Surviving Parkland
A teen’s road to recovery after a mass school shooting
CORAL SPRINGS, Fla.—Marie Laman carefully removes a black bow tie from its box and slips it around her son’s neck. It’s his first bow tie, for his first formal dance. A moment for a mother to savor.
“I don’t want to do this,” Kyle says. He is slumped on his bed, tugging at the sleeves of his dress shirt. “This is so stupid.”
Marie, still struggling with the tie’s clasp, doesn’t respond. Suddenly, Kyle shoves her away.
“You’re choking me,” he says. “Stop. Stop!”
He stands and retreats to the bathroom, slamming the door.
“Franz,” Marie calls for her husband. “You need to take over.” She goes to her bedroom and tells herself to take 10 deep breaths.
Once, Kyle had been excited for the Military Ball, a springtime event to honor the students in the junior ROTC program. He and his friends were going to rent a limo. They were going to dance all night.
But now the 15-year-old can’t dance, thanks to a heavy medical boot that encases his foot and calf. Some other students are skipping the event entirely, still too traumatized to handle large crowds.
And three of Kyle’s JROTC classmates who should be at the ball are dead. They were among the 17 people killed when a gunman attacked the freshman building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14. Kyle, who came face-toface with the shooter in a thirdfloor hallway strewn with bodies, escaped with a bullet wound to his foot. Doctors told his parents it would be a year before he could walk normally again.
No one can say how long it will take his mental scars to heal.
It’s April, two months since the day Kyle was shot. He still has the rest of this difficult school year ahead of him, then a long and lonely summer packed with doctor appointments instead of days at the beach. He and his parents, still learning to navigate the universal trials of adolescence, now also face the lingering horror of a mass shooting.
The teenager has days when he doesn’t want to leave the house and can’t focus at school. Sometimes his frustration flares in an angry outburst; sometimes he just wants to hole up in his room and play video games alone.
Marie and Franz aren’t sure how much is standard 15-year-old behavior and what is the vestige of trauma. They don’t know how to help or whether he can be helped at all.
“It’s hard to raise a teenager as it is,” Marie says. “You add this on top of it and it’s nearly impossible… . I just don’t want to mess him up even more than he already is.”
On the night of the ball, it’s Franz who finally leads Kyle back to his room and finishes tying the bow tie. Fishing trophies line the boy’s bed frame and dramatic music streams from a video game on the computer—Digital Combat Simulator World.
“I look so fat in this thing,” Kyle complains. The teen, who once spent weekends riding his dirt bike and chasing friends around an Airsoft arena with a BB gun, is self-conscious after weeks on bed rest and in a wheelchair. “It doesn’t fit. I don’t want to go to this stupid thing.”
“Come on, ROTC,” Franz says. “You want to fight in that”—he gestures toward the image of a fighter jet on the computer screen—“you got to wear that.”
“You look nice,” Marie says when the teenager is fully dressed.
But Kyle just grimaces. “Why is this so difficult?”
“You’re making it difficult,” his father replies.
Marie touches Kyle’s shoulder. “Smile.”
“I don’t want to smile.”
Kyle turns, heads outside, slams the door.
Marie looks at Franz and echoes their son: “This is so hard.”
Of course, it had been hard before. Marie was always ragging on Kyle to clean his room. Franz tried to encourage him to stay focused on school.
“But that was normal,” Marie says. They had worked so hard for normal—family dinners Thursday nights at the local Chinese buffet, weekend trips to Daytona and Disney, a house in a gated subdivision with a pool and a yard where they could play with their placid American bulldog, Katie. Their most persistent source of stress was shuttling the kids from school to sleepovers to extracurricular activities—dirt biking and Fire Explorers club for Kyle, singing lessons and acting auditions for his 12-year-old sister, Mya.
Marie, a benefits coordinator for the city of Boca Raton, Florida, had been raised by a single mother, with two siblings and few luxuries. Franz, a mechanic at a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, car dealership, immigrated from Jamaica with his family when he was 12.
“We tried to give them the life we didn’t have,” Marie said.
The previous fall, they had moved to this leafy Coral Springs neighborhood expressly so Kyle could attend Stoneman Douglas High—the best school in the county, in the safest city in the state.
Months later, with a single bullet, their normal was shattered.
Since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, at least 141 students, staffers and others have been killed in shootings at more than 200 schools and college campuses, a Washington Post analysis has found.
An additional 287 people have been injured, Kyle among them. There are scores of families like the Lamans—striving to support a loved one in physical and mental anguish, struggling to navigate an experience most parents can’t imagine and most children can’t put into words.
Marie was at work when she got Kyle’s call. She could barely make sense of what he was saying over the chaos in the background. “Mom, I was shot.” “What?”
“I was shot!”
A paramedic took the phone. They were at Kyle’s school. They were taking him to Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale. She should come right away.
Even as she ran to her car, “I was thinking it was a BB gun. I was thinking it was a little hole,” Marie recalled. Kyle’s JROTC program practiced with air rifles. There had probably been an accident. She knew how things go with kids.
