with me many times, individually and together. They had a chance to crystallize their thoughts over time and home in on them in their excellent joint memoir, #NeverAgain, so I used many of the quotes about that day from their book.

  I followed up with Lauren while fact-checking in November, to see which friends she learned about each day. She said she first learned about Alyssa, and then it’s all a blur.

  2

  Authoritative sources on David Byrne seem split on whether his hair is black or dark brown. We examined photos closely and fall in the dark brown camp, though if it’s black to you, we won’t argue. David Hogg’s hair also appears black to many people, but he assures me it’s dark brown.

  We rounded the school’s student body to 3,200 students. The exact figure was 3,158 students enrolled at MSD during the 2017–18 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

  MSD has fourteen permanent buildings, confirmed in an email exchange with Nadine Drew of the Broward County Public Schools Public Information Office in November. As of that date, there were about forty temporary buildings, most of which serve to accommodate the closing of building 12.

  3

  I did not expect this to be a book. I actually began writing about Parkland the morning after the shooting, when a Politico magazine editor saw one of my tweets and asked me to write a piece about my becoming the media murder guy. I was so stunned by David—and his peers, whom I watched the rest of the morning—that I proposed writing the piece about whether this time might actually be different. I was wrapping that up Saturday when Michael Hogan called. He is a good friend and the digital director of Vanity Fair, who knows my restrictions and edits my occasional pieces for that publication. He said he knew I wasn’t allowed to go to these places, but . . . would I consider it anyway? I did consider it. But I had another problem: I was eighteen years into my book on two gay soldiers whom I’d first written about in 2000. (Half of that time was overlapping with Columbine, which was my primary occupation until 2009.) I was three years late on the gay soldiers book, the end in sight, and vowing to stay laser focused. But Parkland seemed too important to ignore.

  I thought about it overnight, and hashed it out with Mike on Sunday. I agreed to cover Parkland for five weeks, publishing three to five pieces for Vanity Fair, and helping produce a documentary video short. Under no circumstances could I stay more than five weeks.

  I had become so engrossed in working that out that I missed the Sunday-morning shows announcing the march. When I heard that, I knew I had made the right call. I started packing while hitting up my media and survivor networks to find a way to make contact with the kids.

  I was down there Monday, and once I met those kids, I was hooked. I have spent much of the past two decades working with children. Countless high schools and colleges have brought me in as a speaker, and I had been Skyping with classes regularly until I put that on hold to finish the soldiers book. So I am used to being amazed by kids, and I never really bought into the idea that they’re incapable of huge undertakings. Still, the march was a lot. Once I saw Jackie and her team pull off Tallahassee, I had no doubts.

  I got so enthused the first month that I toyed with the idea of a book a few times. I kept deciding it was a terrible idea. One book at a time. But my second trip to Parkland, mid-March, turned my head around. I was meeting several of the kids in person for the second round, with many phone calls in between. They were feeling more comfortable with me, and I was getting a real sense of them, and I could not bear the idea of not telling their stories. I had already written about several of them in Vanity Fair dispatches, but that canvas was way too small. I was staggered by the scope of this, and I wanted room to convey their personalities as well.

  Vanity Fair signed on for a long piece in the October issue of the print magazine, which committed me for much longer. I told my agent, Betsy Lerner, that I was serious about a book, and she helped me work out an approach—leaving the content open-ended, to see how the story played out. (God, I hate it when journalists arrive at a story with it already written in their heads.) We worried about Harper’s possible reaction. I was already under contract and three years late on the gay soldiers book—would they be horrified at my suggesting another delay? (Or what if they suggested replacing the overdue book with Parkland? That would be far worse.) Luckily, they were eager to tackle both. (The new plan is for me to finish writing the gay soldiers book in 2019.)

  Survivors showed me the Hokie Stones when I visited Virginia Tech at the Academy of Critical Incident Analysis (ACIA) conference. I recalled some very particular memorials at Newtown, but couldn’t remember what they were, so I dug through old news reports. I found the painted bedsheets and small cardb
oard angels in “Asking What to Do With Symbols of Grief as Memorials Pile Up” (New York Times) and “Christmas Day in Sandy Hook” (New Yorker).

  All the details from Pine Trails Park are my observations and impressions.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the young women were singing “What a Beautiful Name” by Hillsong Worship. They actually sang the fourth line out of order. The group leader would call out a line, and the rest would sing it back, and I recorded and transcribed it the way they performed it.

  2. Lightning Strike

  1

  Jackie described her lockdown experiences to me in interviews, and we went over them several times. Cameron laid his down in a series of Facebook posts the first night, and pieces he later published, including his CNN op-ed the next day. I later discussed them with him and his mother, Natalie Weiss. Cameron has made his Facebook posts private, but those posts were captured before he did so. I ran them by his mom. (The kids have enormous demands on their time and get overwhelmed by media requests. I tried to offload routine matters to people around them whenever possible. His mom had all the posts and could vouch for them 100 percent.)

  If you have never watched a “Run. Hide. Fight.” video, I highly recommend them for preparing yourself if you ever find yourself in this situation. They stress three simple concepts, and they offer lots of ideas that you can visualize when there is no time to think. Just google the phrase, or check out the great one I feature in the resources section of my website.

  MSD’s alternating silver and burgundy days are named after the school’s colors.