Honoring the victims

ONE YEAR LATER:

Victoria Gonzalez (left) hugs Allison Torres, both of whom are students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as they remember those lost during a mass shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Students at the school and other schools across the U.S. bowed their heads in a moment of silence Thursday to mark the anniversary of the shooting rampage that claimed 17 lives.

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How last year’s shooting changed the lives of several survivors,

The name “Parkland” has become a shorthand for the tragedy that many hoped would mark the beginning of the end of school massacres. But ask the survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in more quiet moments about the awful year since last Feb. 14 and they tell you a different, more personal story. About innocence lost. Dreams undone. Grief delayed.

There is the boy who took five bullets to protect his classmates. A hero, the headlines proclaimed. He wanted to be a professional soccer player. “Now I don’t do anything,” he said.

There is the young woman who tells people about her best friend, because if she calls him her boyfriend, it does not seem sufficient to convey what they were. Soul mate: That is what he had told her she was to him. Told her before he died.

And there are the famous faces, the students everyone thinks they know, who on a recent morning stood at a nearby elementary school where a local charity quietly unveiled a mural, the last of 17 community service projects created to honor each of the victims. David Hogg, the one who went on CNN and dared adults to act like one, lay on a basketball court and painted in a hibiscus flower. Emma González, the one who “called BS” on politicians who were not serious about gun control, crouched barefoot before the wall, cut out a paper stencil and sang along to the Beatles’ song, “Here Comes The Sun.”

To think of them, and of this upscale suburban high school, as mere symbols of tragedy ignores the complicated tapestry of sadness, fear and defiance that is now forever part of it — and will be long after the last of these students graduate.

In a series of interviews, nine members of the Stoneman Douglas community — students, parents, police, teachers — reflected on the past 12 months.

They did not want to relive that day. They did not want to argue about politics. They did not want to talk about the gunman’s pending trial for capital murder.

This is what they wanted to do: mourn.

In all the activity of the past year, the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, the tour across the country registering voters, the investigations, the hearings, finishing senior year, getting into college — some said they had not had time to take the measure of what they had lost. As Jammal Levy, 21, a Stoneman Douglas alumnus-turned-activist explained it, “We just had so much going on.”

These are their stories, in their own words.

ABOVE: The Project Grow Love memorial garden at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has stones with the names of each of the 17 people killed in the 2018 Valentine’s Day mass shooting.BELOW: Many supportive signs still surround the school, and many Parkland students have become advocates for gun control legislation and getting young people to vote.