A year later, families grapple with trauma and grief
For one student still in despair, reminders are everywhere of the loss of her brother
Danika McLeod does not remember ripping the acrylic nails off her fingers. It was 12:30 p.m. on Sept. 11, and she was back at home from school — a routine that started almost as soon as the 18-yearold began her senior year at Santa Fe High School last August.
She had just gotten off a Facetime
call with her boyfriend and changed into her pajamas before sliding onto the living room floor to play with Clay, her 4-month-old Chesapeake Bay retriever. When she glanced up, she felt her world stop. Kyle’s door. It was closed, just as it had been since he left for school on May 18, 2018. Just the sight of it sent thoughts and memories of Kyle, her only sibling, tumbling through her mind: the countless hours they spent in his bedroom binging on Netflix; the last words she spoke to him as they split off for class that Friday morning; the text messages he sent her as he lay bleeding in an art classroom closet; the lock of strawberry blonde hair sitting near his bed.
She did not feel herself pry off the glittery blue nails superglued to her fingertips. Nor does she remember much else about the hours she spent on the floor, pinned by the weight of her loss.
“I just remember waking up to my dog licking my face,” Danika said.
It has been one year since 15year-old Kyle McLeod and nine others lay dead on the polished tile floors of Santa Fe High School, shot by a gunman who also wounded 13 others in the northwest corner of the Galveston County campus.
Three months earlier, an expelled student had walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and opened fire, killing 17 students and staff and wounding 17 others. The Florida massacre sparked a national discussion on school safety and gun violence, fanned further by a nationwide burst of student activism, mostly calling for stricter gun laws.
There was no unified push from the victims of Santa Fe. Residents rallied around the school, declaring themselves “Santa Fe Strong,” grateful for national sympathies but resistant to too much media attention. President Donald Trump visited with victims’ families at Ellington Field. Green and gold ribbons covered nearly every light pole, mailbox and fence line in town.
When the national spotlight blinked away from the semi-rural town, survivors, students and family members of those who died were left to struggle with physical and mental scars that may never fully heal.
For Danika, what was supposed to be a fun-filled senior year became a walking nightmare as she wandered the halls where the teen gunman targeted his victims and murdered her brother.
Like many at the school, she shows symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her palms sweat, and her hands tremble. Her heart hammers inside her chest, and she flashes back to that day with the slightest reminder.
And the reminders are everywhere: Young men walking by wearing tall socks, the kind Kyle used to wear; the paths they used to walk together; shirts worn by well-meaning neighbors, emblazoned with the words “Santa Fe Strong” and a list of the 10 students and teachers who never came home from school that day.
To Steve Perkins, whose wife, Ann, was shot and killed as she shoved a student out of the line of fire, the silence around his house echoes an emptiness in his life. Ann had kept their calendar filled with dinners with friends and social outings. Now, except meeting with other victims’ families and new relationships he formed with students his wife saved, his social interactions mostly consist of onesided conversations with his Amazon Alexa.
“I depend on her for company. I’ll ask her what’s the stock market doing today or what happened with the Cowboys’ game. It’s someone to talk to,” Perkins said. “It’s very weird to wake up, and you’re used to having conversations, telling someone what your day is going to look like, and that’s just totally gone.”
Student enrollment at the high school dropped by more than 100 as many students found it too difficult to return to the scene of the massacre. District officials said more students returned after January.
Some parents were spurred to act. Rhonda Hart, whose daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, died in the shooting, ran for a school board position in a nearby district. Scot Rice, whose wife, Flo, was shot and injured, ran for Santa Fe City Council. Both lost their races. Others joined community groups and flooded Santa Fe ISD board meetings in the months after the shooting, although attendance at both has dropped as the months ticked by.
A brother and best friend
Kyle’s mornings usually started the same way.
His mother, Gail, would wake him up. She would tousle her fingers through his satiny hair as the teen would pretend to sleep or sit up to give her a hug.
He would stand up and put his chin on top of her head, impressing himself by how much he grew from the summer before, when he barely inched above her 5-foot 2inch frame. He would tell her she smelled nice.
He was not as gentle with Danika. Dink, he’d call her. Your hair: a mess. Your shoes: ugly. Your face: a tragedy.
It was ruthless, but Danika could not help but smile.
