Parkland

by Dave Cullen

  The profile by Emma I cite was published in Harper’s Bazaar in February.

  All the major investigations into the issue of school shooters and mental illness have issued the same caution: that most perpetrators never received a formal psychological evaluation, and they’ve then died during their attacks. Our inability to interrogate such perpetrators afterward has led to woefully incomplete data. Given that these statistics are pulled only from the cases in which a history of mental illness could be documented, the incidence of such issues among perpetrators may actually be considerably higher.

  Though I only briefly touch on the mental health issue here, I have explored it in greater depth in several publications over the past few years. If you’re interested in this topic, my piece “What Does a Killer Think?” (Newsweek) summarizes the three major motivations of mass murderers other than terrorism: depression, psychosis, and, rarely, psychopathy. (The last two sound similar and are often confused by laypeople, but are in fact completely different.) I have written related pieces for the New Republic, Slate, and the New York Times. They are linked at my site.

  3

  I relied on several sources to document the perpetrator’s actions, including the Broward County Sheriff’s Office’s official report. The New York Times had several excellent pieces: “What Happened in the Parkland School Shooting,” “Parkland Shooting Suspect Lost Special-Needs Help,” “[Suspect name], Florida Shooting Suspect,” and “‘Kill Me,’ Parkland Shooting Suspect Said.” I also consulted “‘You’re All Going to Die’ . . .” (Miami Herald), “Uber Driver Says . . .” (Miami Herald), “What Happened in the 82 Minutes” (Chicago Tribune), and “Teacher Told Students to Run” (CBS News).

  4

  All quotes in the book from Cameron’s mom, Natalie Weiss, come from my interviews with her. I met her at the first two Spring Awakening shows, and asked if I could interview her. She said she would be happy to, but only if Cameron approved it. He did. I interviewed her for a few hours at their home on May 7, and followed up periodically by text afterward. The descriptions come from my time there. She let me tour their home and take lots of pictures for reference.

  It was widely reported that Jackie’s post was made to Instagram, with “MAKE IT STOP” formatted as a picture, and the rest in the text. That is understandable, because her Instagram feed is public, and her Facebook timeline is not. However, Jackie assured me as far back as February that she posted it to Facebook first, and then created the Instagram post, using the last Facebook line for the Instagram picture. (She sent me the Facebook post.) It was also the Facebook post that made its way to the family of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, setting in motion the events described next in this chapter.

  5

  All the details and quotes about the development of the Tallahassee trip come from numerous interviews and follow-ups with Jackie, Claire VanSusteren, and State Senator Lauren Book in February and early March, primarily the first two. (We also did a lot of fact-checking calls and texts in the late summer, prior to a Vanity Fair piece.)

  The primary interviews with all of them took place by phone, about a week after the trip. I spoke to Senator Book several times on that trip, and spoke and texted with Claire constantly—she was invaluable at getting us into sessions, sending urgent texts to hightail it over—but most of the reflection, and re-creating all the details, came later.

  I shadowed Jackie through much of the trip, but she did not grant any media interviews during or prior (other than her brief chat on my Sunday call with David on speakerphone with the team).

  State Representative Kristin Jacobs made her comments to me in an interview late Tuesday night, immediately after the training inside Leon High School covered in the “Tallahassee” chapter.

  3. #NeverAgain

  1

  The re-creation of the first few days at Cameron’s house come from interviews with many of the kids over the course of several months, as well as trusted media accounts. Emily Witt’s excellent New Yorker piece “How the Survivors of Parkland Began the Never Again Movement” was incredibly useful. I borrowed liberally, checked it all out with the kids, and I’m indebted to Emily for capturing it so well.

  Emma’s quotes come from her New York Times op-ed “A Young Activist’s Advice,” and her feature on the Instagram account Humans of MSD.

  2

  Estimates of attendance at the first Women’s March were determined by crowd scientists who conducted a digital image study, the results of which were reported in “Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March . . .” (New York Times).

  Statistics on crowd size for the Women’s Marches and the March for Our Lives come from the professors Kanisha Bond, Erica Chenoweth, and Jeremy Pressman, who reported their articles “Did You Attend the March for Our Lives?” and “This Is What We Learned . . .” (both in the Washington Post). The authors belong to the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), which collects “publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other actions,” according to its website. The CCC was formed to collect data for the first Women’s March and its sibling marches, and it has continued to publish data on its website and in monthly articles for the Washington Post. It offers by far the most definitive numbers, so I relied on them throughout.

  Eleven days before the Women’s March, the New York Times reported donations at $849,000 (“Women’s March on Washington . . .”). As of November 2018, the March has received $2,069,783 in donations.

  3

  The five recent grads were Matt Deitsch, Dylan Baierlein, Brendan Duff, Kaylyn Pipitone (Pippy), and Bradley Thornton. (All come up in the book except Bradley. Sorry Bradley—I wish our paths had crossed. I think they did briefly in Chicago.)

