One month later, Parkland school shooting survivors still struggle
Alexi C. Cardona
Ivanna Paitan has slept next to her mom every night in the month since the school shooting that claimed the lives of classmates and teachers she saw every day.
She sometimes can’t eat. Loud noises startle her.
When she’s transported to the endless moments when she was sure she would die, she has to center herself by lowering her gaze, listening to music and reminding herself she no longer is lying on the floor of her AP psychology classroom in the freshman building listening to gunfire and smelling smoke.
She isn’t holding on to a friend she couldn’t help in the moment. She isn’t walking over shell casings and broken glass. She isn’t wondering which of her classmates and friends made it and which ones didn’t.
“I’m traumatized,” Paitan, 16, said Tuesday afternoon. “We can’t concentrate in school. I took a test today, and I couldn’t sit still. I’m there, but my normal self is not there.”
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One of Paitan's close friends, Maddy Wilford, was shot in the same classroom. When a SWAT team went in the classroom and told the students to run, Paitan said she had to leave Wilford behind, possibly unresponsive.
"I couldn’t help her at that moment, and I feel regret that I couldn’t do anything," Paitan said. "I couldn't move at all to do anything for her, and she's one of my closest friends. It was hard seeing her like that."
Paitan said her friend recovered and that they've been able to see each other.
"It was the best feeling to know she’s OK, and she was breathing, and she could hug me," Paitan said.
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The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior said she knows her life will never be the same after the Feb. 14 shooting that killed 14 students and three staff members at the school and injured 17 others.
“I had to accept my death,” Paitan said. “As bad as that sounds, I had to accept it because I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
She feels she was given a second chance at life, and she’ll take that chance to honor the memory of those who were killed, inspire change and focus on her future.
One month later, students and their families are adjusting to a new normal. Nothing is normal when 17 people were killed at your school and when you have to sometimes walk past the building where they were killed, they said, but they’re taking things step by step.
Paitan is going to therapy, which she said has helped her with processing her emotions. She has become hypervigilant of her surroundings and said she has to have an escape plan when she goes into a classroom or public place.
“When I see cops, I get startled,” she said. “I start to think, ‘What if something is happening where I am right now?’ I get anxious.”
On Feb. 13, Paitan and each of the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were regular kids.
She used her first-ever paycheck to buy chocolates and teddy bears for her closest friends. They don’t have boyfriends, so they were each other’s valentines. The only thing she was worried about Feb. 14 was making up a math test.
Now many of these students say they’re experiencing symptoms associated with PTSD. Some who know they’re prone to depression because of family history say they’re feeling worse than usual. They are experiencing emotional extremes they’ve never had before. They’re angry, sad, traumatized and grieving deeply.
They’re also proud of themselves and one another for making their voices heard and using all available platforms to demand change. They are committed to making sure no other community faces the pain their community has faced.
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They sometimes lash out at their parents though they don’t mean to. They need comfort but don’t want to be hovered over. They wish they could have a normal routine, but now, “normal” is studying for exams at the same time as they’re planning demonstrations, meeting with community leaders and traveling to see elected officials.
“Generation Z is not to be played with right now,” said Tyah Amoy Roberts, 17, a junior at Stoneman Douglas.
Her friend Sabrina Vargas agreed.
“I’m working on my GPA, and I’m working on changing gun laws,” Vargas said.
Roberts, Vargas and two other friends, Mei-Ling Ho-Shing and Danielle-Ali Hayes, were among the thousands of Parkland students who on Wednesday participated in a national school walkout in honor of the people killed in the shooting.
Ho-Shing, 17, said the unity Stoneman Douglas students have shown since the shooting gave her a sense of pride about her school she didn’t feel before.
She said some students’ “snobbiness” and disrespectful attitudes made it difficult to make friends and connect with others. She said the collective experience of surviving a shooting and losing friends and teachers has united everyone.
“Everyone is loving on each other,” Ho-Shing said. “It’s sad this is what it took. But we’re not complacent. Our circumstances brought us together and gave us something to fight for.”
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Roberts and Vargas said the shooting has made them think about death and their own mortality. Roberts wants to embrace everyone and be everyone’s friend. She, Vargas and Hayes said the best therapy they could have is one another.
“We’ve learned that even when we believe in completely opposite things, we can fight for something we all believe in,” Roberts said. “This has brought us together with people we may not have been friends with otherwise. I can’t leave this school now. No one would understand me. There’s nothing like these Douglas kids to talk to.”
The shooting has also made them appreciate things they took for granted before, the girls said. Among the most significant changes in their lives now are their relationships with their parents.
Vargas said she used to turn the location off on her phone because her mom used to hound her often about where she was. Since the shooting, she has kept her phone's GPS turned on.
“My mom told me the other day she never used to worry about me when I was at school,” Vargas said. “She never cared where I was or who I was with because I’m in Parkland. Parkland is safe. She said she feels regret about that. She told me, ‘No matter where you are or who you’re surrounded by, I’m always going to be worried about you.’ ”
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Annika Dean worries about how the experiences her son Austin Foote had during the shooting could affect him emotionally in the future.
Dean survived the shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in January 2017. She’s gone through the PTSD-like symptoms and sometimes still has flashbacks in public. She’s gotten on a plane since surviving the airport shooting, but she said she’s fearful of traveling and going out to the movies after the high school shooting.
“I just hope Austin can heal from this,” Dean said. “I can’t comprehend what he’s been through. The airport shooting was different. He’s seen me move on in the last year, but the trauma resurfaces. He might struggle the way I have whenever there’s a new shooting. It seems he’s working through it, but there’s no question he’s suffering.”
On his 15th birthday, Foote attended a funeral for one of his friends. The next day he attended another. His parents tried to take him out for a birthday lunch to get his mind off the shooting and the community’s loss, but he went home to sleep instead.
Dean took both her sons to a ceramics class on a recent weekend. The class was scheduled to make mugs, and Foote made a tribute to five of his friends and a coach who died.
“I saw he grabbed an alphabet, and on the mug he started with the letter A,” Dean said. “Then I saw he wrote the name Alaina, then Luke.”
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On his mug, Foote put the names of Alaina Petty, Luke Hoyer, Alex Schachter, Peter Wang, Jaime Guttenberg and Scott Beigel.
“I had no idea what he was going to make, but ceramics turned into art therapy for the pain he’s going through,” Dean said.
Dean said Foote was happy to return to school and be with his friends, but he returned to see the empty seats of three of his fellow JROTC cadets.
“He’s hurting, we’re hurting, everybody’s hurting,” Dean said. “You can feel it. This is on everyone’s minds. Everyone you talk to, just everyone, was totally affected by this. But everyone is lending support. It’s kind of amazing. I think we feel the pain so much, we’re just trying to lift each other through it.”