Although they grew up quarreling as youngsters in the rural northern California community of Ormand, the relationship between Danika and Kyle warmed when the family moved to Sante Fe in 2011 to be close to their father’s oil job in Texas City. They found solace in each other as they worked to meet new friends and create a new life thousands of miles away from their first home.
By the time they were in high school, they would spend hours in Kyle’s room binge-watching Netflix. They would take late-night trips to Walmart and, although both are unathletic, signed up for the tennis team together. They began using nicknames — Kyle would call Danika “my girl,” and to Danika, he was always “my boy.” When her messiness spilled into his room, he’d collect all of her belongings and throw them in the hallway with a handwritten eviction notice.
His antics were not limited to Danika.
Christina White, who teaches English, often would walk into her classroom to find Kyle sitting behind her desk. He would ask her about things teachers try to keep private — who she was dating, how her personal life was going, what she did the weekend before.
He was similarly unfiltered with his classmates.
“He never failed to let you know what his opinion was, which was great at times,” White said, laughing. “Other times I prayed he would just keep it quiet to keep himself from saying something to someone.”
Kyle’s style could be off-putting to some, acknowledged Shelby Jackson, one of Danika’s closest friends.
“But if you actually get to know him, he was the sweetest person you would have met in your entire life,” she said. “He would have done anything for you.”
May 18, 2018
Kyle and Danika held hands as they raced across the student parking lot on May 18, separating only when Danika walked to her history class on the opposite end of the campus and Kyle headed to art.
“I love you, my boy,” she said, “I’ll see you when we walk to third period.”
“I love you too, my girl,” Kyle called over his shoulder.
They had planned to leave school early, as soon as Danika finished a test that morning. With summer right around the corner, the duo was eager to put distance between themselves and their school work.
Danika spent most of first period flirting with sleep. She barely noticed when her history teacher stepped out but jolted up when she heard a teacher down the hall yelling: “Get in! Get in!”
No one in her classroom knew what was happening, but some seniors began grabbing desks and chairs to barricade the door. Then, a fire alarm went off. Her class of terrified teens grew confused when they saw classmates walking by, laughing and talking like they were going through the motions of a fire drill. The teens figured they overreacted, unblocked the door and began to drift outside.
Danika’s phone buzzed when she stepped onto the grass behind the school in a field. It was a text from Kyle:
They’re shooting in my classroom What, Danika replied. They’re shooting my classroom What? Are you okay? Kyle don’t stop texting me Later, authorities would tell Danika that a 17-year-old student walked into Kyle’s classroom, carrying a .38-caliber revolver, a shotgun and duffel bag filled with homemade explosives and ammunition. He walked through the art hallway and into the open door of classroom H117, which was connected to Kyle’s classroom by a shared supply closet, office and kiln room.
Kyle and his classmates tried to run out a back door. It was locked. One student tried to throw a stool through an 8-foot-long window but it bounced off the laminated safety glass.
Danika would learn that as the gunman unleashed a volley on those in Kyle’s classroom, her brother and a classmate grabbed an injured substitute teacher and dragged her into the supply closet between the two art classrooms. The other boy was holding the door shut when bullets ripped through the plastic laminate. The boy — later identified as Christian Riley Garcia — fell as cans of paint and bottles of glitter exploded around him. A bullet pierced Kyle near his left armpit, Danika learned later, severing his brachial artery. I got hit in the arm, Kyle texted Danika. Are you okay, no Kyle Tell them I’m in the art hallway. Get me. Hello? Please I’m crying and I’m scared
I told them, play dead, Danika typed back.
I can’t. We’re hidden, but we had a sub and we’re hiding but I think a kid is dead
The sound of three gunshots ripped through the humid air, sending Danika and a group of students and teachers bolting across Texas 6 to a gas station on the other side of the road. I love you so much, she texted her brother.
I love you too but I don’t think there’s anyone coming and we couldn’t get outside
Minutes ticked by without another message from the 15-yearold.
Kyle, Kyle let me know you’re okay somehow, Danika texted. Kyle I love you, I love you so much you’re my best friend. You’re a fighter, you fight. You’re the purest and most beautiful person I know. You’re going to make it No reply.
If anyone sees this, please let me know something
No reply.
My boy, you’re going to be okay
No reply.
I love you
No reply.
