Santa Fe shooting survivor talks solutions, long-term impact
Flo Rice was a substitute teacher at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, the day a teenage gunman killed 10 people — eight students and two teachers — and injured 13 others, including Rice.
Bullets shattered bones and splintered nerve endings in Rice’s legs. Once an avid runner, she now has an 18-inch titanium rod in her left leg, needs a cane to get around and suffers from PTSD. She has also become an advocate for better safety training for substitute teachers. Editorial board member Monica Rhor talked to Rice about her life now and what can be done to prevent future shootings.
Q: We had three mass shootings in the span of a week — Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton — and since Santa Fe, according to one measure, 14 others with three or more fatalities. How do these shootings affect you as a survivor?
A: It throws me back into the moment and all the trauma that happened afterward, just trying to deal with the shock of what’s happened. I still have severe PTSD. I don’t get out much, but it’s really been hard for me even to get out to my therapy. Just knowing what these people are going through, it breaks my heart. If you survive, the rest of your life has been turned upside down. It will never be the same again.
Q: How do you cope with that?
A: Well, I have a therapist. I have a psychiatrist. You name it. I try to focus on the positive. I’m very thankful for my family and for my friends and the support from my community. So I just try to remember that every day’s a new day.,.
It’s scary because I’m not afraid for myself. I’m afraid for my children now. At first I was concerned about their safety in the school. Now they’re at university, and I’m afraid for their safety at the university. I’m afraid for their safety when they go shopping, when they go to a concert, anything. It’s a neverending anxiety that I have.
Q: Are you satisfied with the response to Santa Fe?
A: I was very, very pleased
that the governor put in a school safety act. Rep. (Greg) Bonnen came to my home and listened to my concerns about the lack of training and resources for substitute teachers. That was put into the act. So I’m very pleased with what they tried to do as far as hardening the schools and making the school safer.
That being said, it was disappointing that we have to wait two more years for many other things to try again that we didn’t get done. There was holding parents responsible, just to have them lock their guns up, these types of things that we were trying to have strengthened did not get done. So maybe things were done to make schools safer. But overall as far as the community and other places in public, I don’t feel like we’ve made any great strides in safety.
Q: What are some of the other things that you would like to see happen?
A: We have never had a third-party investigation into the Santa Fe School shooting. (Marjory) Stoneman Douglas
(in Parkland, Fla.) did. The Florida governor made sure they had an investigation to identify what went wrong, the things that led up to that. Were there red flags going off and we should have identified those? That the school should have identified? … We need a commission. We need those things put on paper and identified so we can learn from them.
We need an investigation to understand what happened to prevent this from happening again.
Q: What else do you think should be done?
A: Background checks need to be much more stringent, and parents need to be held accountable because that was an issue obviously with the shooter in Santa Fe. Had they been made to lock their guns up and held accountable if they were not, maybe those guns would have been locked up and that kid never would have gotten to them.
Q: What is your position on gun control and bans on assault weapons?
A: I personally don’t see the need for people to have access to those weapons and certainly not 21-year-olds or 19-yearolds. It’s ridiculous. But I do know that a shotgun can be used for a massacre just as well because that’s what our shooter had.
Q: So it can’t just be gun control and it can’t just be mental illness treatment?
A: I really believe that there should be stronger background checks, and there needs to be something done so this information is communicated. Congressman (Brian) Babin has the TAPS Act, which is behavioral threat assessment that will allow communication from schools to police forces and all across the nation to hopefully mitigate some of these threats of violence.
Q: But you also think there should be resources for mental illness?
A: Having resources in the school to identify someone doesn’t mean that that student is mentally ill. It just may mean that there are things going very wrong in their home life that can trigger them into doing something.
With our case, it was the Columbine effect. He wore a trench coat for months. It was hot and humid in the summer and he was still wearing a trench coat. That should have been a red flag to someone to say something’s not right here.
Q: When something such as El Paso happens, do you think about what all those families will have to go through?
A: Yes, my heart goes out to them for it. You’re victimized. You’re traumatized. And then there’s more. All the financial aspects of it. Your world stops and the rest of the world keeps going. There’s no one there really to help you pick up the pieces.