Tragic Links

The story behind revisiting the aftermath of a school shooting near my boyhood home

Three weeks ago today, I returned home from a trip to Santa Fe, Texas, after revisiting a magazine article I had written four years ago. The topic: How a school district moves forward following an on-campus shooting that leaves 10 people dead and 13 injured.

When 21 people were killed and 17 injured at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School this past May, my thoughts immediately returned to Santa Fe, a town 12 miles from where I grew up. The two districts, which are similar and size and separated by just 300 miles, share a tragic bond. In terms of mass casualty events on K-12 campuses, the two school shootings rank as second and fifth largest in U.S. history.

My story and photographs, which will appear in December’s issue of American School Board Journal, look at the recovery process in Santa Fe and the high school where the shooting occurred on May 18, 2018. (My earlier story, December 2018’s “After It All Falls Apart,” appeared in the magazine just six months after the shooting.)

Initially, I thought writing the article would be relatively straightforward. The interview subjects, a couple of whom had never talked to the media in-depth about their experiences, were thoughtful and kind. By telling the story mostly from the district’s perspective, a necessity given the audience I’m writing for, I had a solid A to B to C arc.

I also know a great deal about this small, but soon-to-be growing community. As part of my first newspaper job at the Texas City Sun, I covered the Santa Fe city council and school board meetings as part of my State Highway 6 beat, talking to officials and community leaders there almost daily. Even though I left the area almost three decades ago, I keep up on what’s going on through friends and family.

What I didn’t count on was the amount of information I would have, or how difficult it would be to sort everything into narrative form. In many respects, I had over-reported a story that can’t be fully told in anything less than a book; 3,000 words — a longer feature article than I’ve written in years — didn’t seem like enough.

In the end, I tried to capture how the tentacles of that traumatic, terrifying day and its immediate aftermath continue to ripple through parts of the community, as they do in other places where such tragedies have occurred. I’ll be sure to share the story on Santa Fe when it appears. Meanwhile, I’m still deciding whether to post more in-depth profiles of some of the people interviewed. Is that something you would be interested in as a reader?

Three Days This Week

Over three days this week, as reports streamed in related to developments from other mass casualty school shootings that have occurred over the past decade, I thought once again about my experience in Santa Fe.

• Monday: Hal Harrell, the superintendent in Uvalde, announced his retirement following a steady stream of criticism over the district’s handling of the shooting. Last week, the district fired one of its new police officers, a former Texas Department of Public Safety trooper who is under investigation for her response to the shooting that killed 19 adults and two children. The district also suspended the operation of its in-house police department and placed two officials on leave as its investigation continues.

The scrutiny and criticism of Uvalde’s handling of the shooting is a typical course of action when these tragedies occur, according to David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for Crisis and Bereavement, based at the University of Southern California. I’ve interviewed Schonfeld several times and thought about this quote as it related to Harrell’s resignation.

“If you don’t think someone has made a mistake or was incompetent, that means it could happen again. That’s not acceptable to people,” Schoenfeld told me in 2018. “They believe someone had to make the very big mistake, not the shooter or Mother Nature, but someone in authority.”

According to CNN, an “emotional divide” was clear at the meeting where Harrell’s retirement was announced, “with mostly white supporters of the superintendent outside the school board meeting cheering him on and mostly Hispanic families of victims inside the meeting crying and pleading to the board for accountability.”

From Schonfeld, on how communities react after this type of tragedy: “People become very passionate about their beliefs and what is important, and the views are often divergent. The one thing you can predict is that everyone will have strong opinions, and none will be the same.”

Last week, I spoke with Rick Kaufman, executive director of community relations and emergency management for Minnesota’s Bloomington Public Schools, about the increase in parent fears as children returned to school this year. A Gallup poll conducted in August said 44 percent of parents are concerned about their child’s physical safety at school, the highest number since 2001.

Kaufman, who was the communications director for Colorado’s Jefferson County Public Schools when the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School occurred, is one of the most knowledgable and respected professionals in his field on the topic of safety. He has consulted with districts across the U.S. while leading the efforts in Bloomington, where he has worked for 15 years.

