Student who helped cops nab shooter returns to school
His foot shot up, Kyle Laman managed to run outside to give a description
Before his three surgeries, before 16 excruciating days in the hospital, 15-year-old Kyle Laman helped identify the man who shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Kyle came face to face in the hallway with shooter Nikolas Cruz, who fired a bullet into his foot as he dove for the ground. After hobbling away, Kyle told police what the suspect was wearing and what he looked like — a description that helped them nab Cruz about an hour later on the street.
Kyle finally returned to
school last week, still in a wheelchair. The freshman would prefer to skip the fuss around his return — or his part in helping cops nab the shooter, according to his mother.
“I just wanted to see some of my friends,” said Kyle, who will be facing more surgeries before he can walk again.
On the day of the shooting at Stoneman Douglas, Kyle was in Room 1249, on the third floor of the 1200 building.
As the end of the school day neared, Kyle had finished his work in a study hall and was watching friends play chess.
Then the fire alarm went off. Everyone left the classroom.
And because a door locked behind them as they left the room, they found themselves trapped in the hallway with bullets flying, Kyle said.
About 90 seconds after leaving study hall, Kyle said he encountered Cruz. It was the first time he had ever seen him.
It seemed completely unreal to Kyle that Cruz was a shooter and not part of some sort of shooting drill, he said.
Cruz fired as Kyle dove to the ground, he said. Kyle still thought it was a simulation round, the kind used for non-lethal training, he said. “Then I was like, ‘Wow. That hurt,’ ” he recalled.
Still, he started running. And the situation became more terrifyingly real.
A student’s body was in his path.
He also remembers seeing Coach Aaron Feis, one of the 17 killed.
“I had to move Coach Feis’ body out of the way,” he said, because Feis was in a doorway.
He tried his best to run with his wounded foot.
“It was hurting, but I had to run,” he said. “It was painful. It was burning.”
He ran to the senior parking lot and kept getting farther from the school.
Along the way, he found Sgt. Jeff Heinrich, a Coral Springs police officer.
Heinrich was off duty, doing his regular, volunteer maintenance of the school’s baseball diamond, where his son played.
The sound of a second volley of what sounded like fireworks at first made Heinrich drop his work and run to the school.
“I saw other kids running, but Kyle was the first who was looking for an adult,” Heinrich recalled.
Kyle gave Heinrich a description of the shooter that was “spot on,” Heinrich said.
Heinrich bandaged him up. In retrospect, he still can’t believe that the boy was running on that foot.
“He severed one of the tendons that allows the foot to go up and down,” he said. “The doctors said they were amazed he was able to run also.”
After administering first aid, Heinrich got Kyle to paramedics.
Meanwhile, Kyle’s friends were getting word that he was among the wounded. Dylan Persaud, 14, also a freshman, thought it was a joke at first.
“One of my friends texted that Kyle had been shot, but I thought he was just messing around,” he said.
Kyle’s mother, Marie Laman, got a phone call, but she couldn’t understand what her son was saying.
“I said, ‘What? You want lunch money?” she said. They got disconnected. From the ambulance, Kyle sent out a picture of his wounded right foot.
The hole was about the size of a fist, his mother recalled. She could see the bones inside.
And so began one long roller-coaster ride of surgeries and slow progress. At one point, doctors told the family that if a surgery didn’t go well, they would have to amputate his foot.
Right now, the front of his foot where his leg attaches has swelling the size of a grapefruit.
“It looks like something’s going to pop out of there,” his mother said.
“Maybe my extra head,” Kyle said, joking back.
Kyle attended the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24. To get there, he and others in the group flew in the airplane that the New England Patriots lent the cause.
He didn’t participate in the onstage part of the rally, but he, his family, his surgeons and the Coral Springs’ police sergeant’s family went to spend some time backstage.
“We got to try on Super Bowl rings,” Marie Laman said, scrolling through a gallery of pictures she took of that and some of the celebrities they met. They included actor George Clooney and singers Cher, Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson. He also met former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a shooting survivor, and her husband.
Kyle said he greeted Jimmy Kimmel, saying, “Hey Jimmy Fallon.”
“He sat on me for that,” he said.
Kyle said he supports changes to gun laws. It spread a smile on his face to hear that state Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, mentioned him by name on the floor of the Senate on March 5, when she announced her support for the new age requirement to purchase a semi-automatic gun.
“They should make it really hard to get one of those,” Kyle said.
Meanwhile, Kyle has made steady progress toward his recovery. He now is able to hop upstairs to his normal bedroom, so he doesn’t have to sleep in a hospital bed in the living room.
The biggest milestone to improvement was getting out of the “external fixator” — a contraption of metal rods through his foot designed to keep him from moving his foot.
Despite being shot in the foot, Kyle said he never considered withdrawing from Stoneman Douglas.
On April 2, Kyle showed up to school accompanied by Sgt. Heinrich for a halfday run through his schedule.
Last Tuesday, Kyle’s first full day back to school, Coral Springs Commissioner Larry Vignola pushed him in his wheelchair around campus.
Vignola said it was moving to watch Kyle welcomed back.
“Honestly, there was a genuine, sincere love coming from these kids. You could see it was part of the healing process for them, too,” Vignola said. “All the people came and gave him hugs. There were some tears.”
After the shooting, loud noises startle Kyle, and he has nightmares about that day. “I get dreams of the hallways,” he said. Still, Kyle said he felt no fear being back at school.