Debbie Benson is a lawyer who lives with her husband and three children in what they’ve long considered a safe neighborhood in Parkland, Florida. Her two oldest kids are students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly killed seventeen students on Wednesday, and injured more than a dozen others, with an AR-15 rifle. On Thursday afternoon, Benson attended a vigil near the school with her daughter Taylor, a freshman at the school, and two of Taylor’s close friends, Lauren Fest and Jordan Campbell. Standing in a park during a pause in the vigil, the three teen-agers reconstructed what they’d seen the day before. They spoke in detail and with remarkable composure, which belied the emotional chaos of the previous twenty-four hours.
There was a fire drill at Stoneman Douglas on Wednesday, during second period, Taylor recalled. When the fire alarm rang out again, during fourth period, she was confused. Her teacher led the students out of the classroom in a “kind of mellow” procession. As they walked into the auditorium, Taylor still thought it was a simulation. Then security guards yelled at them to go to the front and get down on the floor, between rows of seats. Someone was called to leave the room, and everyone got up; this time, the guards yelled louder, telling them to get down again. “We were very scared by this point,” Taylor said. “But still confused.”
Lauren Fest had been in marketing class, on the other side of the school from Taylor, when the second fire alarm went off. She headed to her predetermined drill zone, near the basketball courts. “Pretty much immediately I came face-to-face with the shooter,” she said. “He was running straight towards me, in a maroon shirt, screaming nonsense and carrying a big gun. Just loud screams, and gunshots. I dropped my backpack, everything fell out. Kids were running everywhere.” Fest sprinted to the auditorium, where she saw Taylor, who’d already been there for twenty or thirty minutes. Taylor was texting her parents and her older brother Ethan, a junior. “My brother wasn’t answering,” Taylor said. “I didn’t know where he was. I thought he’d been shot. I was crying.”
New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.
Debbie received a text from her daughter around 2:35: “mom I’m rlly scared rn apparently there are two shooters in the freshman building i’m not sure if it’s real or not.” Debbie wasn’t sure if it was real, either. “Let’s take a minute,” she wrote back. “Maybe it’s just a drill.” She turned on the news at her office. Seeing reports of the shooting, she texted Taylor back, and then texted Ethan, too. He didn’t respond, so she called him. He eventually picked up, whispering. “I’m O.K.,” he said. “I’m on the floor of my chemistry lab.”
Jordan Campbell was in the school’s main building, in math class, when the alarm sounded. After she and her classmates began heading downstairs, a guard yelled at them to return to their room. “The teacher locked the door and turned off our lights,” Campbell said. She heard screaming outside the door, and five gunshots, “like fireworks, underneath me. Then it sounded like someone banging on the door, maybe a kid, but we weren’t allowed to open it.” The shooter had smoke bombs, she was told, which had set off the fire alarm. Campbell texted her mother, who began to watch the news and narrate to her what was happening. Her father drove as close as he could to the school before officers turned him away. Campbell’s parents told her to stay where she was. About an hour later, a SWAT team arrived at her class door. She and her classmates were told to exit single-file, with their hands on each others’ shoulders, to the senior lot.
“I saw a yellow body bag as we walked by the freshman building,” Campbell said. “They put us behind caution tape.”
The SWAT team soon arrived in the auditorium. Officers were yelling “Blue,” Taylor said; she took this as a good sign, guessing that it meant an area was safe. Students were eventually ordered to go into the street outside with their hands above their heads. A friend of Taylor’s told her that the SWAT team had said not to run, “because we could slip on blood or gunpowder on the floor.” Fest saw bodies in the courtyard as she walked to a safe place.
Authorities apprehended Cruz, the shooter, on a street right behind the Bensons’ house. Debbie watched it happen on TV, not realizing how close it was. “My neighbor called to say that she saw the police take him down right there,” Debbie said. “I was stunned.”
“I lost maybe five friends,” Taylor said. “My lab partner. We weren’t best friends, but she sits next to me. That’s a person I laugh with and talk to. Now she’s gone.” She continued, “A couple of the others I knew since sixth grade. One since fourth grade. It’s insane to think they’re gone forever.”
Fest saw students killed in front of her. “One was trying to run away with me and got shot twice. Another was going down a staircase where the shooter was coming up. A third was shot in the freshman building, I don’t remember when.” She said, “Now I understand: this can happen anywhere.”
Campbell woke up in the middle of the night last night. Her room was pitch black. “I’d been watching YouTube when I finally dozed off,” she said. “I was too scared to go to sleep without it. I don’t know how I’ll ever go back inside my school again.”
“It’s weird to see friends on national news now,” Taylor said. “I’m, like, ‘That girl’s in my study hall. That one’s in my A.P. class. I’ve known that person since I was born.’ It’s just weird. Most kids would like to be on TV, but not for this. A lot of them are more political than I am. When they say things about Donald Trump, I don’t really know what that means. But I’m glad kids are speaking up. Someone should.”