  Statistics on Parkland’s demographics, median income and home value, and poverty rate are from City Data, DataUSA, and the US Census.

  The Parkland Historical Society was invaluable in providing history on the area. The society’s president, Jeff Schwartz, and vice president, Jim Weiss, described the area as it was and is to my researcher Marc Greenawalt. (These were among the few interviews I did not conduct personally.) Jim Weiss also wrote articles on the Parkland Historical Society’s website that contribute to the background. Additional information comes from the city of Parkland’s website.

  I relied on several sources to situate Parkland’s role in the Everglades, especially the US Geological Survey’s articles on the Everglades and the South Florida environment, and Michael Grunwald’s book The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise.

  For biographical information on Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I relied primarily on “At the March for Our Lives . . .” (Washington Post) and Tim Collie’s “Marjory Stoneman Douglas, ‘Voice of the River’” (Sun-Sentinel). That Washington Post piece also provides the number of stoplights in Parkland.

  The statistics on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School come from the National Center for Education Statistics and pertain to the 2017–18 school year. Additional statistics come from U.S. News & World Report.

  Basic facts on the rally, including sponsors, come from the event’s Facebook page.

  4

  Emma’s experience in AP US government class that day and her thoughts about gun legislation at that time come from “Emma González Hated Guns . . .” (Washington Post).

  The information about David Hogg recommending Emma for Anderson Cooper 360° initially came from the same article. I also spoke to the producers about David at the time, and appeared on the show that night.

  Quotes from Emma in this section come from her appearances on Ellen and 60 Minutes, her interview with Milk.xyz, and the articles “Emma González Hated Guns . . .” (Washington Post) and “What We Know about Emma Gonzalez” (CNN).

  Like most of America, I had never heard of Emma until Saturday, and I was unaware of the rally until Saturday afternoon, when I started seeing clips of her speech online. I watched it online many
times. All quotes and descriptions are from that recording.

  4. Tallahassee

  1

  All descriptions and quotes from the Tallahassee trip—including the organizational meeting and the parking lot—are from my interviews and observations. I rented a car and followed the first two buses in a long media caravan up to the capital. We made three rest stops along the way. At first, I left the kids alone to have quiet time, but at each break, more of them wandered over to chat with me. I pulled into Leon High School right behind the first bus, convinced a cop to let me into the parking lot, and then watched the kids get off the first two buses, receive a hero’s welcome, and make their speeches. Then the Leon kids went inside with them, and Claire let me inside the school. I spent the next few hours interviewing kids and observing the training. I was covering it with a two-man documentary film crew hired by Vanity Fair, so we often split up and compared notes, and I watched the video footage as well. The third bus arrived while I was inside, so I didn’t witness that. Jackie was on it, and she described their unceremonious entry to me later.

  2

  I watched Jackie and Cameron hop onto the SUV in the parking lot from a few feet away, but did not hear what they whispered to each other. I got the brief snatch of dialogue used in the book first by interviewing Jackie about it, and then I pasted it into a text message to run it by Cameron. He remembered a few bits slightly differently. I adjusted accordingly to match his memory, then ran that by Jackie, until they were both satisfied it was accurate. (This scene was included in a March Vanity Fair online story, and its fact-checker then checked most quotes like that, but I can’t recall for certain if she did that one.)

  Jackie’s comment to the school board member is an exception to her providing the commentary later. I heard and recorded that at the time.

  I filmed more than an hour of video on my phone in the Publix parking lot alone, and filmed much that evening and the next day in the capitol, as well as teaming up with the Vanity Fair video crew once we got to Tallahassee. I found it somewhat amusing that in all that time, the only person who asked me not to use what I had shot was a journalist. While the CNN producer was having the slightly heated disagreement with Jackie, she noticed me filming it. She then found me later and begged me not to use it. It was understandable. I could have made her look awful, by appearing to give a seventeen-year-old survivor a hard time. I assured her it was clearly a legit problem, which Jackie agreed with as well once she understood. I chuckled that the kids were fine, but a professional had gotten worried. But she had reason to—and it was a painful reminder that it’s very easy to make an innocent person look horrible if you come with an agenda, or if you’re just sloppy and don’t bother to sort out what actually happened.

  I interviewed Jackie’s dad, Paul, in the parking lot. Her mom did not want to do interviews, but I spoke to her informally near the end of the trip, and a bit by phone and text days and weeks later.

  I did not witness the dispute with the bus driver. We were already lined up in our cars with motors running, waiting for the buses to leave at any moment. (The bus engines had been running the entire time, and everyone had boarded the buses.) We were wondering what the holdup was. Jackie filled me in on those events later.

  3

  David, Cameron, and Alfonso all told me about their roles and the logistics getting there.

  Information on the march’s projections comes from the group’s permit application. I discussed various aspects of it with the kids over the next month.

  I did not interview Emma Collum. Her descriptions come from “Parkland Students Have a Cause and $3.5 Million . . .” (Miami Herald).

