Stoneman Douglas memorial dismantled for preservation
For the past month, 17 white crosses and stars of David have stood on a stately hill along the fence outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, each festooned in posters and balloons, handwritten notes and flowers.
Now, six weeks after the Feb. 14 shooting, this makeshift memorial dedicated to 17 Stoneman Douglas students and teachers had faded in the South Florida sun and rain.
On a windy Wednesday morning, 50 volunteers dressed in burgundy #MSDStrong T-shirts, some overcome by grief and tears, began disassembling each shrine.
The volunteers — Stoneman Douglas alumni, still-grieving parents, childhood friends of Coach Aaron Feis, Meadow Pollack, Nicholas Dworet — gently placed flower bouquets in boxes prepunched with holes.
They plucked spinning pinwheels, some flattened, from the hill. They paused to read notes. They stopped to weep. “We all feel helpless. Everyone’s hurting,” said volunteer Kristy King, of Coral Springs, whose niece, Chloe, swam with Nicholas Dworet at school swim meets.
Dworet, one of 14 children killed in the shooting, would have turned 18 Saturday.
“But you just try to be here anyway, having some sort of impact on the healing,” she said, and gasped. Sorting through Dworet’s memorial, she picked up a framed photo of a blue birthday cake, topped with a butterfly, bearing the message: “Happy birthday to my dear friend.”
The grief felt like this: collective. And necessary.
And King and other volunteers preserving these loving tributes needed to work quickly, because the flowers have withered. Handwritten messages are too raindamaged to read.
“The timing is right,” said Jeff Schwartz, president of the Parkland Historical Society, whose group is leading the salvage effort. “Not only is school out for holiday break, it’s a chance for students to come back and heal with the memorial gone. We need to save it now because it’s degrading — the handwritten notes, the posters, everything.”
Schwartz said he plans to house each collected memorial in climate-controlled rooms at Florida Atlantic University.