Everyone ran, recalls Irish survivor
AN Irish teenager has told of how she ran from her Florida high school as 17 young people were gunned down.
‘It was really scary because you were running and everyone was running, screaming, and some people were crying,’ 16-year-old Dubliner Adelina Hurley said as she recalled the immediate aftermath of Nikolas Cruz’s shooting spree.
‘People were like climbing the fence just to get out as fast as they could,’ she told RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland.
A quick-thinking teacher led them out of the school on a little-known route to a local shopping centre. As she ran, Adelina called her mother with the words: ‘Mom, I’m running, there is some shooting.’
Adelina told Morning Ireland that when the shooting started, the alarm went off and her teacher started to look worried.
Soon afterwards, they heard a helicopter overhead. However, the students weren’t told what was happening. It was only when they checked the news online that they discovered there was a shooter in the school.
Adelina’s mother, Olga Hurley, called to the school and saw police swamping the streets.
As they were doing so, the suspected gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was escaping with fleeing students and got past the security cordon.
Olga called her daughter and yesterday she described her relief at discovering that Adelina was safe. She said: ‘Once I heard her voice, I knew she would be okay. The panic… I didn’t know what to think. I just kept telling her, “Keep running, keep running, don’t [be] alone”.’
Forty minutes later, Olga was reunited with her daughter. Yesterday she said it felt like the ordeal had lasted hours.
She said: ‘I was so relieved to see my beautiful child in front of me. It’s a gift. Honestly, it’s a blessing.’
The family, who yesterday learned that one of Adelina’s classmates had died in the attack, moved to the US from Clontarf in Dublin six months ago – and bought a house just around the corner from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.