Alaina Petty
Three feet of mud and raw sewage had flooded downtown Everglades City after Hurricane Irma by the time Alaina Petty arrived with shovels and volunteers from the Mormon Helping Hands program.
With her father, Ryan Petty, Alaina visited families stranded without electricity, mucking out flooded homes with shovels and rakes, cutting drywall, moving destroyed furniture, comforting people who lost everything in the storm.
This was Alaina in a nutshell: selfless and ready to serve. “On the drive back home – we were very tired – but I couldn’t help but feel that all of the kids, including Alaina, felt grateful for what they did,” Petty recalls. “What we hope people never forget about Alaina is she was ready to be your friend.”
When she wasn’t dedicated to community service, Alaina Joann Petty, 14, loved shooting at the gun range with her dad. She also loved her dogs Diego and Leo, and camping with her youth group from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Coral Springs.
At Stoneman Douglas, Alaina excelled as a Junior ROTC cadet, following her older brother Patrick, whom she idolized, into the program. “I thought she joined JROTC to get out of P.E.,” Petty says. “Then she won cadet of the quarter in December [2017] — it’s remarkable. Her older brother was really jealous.” The U.S. Army posthumously awarded her with a Medal of Heroism.
The youngest of four children — Ian, Meghan and Patrick — Alaina moved from Washington state to Florida when she was 10, and is remembered by friends and family for her bright smile and love of Miami pop star Camila Cabello and bachata music, her sister Meghan says.
“She was happiest when she was helping others,” Meghan told the Eagle Eye, Stoneman Douglas’ student newspaper. “She would spend her weekends going to soup kitchens and just doing things that helped others’ lives […] She felt the most comfortable when she was sweating, working hard and making a difference.”
Ryan Petty says donations in Alaina’s memory may be made to the WalkUp Foundation, a nonprofit raising funds for mental-health programs, which has partnered with the Columbia Lighthouse Project and Sandy Hook Promise.