And despite what had so recently taken place in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas, despite Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino, Calif., and Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., and Virginia Tech and Columbine, the thought of a mass shooting didn’t cross her mind.
But emergency vehicles kept screaming past her as she drove down Interstate 95.
She found her son in the trauma unit. His foot was swathed in heavy bandages, and he was surrounded by what seemed like dozens of law enforcement agents, machine guns in their arms, their expressions grave.
“Mom,” the teenager was crying. “There were bodies everywhere. There was a guy with an AR-15. I saw people die.”
By then the hospital was on lockdown. Kyle was being wheeled into surgery. The bandages on his leg were removed, and Marie saw the softball-size chunk of flesh missing from the top of his right foot where a high-velocity bullet had torn through skin, soft tissue and muscle. There were little bits of grass and dirt in the wound.
“And then,” she recalled. “It just got real.”
Kyle’s injury was not life-threatening, his doctors said, but it nearly cost him his ability to walk.
The bullet severed the major vessels that carry blood to the foot, as well as his tibialis anterior tendon, which contracts to lift the foot off the ground.
Had it struck any deeper, it would have hit bone and “exploded his foot,” said Christopher Low, a reconstructive specialist who operated on Kyle.
In an eight-hour procedure five days after the shooting, Low and fellow surgeon Michael Cheung repaired the tendon and covered the wound with a flap of tissue taken from his left thigh. Painstakingly, they attached blood vessels in the transplanted tissue to the fragmented structures in his foot, restoring blood flow to the limb. Then they installed an external fixator to hold his ankle in place while the tendon healed.
“That operation essentially salvaged his leg,” Cheung said.
Kyle awoke from the surgery screaming, Franz recalled. The memory haunts him still. “There was nothing I could do.”
The morning after the military ball, Marie learns that the event included a moment of silence for three slain members of the JROTC program: Peter Wang, 15; Alaina Petty, 14; and Martin Duque, 14.
There were also plans to honor Kyle with a Purple Heart, but the boy asked for the medal to be given to him in private. He didn’t want them to make a big deal about him, and he hates any mention of the shooting.
“It was remembering,” is all he says. “I didn’t like it.”
But reminders are inescapable: In the hallways of his school, where he now moves in a wheelchair and can tolerate only a few hours at a time. In the #MSDStrong placards posted in restaurant windows and the motivational messages painted on the mirror at his physical-therapy clinic. In the visitors who flock to his house bearing casseroles and good intentions, wanting to know how he feels. In strangers’ lingering stares and unsubtle whispers: “That’s one of the kids who was shot.”
Sometimes, Kyle says, he wishes he had died in the shooting. He didn’t think survival would be so hard.
“I just want to be normal,” he tells his mother.
“You are normal.”
“I’m not.”
Marie doesn’t know how to respond.
“There’s no mom handbook on this,” she says.
She and her husband probe around the edges of Kyle’s pain. Franz draws him into the garage to apply new decals to the dirt bike he still can’t ride. Marie scrolls through photos of her son on Instagram, peering at his facial expressions in an attempt to divine how the 15-year-old is feeling.
She drives to a child psychiatrist in Fort Lauderdale to talk about treatment. But when she brings up the visit, Kyle blurts out “No!”
Then, in a joking tone, “The only therapy I need is Jesus.”
Marie gives him a stern look but doesn’t press the issue. A parent has to pick her battles.
So many times, when Kyle has gone days without showering, or spent hours playing video games alone in his room, or asked yet again to be picked up early from school, she has told him, “You’re at a crossroads right now.”
“What happened can tear you down. It can make you weaker. Or it can build you up,” she says. “Try to take this negative event and make it a positive.”
This, she believes, is her job now. She couldn’t keep her son safe. But she can help make him strong.
But Kyle has never been one to seize the spotlight. He’s not like those kids at his school, the ones who were tweeting about gun control even as they hid in their classrooms, whose eloquent rage turned their tragedy into a rallying cry for change.
Sometimes, he’s not even sure he agrees with those kids. Kyle, who dreams of entering the Air Force as a fighter pilot, has always been more comfortable with guns than most of his classmates. Before the shooting, he spent much of his free time in Airsoft arenas, shooting BB pellets out of replica rifles. The only thing keeping him from playing right now is the heavy boot on his injured foot.
“I like guns,” he says. “I like shooting at things. But, like, targets. Not people.”
What Kyle really wants, more than any megaphone, is to get back in the arena, back on his bike, back on his feet. To be the boy he was on Feb. 13.
The first time Marianne Sheehan met Kyle, “I knew I was seeing someone who was going to need help,” she says. “But no parent wants to accept that or see it.”
Sheehan, a 26-year-old Air Force veteran and firefighter, had never met the teenager before. She had flown down from Vermont in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas shooting to deliver a handmade wooden American flag to the school. Mutual friends connected her with Kyle’s family, and she offered to come by his hospital room with her service dog, Cooper.