‘Your wife saved my daughter’
The day after the shooting, Steve Perkins’ phone rang.
“You don’t know me,” a woman said. “But your wife saved my daughter, and she wants to meet you.”
The day before, Shelby and Tabitha Sosa had first-period gym class with the girls volleyball team. Near the end of class, they heard the school’s fire alarm.
It was not until they passed the nearby dance classroom that they heard a loud pop.
Almost instinctively, students ducked and began racing to the double doors that led to a parking lot behind the school, unknowingly running right into the gunman’s line of fire from the art hallway.
Just before she reached the doors, Shelby froze.
“I stopped right there, and I looked over and I saw him,” she said, describing a teenager wearing a black trench coat with a shotgun at his side.
She turned to look for Tabitha, who bolted past. She saw Officer John Barnes crouched behind a corner, preparing to edge out so he could get a shot at the boy with the gun. The teen fired first, striking Barnes in the elbow, causing the veteran officer to nearly bleed to death from a gaping hole in his forearm.
Shelby did not see the blast. Ann Perkins, who had been subbing for another teacher in the gymnasium, pushed her through the double doors to safety.
At that moment, the gunman turned and fired at Perkins, hitting her in the chest, killing her in the spot where Shelby had stood a fraction of a second earlier. Another shot tore through substitute teacher Flo Rice’s legs, shattering her left femur and shredding her right thigh as she ran right behind Perkins.
Shelby glanced back at the doors, just in time to see both women fall to the ground.
Two days later, with tears and terror still etched on her face, she and Tabitha went to Steve Perkins’ home, and poured out the story of how Ann had saved Shelby’s life.
Perkins later said he was humbled by how open the girls and their mother Christina were, and by their gratitude.
Since then, not a month has gone by without a visit.
Sometimes Perkins and the Sosa twins will go to restaurants around town, the same ones Ann would walk into and chat with friends for 20 minutes before taking a seat herself. Other times they go to Perkins’ house to play board games.
A couple of months after the start of their sophomore year, the Sosa twins and their mother decided to transfer to another school district. While they were traumatized by the shooting, many students who were on the other side of campus during the rampage were not. Some would make offcolor jokes about May 18; one told Shelby she was the reason Ann Perkins died.
They found more comfort in their new school in the nearby Clear Creek Independent School District but still suffered from the memories of that terrible day.
Perkins texts them weekly to see how they are they are holding up.
“They’re such beautiful girls, so original, so very well-mannered,” he said. “You can’t help but love them.”
Shelby said she knows that if she ever has a breakdown, she can count on Perkins to help. Instead of making her feel guilty for his wife’s death, she said, he made the twins part of his extended family. A couple of weeks ago, Shelby asked if they could spend May 18 with him. They plan to go over to his house, swim in his pool and talk.
“We’re always going to be grateful for what Mrs. Perkins did,” Shelby said. “It sucks it had to be in an unfortunate way, how we met Steve. But he has impacted our lives so much.”
Going back
At 10 a.m. on the first day of Danika’s senior year, she still was in her pajamas.
She got up briefly at 7 a.m. to feed Clay but soon went back to sleep. When she awoke, she watched some TV before heading to her part-time job at Freddy’s Frozen Custards & Steakburgers.
This was not how senior year was supposed to be.
She was supposed to have two periods of band. She was supposed to play ice-breakers on the first day and mentor middle schoolers through a volunteer program. She was supposed to take a food science course with Kyle and text him jokes while they pretended to study. Now what? She was uncertain of much in those grief-filled months after the shooting, but she was sure she did not want to go back to Santa Fe High School.
The first time she returned to campus for summer band practice, she began to shake uncontrollably. She slipped sunglasses over her eyes to hide the tears and could not remember her locker combination — the same three numbers she had twisted into the dial for three years.
A few days after the new school year began, a guidance counselor gave her an ultimatum: come back to school to take classes in person or give up band. Losing one of the few tethers to her life before the massacre was too high a price, so on Aug. 28, Danika walked back into Santa Fe High School.
She had learned to play clarinet in sixth grade, eventually working
her way to one of the top chairs in the high school band, picking up the saxophone along the way. The band directors selected her as band president a week before the shooting. Though musically talented, it was the marching practice that proved the best distraction that first semester.