“The more social capital organizations have going into a crisis, the better they will weather the storm,” Kaufman said. “Parents need regular and consistent reassurances that their child will be safe. They need to know your district has a plan in place and that your staff is prepared to do everything they can to protect children. They need to know what they can expect as a parent when things happen. And this is not a one-time thing; you have new parents coming in every year who have concerns and questions. You need to keep them informed.”

For example, parents need to understand what scenarios can trigger a school lockdown or additional security measures. Be transparent about the ways you will communicate with parents to help give them peace of mind

“When something like this happens, parents should know that they’re not going to hear from the school right away, but that you will be in communication as soon as possible,” Kaufman says. “At the same time, parents should have the assurance that you’re doing what you’ve been trained to do, and what you’ve drilled to do over and over again.”

• Wednesday: I thought about the relief that families in Newtown, Conn., experienced when a jury ordered Infowars founder Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to relatives of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting that killed 20 children and six educators. Jones, the far-right radio/webcast host, had claimed the shooting was a hoax and staged by gun-control advocates.

Robbie Parker, who lost his 6-year-old daughter in the shooting and was awarded the highest damages of the plaintiffs, had a chilling quote during a news conference after the verdict was read:

“Every day in that courtroom, we got up on the stand and we told the truth. Telling the truth shouldn’t be so hard, and it shouldn’t be so scary.”

Jones’ conspiracy theories, which include blaming the federal government for the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, are abhorrent. His attacks on parents and families, in which he labeled them “crisis actors,” are reprehensible.

As the verdict was being read, Jones was — to no one’s surprise — live-streaming from his Infowars studio in Texas and providing more of his vile commentary. During the trial, he had labeled the judge as a “tyrant” and called the proceedings a “kangaroo court.”

“This is hilarious,” he said. “Do these people actually think they’re getting any money?”

• Today: For my upcoming story on Santa Fe, I spoke with Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. She noted that it’s important to acknowledge the non-linear pace at which a community works through trauma and grief.

“Trauma and grief do not have the same trajectory,” Brymer said. “We can recover from trauma. You can go into trauma-based treatments, but you never fully recover from the death of a loved one.”

I thought about Brymer’s quote while watching the families of the Marjory Stoneman-Douglas High School students react to the verdict in the sentencing phase of the shooter’s trial this morning. On Valentine’s Day 2018, three months before the Santa Fe shooting, Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 others in a rampage at the Parkland, Fla., high school.

Cruz pleaded guilty to the murders and could have faced the death penalty, but the jury instead sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

“As the verdicts were being read, many parents of the victims gently shook their heads,” wrote Tim Craig for the Washington Post. “One juror clutched a tissue, wiping tears from her eyes. Cruz mostly stared down at a desk. Later, as victims’ family members left the courtroom, some relatives sobbed and collapsed into each others’ arms. Several lashed out angrily at the jurors, accusing them of too easily buying into the defense’s argument that Cruz suffered from mental illness.”

Like Parkland, the Santa Fe shooter was apprehended, but that case still has not gone to trial.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Santa Fe student charged with multiple counts of capital murder, has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial three times since 2019. Another hearing is scheduled in February 2023.

In 2018, I interviewed Julie Kaplow, a clinical psychologist who at the time served as director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Trauma and Grief (TAG) Center. She said the Santa Fe community, which saw 1,000 families affected by Hurricane Harvey just nine months before the shooting, was facing long-term issues because of the combination of trauma and loss.

“With grief, there is this mistaken notion that one year out you should be over it,” Kaplow said. “What people don’t fully understand is that grief comes in waves. It doesn’t go away; it just changes.”

Brymer says trauma is often overemphasized and notes that not as much time is spent looking at bereavement process. “These families have paid the ultimate sacrifice,” she told me last month. “We learn to understand the meaning of their lives. We adjust to that person not being in our lives, but over time as the trauma subsides, the grief is still there.”