Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Volunteers preserve memorial mementos
Fading objects honor victims of Parkland massacre
Sara Lowell found the pencil near the bottom of a shrine to Alex Schachter, beneath the wilted flower bouquets, the spent votive candles, the rain-soaked teddy bears.
The Parkland mother of two had to sit down. On this cold Thursday morning on the manicured field at Pine Trails Park, Lowell twirled the gray mechanical pencil in her fingers. She unstuck the yellow Post-it wrapped around it.
“Alex, I never thought to give you this pencil back,” Lowell read aloud. “Lunch is so hard without you. Love, Tony.” Lowell sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Save
that pencil. Save it,” she told Jamie Lipman-Rodriguez, her friend and one of five volunteers who gathered to disassemble the public memorial dedicated to the slain Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student.
Lowell knew the 14-year-old Schachter through her son, Caleb King. Last November, Schachter, who played trombone, and King, who plays French horn, marched to victory when the school’s Eagles Regiment Marching Band won the state championship in Tampa.
“I told Caleb this morning that if we were given our choice of memorial to clean up, it would be Alex’s,” Lowell said, “because I would handle everything with the utmost care.”
After a month under the South Florida
sun, mementos left for the victims of the Stoneman Douglas shooting have started to fade. Working quickly, Lowell and 40 volunteer conservators wearing burgundy “MSD Strong” T-shirts began harvesting the hundreds of objects left at Pine Trails Park to honor the dead.
“This has been a place for grieving and healing,” said Jeff Schwartz, president of the Parkland Historical Society. “But on the other hand, it’s important to archive this immediately. The initial goal is to get these items out of the weather and into storage.”
Time is the biggest foe, said Schwartz, who leads the morbid task of deconstructing the shrines — withering flowers, heartshaped signs, 17 crucifixes and Stars of David, handpainted stones and handwritten notes, most written with a child’s penmanship.
The other reason for disassembling the memorials now, Parkland Commissioner Ken Cutler added, is to clear space for a March for Our Lives rally, scheduled for March 24 at Pine Trails Park. He says 20,000 people are expected.
“What we’re doing is gathering the collective grief of the community and preserving that to remember these people as living people,” says Cutler, whose wife, Sharon, is a Stoneman Douglas teacher. Two days after the shooting, Cutler called Schwartz to salvage the memorials.
Almost none of the artifacts will be thrown away. The decayed flowers will be incinerated, their ashes scattered over the city’s community gardens. Todd DeAngelis, Parkland’s public information officer, says they contacted all 17 families, inviting each to keep whichever savaged memorials they want.
The rest will be photographed, archived and digitally stored with help from Pam Schwartz (no relation to Jeff ), a curator leading the One Orlando Collection Initiative to preserve Pulse nightclub artifacts. A permanent museum is in the works, and there are plans to unveil the restored objects to the public on Feb. 14, 2019, the first anniversary of the shooting.
After a brief orientation inside a Pine Trails Park clubhouse, volunteers mobilized quickly, each carrying cardboard boxes punched with air holes. The volunteers included members of Schwartz’s historical society, along with Stoneman Douglas alumni and friends of victims’ families.
Volunteer Jeremy Nierenberg, 32, kneeled in front of the memorial for Aaron Feis, his best friend’s brother. Nearby, stuffed teddy bears wearing Stoneman Douglas T-shirts lay facedown in a row on the grass, next to soggy sports jerseys, hats and bandannas left for the beloved football coach and security guard. Plastic flowers lay in a pile nearby.
“None of us should be here,” says Neirenberg, of Tamarac, a 2004 Stoneman Douglas graduate.
Neirenberg paused, collecting his thoughts. “I got to meet his daughter at the Publix deli counter six months ago. It was just a couple of minutes,” he says. His voice wavers. “It sticks in my mind now because it was the last time I saw him.”
A second memorial, which lines the chain-link fence in front of the school, will be deconstructed next, likely after the March 24 rally.
A stiff, cold wind kicked up. Jamie Lipman-Rodriguez, part of Lowell’s volunteer group, stopped a small stack of ink-stained notes written for Schachter from flying away. The Parkland woman is friends with the family of slain 18-year-old student Meadow Pollack.
“I almost didn’t come this morning. I said no at first. I couldn’t,” LipmanRodriguez says. “But it’s the people who knew them who know how to respect and honor the memorials. We’re going to save every page.”