Unfinished Business
Fate of the shooter, location of memorial remain unknowns almost five years after Santa Fe tragedy
Almost five years after the tragic shooting at Santa Fe High School, two lingering issues remain undetermined: the fate of the accused shooter and where a permanent memorial to the victims will be located.
It appears neither will be resolved anytime soon.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the 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. Meanwhile, families of the victims are frustrated by the Galveston County District Attorney’s office refusal to release detailed information about the shooting and the motive because it is being used as evidence in a pending criminal case.
Meanwhile, the Santa Fe Ten Memorial Foundation is seeking donations to honor the victims, but fundraising efforts have been slowed by Covid and a final location of the site has not been determined. In October, the school board voted unanimously to pursue an off-campus site for the $1.6 million memorial, a move that left families of the victims upset and outraged.
About this series:
This is the last of six pieces that expand on my freelance article focusing on how the Santa Fe, Texas, school district is moving forward following a horrific school shooting in May 2018. To read the story, which appears in the December 2022 issue of American School Board Journal, click on this link.
The memorial site remains a sticking point between a school district that is trying to move forward from the May 18 shooting and the families who do not want the victims’ sacrifice to be forgotten. While large scale memorials in other mass casualty school shooting incidents, such as Columbine and Sandy Hook, have been dedicated in recent years, none are on the campus where the tragedy occurred, said Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
“You don’t want to forget, and you want to honor the loved ones who died,” Brymer says, “but having a memorial on school grounds may not be what’s best for current students. If you have something on campus, you still have to worry about having people who are not part of the school system come onto school grounds, which can cause safety issues for the students and staff who are still on the campus.”
The Quest to Honor the Victims
The Santa Fe Ten Memorial Foundation is led by Megan Grove, whose daughter Reagan Gaona is one of the May 18 survivors. Gaona’s boyfriend, Chris Stone, was one of the 10 killed in the shooting.
“The school did an open call as part of the process, and I jumped up and volunteered,” Grove said during an interview in September. “It’s really important to me that these individuals be recognized in perpetuity.”
Grove said her daughter, a softball player, used to meet her boyfriend outside the fine arts wing that is close to the ballfields. The shooting took place in two art rooms in that wing.
“It was really difficult for my daughter because she literally had to pass that spot every day to go to practice,” said Grove, who ultimately placed her daughter at an early college program for her senior year “just to get her out of high school.”
The foundation has raised money for “The Unfillable Chair” — a student-designed tribute to the victims located on the southeast side of the campus — that was dedicated on the third anniversary of the shooting. A sculpture of a “Warrior Spirit” — Santa Fe’s mascot is the American Indian — is scheduled to be installed outside the auditorium by the fifth anniversary in May 2023.
But for Grove and families of the shooting victims, a large, permanent memorial is the best way to honor their loss.
The foundation has raised $105,000 of the projected $1.6 million to $1.8 million cost for the memorial, which was designed by graduate students at the University of Houston’s College of Architecture and Design. It would include a circular pathway surrounding a grove with monuments to each victim.
After two years lost due to COVID, Grove said fundraising efforts have ramped up again. In talking to parents, school officials, and community members, Grove said she “realized right away there is no blueprint for how a community and school districts deal with the aftermath” of a mass casualty tragedy.
“Those are things people don’t think they’ll ever have to decide as a parent,” she said. “It’s a very unique thing. That’s why it’s really important to me that we make sure their legacy is known forever.”
A ‘No-Win’ Situation
Santa Fe’s controversy over the location of the memorial does not come as a surprise to experts who study the long-term effects of mass casualty events. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, said school districts often find themselves in “no-win situations” when determining how to honor the victims of school shootings.
“These types of situations are always controversial, and everyone has very different views on how it should be handled,” Schonfeld told me during a 2019 interview. “You have to involve everyone in the discussion, because if you don’t, there will be talk in the community about how you’re excluding them. And yet, the final decision you make rarely will please everyone. You have to accept that it’s going to be messy to a certain degree.”
Brymer said the discord that can develop in these situations is understandable, especially given 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. You can make meaning and adjust to that person not being in your life, but the families of the victims are living with their grief every day.”
Grove said her daughter’s continuing grief over the loss of her boyfriend is a large part of what drives her to see the memorial built. She noted the foundation has been given a seedling from the original 9/11 survival tree, making Santa Fe one of only 30 communities in the world to receive such a gift. Trees for Houston, an area nonprofit, also has agreed to provide all of the trees for the memorial once a site is selected.
“There have been some wonderful opportunities and developments, primarily educational opportunities for our future students, that have come as part of the memorial process,” Grove said. “We want to be a model for hope, growth and renewal in communities that suffer the type of tragedies that we have. We’re going to see this memorial through.”
A Difficult Decision
Throughout the process, Grove said the foundation has “made sure we’ve involved students and educators in all steps of the process.” She noted that the group also has worked with school officials and a subcommittee of the board of education and maintains the memorial’s design was always based on locating it on the high school campus.
But Rusty Norman, the board’s chairman, told me in September that the board had not agreed on a specific site. He and others were hesitant to talk about it, saying no decisions had been made. But clearly, the issue was weighing on many minds, as evidenced by the school board meeting that followed the next month.
At the meeting, nine people — including mothers of some of the victims killed in the shooting — begged the school board to build the site on the campus. But Norman said he was concerned about traffic, security and the emotional distress/triggering for students and staff still on the campus. The rest of the board, most of whom still have children in the schools, agreed.
“We do not want that memorial on active school district property where students and staff are there every day,” Norman said after the meeting.
Instead, Norman wants to relocate the memorial on four acres of land the district currently owns on 6th Street near Warpath Avenue. The site is located across the street from one of its elementary schools and close to a park and the local library. The board could sell the land to the city for less than fair market value, which then would leave the city and memorial foundation to work together on the site.
"This is not something that's being taken lightly. It is extremely stressful, it is extremely emotional," Norman told the Houston Chronicle after the vote. "It's a very difficult conversation and to be honest with you, for me personally, I think that's why it has taken so long."
Moving Forward
I read Norman’s quote in the Chronicle soon after turning in my ASBJ story and thought back to the two school board meetings I attended, first in September 2018 and then on the same week four years later.
The meeting this past September lasted 51 minutes. Students and staff members were honored at the beginning, then principals provided overviews of their school improvement plans for 2022-23. Board members asked a few questions and made note of how communication between the schools and families had continued to improve over the past two years.
No media was present for the September meeting, which was not a surprise given the routine agenda and the closings and cutbacks that have affected newspapers, radio, and television stations across the nation. The Chronicle and Houston’s TV stations rarely covered Santa Fe before the shooting and only now when a commemoration or controversy erupts.
Two of the local newspapers that once covered the city and the school district — the weekly Hitchcock Bulletin and the Texas City Sun where my career started in the mid 1980s — folded years ago. The Galveston County Daily News, the state of Texas’ oldest newspaper, now has only three reporters.
“When there are cameras set up in the back of the room, you can tell something’s going to happen and generally speaking it’s not going to be good,” Norman said.
As much as Norman and others would like to put the events and controversies surrounding the aftermath of May 18, 2018, behind them, they know it’s not possible. The impending fifth anniversary again will put a focus on the district in addition to the other unfinished business still left to be addressed.
“It’s a work in progress,” Norman said. “I don’t see a day where we can say, ‘We’re there,’ and rest on our laurels. We have to do what’s best for kids, what’s best for the overall community and do everything thing we can to put our best graduates out into society. That has to be our focus, without question. We’re not moving on. We’re moving forward.”