Standing in a field flanked by her bandmates, Danika had no time to think about the massacre. Her steps had to be perfect. She needed to yell commands. Is Jasmine in the right spot? How quickly should she turn during those 16 counts?
Her friends called her return a triumph, but for Danika, it was terrifying.
She was unable to sit through an entire class period as thoughts of the shooting raced through her mind. She would get up and walk the halls, often wandering into White’s room or the school’s new wellness center, located steps away from the scene of Kyle’s murder. Sometimes, she just lay down in a dark room and tried to sleep.
White would keep bottles of water and snacks in her room for her. Even on days when Danika would only mumble responses to her questions, White saw her as an inspiration.
“Because sometimes even I struggle and I look at her and go, if Danika can do it, if she can get through it, I can too,” White said. “The way she looks to me, I’m looking back at her the same way and thinking ‘My God, I just need that strength she has.’”
Danika’s support network helped her persevere, but few things helped as much as the anti-anxiety medication she was prescribed in the immediate aftermath of the massacre.
The pills allowed her to function through the grips of panic attacks that happened almost daily since the shooting.
Still, her pain got worse during the holidays. Christmas, in particular, felt like a gut punch.
The family went on a cruise. Without the routine of school and work, Danika slipped back into misery.
“It’s just weird having breaks. During breaks, me and Kyle would be together the whole time,” she said. “Now, I’m just kind of alone in the house. It just never got any better, I guess, and I was expecting it to.”
At some point after the new year, Danika stopped taking her anti-anxiety medication. At first, she told herself it was a sign of progress, but it was not long before she felt worse.
February was especially tough. Danika turned 18 on the 11th. Kyle would have turned 16 on the 20th. What should have been two momentous birthdays left her feeling hollow.
“It’s just really draining to go through all that stuff without him,” she said.
At the same time, she started going to school less frequently.
She never went a full week, even in the fall. Her absences never added up — the school was lenient with students affected by the shooting.
By the end of February, she had stopped going altogether.
She signed up to complete her English, science and history credits online, lured to finish with the promise of still being able to attend prom and being able to walk across the stage with her class at graduation.
She also began sharing less with her classmates and school friends, sensing that her grief was holding them back from healing. No one ever told her that directly, but she could tell they would just want to go to lunch and talk about the mundanities of teen life, math lessons and who was dating whom. Danika could think of only Kyle.
“I still talk to my friends from school and we still do stuff, but I definitely withdrew a lot because it’s just different,” she said. “After a while, I felt like I was just living in the past, and they were all trying to move on. I felt bad.”
Her work friends began to play a much larger role in her life, partly due to proximity, partly because they are not connected to Santa Fe High School.
Clay may be her greatest source of comfort now.
In November, Danika began taking him to PTSD service training, teaching him how to recognize the symptoms of her panic attacks. He will flop his now-100pound frame on top of her, licking her face to help pull her out of despair. She runs her fingers through his fur, paying attention to the physical sensations to distract her from thoughts of her brother’s death. He reminds her to take her antianxiety medication in the mornings, and she is back on that routine.
He came with her to Galveston, where she curled her hair and prepared for prom in early May. She, Azia, Shelby and others stood in front of a jasmine covered wall in Galveston’s historic Strand district, striking poses and trying to coach Clay into a sitting position. She wore a floorlength peach gown and clasped her arms around her girlfriends for Instagram photos.
Prom itself felt like an escape, even with the addition of metal-detectors at the entrance. Danika and her friends danced all night.
Principal Rachel Blundell said this year’s prom was the most attended in Santa Fe High’s history.
The next step on the road to normalcy for Danika and her classmates is graduation, less than three weeks away. Danika already plans to wear Kyle’s name on a necklace as she walks across the stage. Then, what? Danika concedes she does not have a clear vision of her future. She is looking forward to a trip to Europe this summer, an excursion organized by several Santa Fe High teachers. She also expects to move out on her own later this year, perhaps enrolling in community college. Eventually, she wants to move back to California, somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area.
Up next, though, was the first anniversary of the worst day of her life. A smattering of events were planned, including a Resiliency Day at the county fairgrounds, a memorial motorcycle ride and a kickball tournament organized by some teachers.
Danika did not plan to take part in any of the commemorations. She was not sure what she would do. Maybe go out with friends to try to keep her mind off of it.
Maybe just stay in bed.