  The information on the celebrity donations and their statements was widely reported, but I got them all from Deadline. I pulled Oprah’s statement from her Twitter feed.

  I was flipping around the dial as we drove, and I heard the promotion on Sean Hannity’s radio show and the opening report on All Things Considered.

  The comments from Jeff Kasky and the MFOL spokesman are from “Parkland Students Have a Cause and $3.5 Million . . .” (Miami Herald).

  4

  My approach to sizing up expectations was to pose the question to dozens of students twice: before they arrived at the capitol, and then late in the day to see how they matched up. Daniel Duff’s reaction was the most common, so I used him to stand in for the whole. In his case, I followed up with him with two phone interviews over the next few weeks to elaborate and reflect more in depth.

  This seems like a good time to talk about how I chose the kids I would focus on in the book. There were about two dozen kids in the original MFOL group, and I knew I could not feature all of them, or the reader would get a strong sense of none. I knew I wanted to focus on a small number, with a mixture of perspectives: all the obvious things like male, female, and different ethnicities, but also the roles they played. I wanted leaders in a central role and foot soldiers a bit further out. The first time I interviewed Daniel in Tallahassee, I knew he was a strong possibility. I asked him to spell his name and give his age and year in school, and I was astounded he was a freshman.

  I also frequently get asked how I made contact with all the kids. Woody Allen famously said that “showing up is eighty percent of life.” I quote that often, because I find it surprisingly true, particularly in journalism. Getting David’s number took some doing, but the rest was mostly showing up. Nearly a hundred kids went to Tallahassee (a few dropped out at the last minute), and I must have spoken to at least two-thirds along the way, plus lots of parents. I used to be reticent about asking minors for their phone numbers, and I’d ask for emails instead. That has all changed. Now they give their cell numbers out with barely a thought, so I didn’t feel bad about it. Over the course of the year, only a few kids said they would feel more comfortable giving me their emails, which I respected. Many kids rarely check email, so it’s frequently useless. (Of course I never share cell numbers. When someone wants to contact a particular individual, I send a message to the source conveying the request.) I came home from Tallahassee with forty to fifty numbers—more than I could ever follow up with. From there, one person recommended me to the next, and I kept bumping into more of them along the way. They generally gave me their cell number at that point, and we’d stay in touch. (In Jackie’s case, it was actually her dad who gave me his number in the Publix parking lot, and he conveyed the message to Jackie afterward, and she called me back.) Sadly, I never connected with a handful, which was mostly just odd luck. It was very hard to get to the kids through official media channels, because they were besieged. It was much more effective just to go to their events and connect with the kids in person. Even once we connected, it was sometimes hard to get a response, because they had so many more media requests than they could handle. But I found that when I actually flew down there—or wherever they were headed—they tended to respond. Showing up.

  I obviously didn’t spend the night with them. Claire, Senator Book, and lots of the kids described the scene to me later. Everything else in this chapter I witnessed directly. (As in all cases, some of the quotes came in real time, and some were later follow-ups. It was a frenzied schedule, and impossible to get everyone’s impressions as they occurred.)

  I rejoined them at the capitol as soon as they arrived, and I spent the day running around with different groups. Claire set up the same large chamber for both the kids and the press to stash our stuff and to use as a break room (and they ate their box lunches there), so we were really thrown together. In that room, I respected their need for downtime, and generally kept to the informal press side of the room. A few times—like right after they met with Governor Scott—I wandered over and asked, “Anyone want to talk?” (No one did then, because they were hungry, but several said they would come find me after they ate, and they did. That’s generally how it worked. They made it pretty clear when they wanted to talk, and they knew where to find us.)

  5

  “Seventeen bills that
could have saved seventeen lives,” a mom told me, a senator told me, aides told me, and the incoming president of the Florida PTA told me.

  6

  Jackie was taking a brief respite from the press—and from everything—in Senator Book’s office. She was with just a few people, but Claire was one of them, who texted me to come confer with her about something I’ve now forgotten. So I happened to see Jackie playing with the babies, but I kept my notepad and recorder in my pocket, and gave her some space. Then I ended up playing with the babies myself. They were adorable, and we all needed a break. (Senator Book was there and handed one of them to me—sorry, I forgot which.)

  Alfonso’s quote beginning “I’m extremely, extremely angry and sad” comes from “‘Look Me in the Eyes.’ . . .” (Miami Herald). He (and many others) characterized it the same way to me directly, but I thought he said it best there, so I used that version.

  5. Spring Awakening

  1

  All the descriptions of Cameron’s childhood come from his mom, Natalie, mostly in our May interview. We stayed in touch by text through the end of November, and I followed up on small items that way periodically.

  Natalie gave only a brief description of Cam’s stand-up set on the cruise ship. She let me know videos of the act were on YouTube, and I watched quite a few. I used the footage to re-create the specifics of that scene. As of November 2018, a video was still there, titled “Cameron Kasky-Norweigan Sky-040509-‘Jokers Wild’ open mike night.” (Note the typo of “Norweigan” to find it.)