What happens to kids who survive school shootings?
Beyond injuries and death tolls, many suffer psychological impact of trauma
Thirteen at Columbine. Twenty-six at Sandy Hook. Seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Over the past two decades, a handful of massacres that have come to define school shootings in this country are almost always remembered for the students and educators slain. Death tolls are repeated so often that the numbers and places become permanently linked.
What those figures fail to capture, though, is the collateral damage of this uniquely American crisis. Beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours, according to a yearlong Washington Post analysis. This means that the number of children who have been shaken by gunfire in the places they go to learn exceeds the population of Eugene, Ore., or Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Many are never the same. School shootings remain extremely rare, representing a tiny fraction of the gun violence epidemic that, on average, leaves a child bleeding or dead every hour in the United States. While few of those incidents happen on campuses, the ones that do spread fear across the country, changing the culture of education and how kids grow up.
Every day, threats send classrooms into lockdowns that can frighten students, even when they turn out to be false alarms. Thousands of schools conduct active-shooter drills in which kids as young as 4 hide in darkened closets and bathrooms from imaginary murderers.
“It’s no longer the default that going to school is going to make you feel safe,” said Bruce D. Perry, a psychiatrist and one of the country’s leading experts on childhood trauma. “Even kids who come from middle-class and uppermiddle-class communities literally don’t feel safe in schools.”
Samantha Haviland understands the waves of fear created by the attacks as well as anyone.
At 16, she survived the carnage at Columbine High, a seminal moment in the evolution of modern school shootings. Now 35, she is the director of counseling for Denver’s public school system and has spent almost her entire professional life treating traumatized kids. Yet, she’s never fully escaped the effects of what happened to her on that morning in Littleton, Colo. The nightmares, always of being chased, lingered for years. Even now, the images of children walking out of schools with their hands up is too much for her to bear.
On Saturday, some of Haviland’s students, born in the years after Columbine, will participate in the Denver March for Our Lives to protest school gun violence. In Washington, students from Parkland, Fla. — still grieving the friends and classmates they lost last month — will lead a rally of as many as 500,000 people in the nation’s capital.
More than 800 similar events are planned worldwide Saturday to peacefully protest gun violence, including a march in Santa Fe organized by students from over a dozen schools across Northern New Mexico. The demonstration is scheduled to begin at noon at the state Capitol and will proceed to a rally on the downtown Plaza, where 16 students are scheduled to speak, as well as U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and newly elected Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber.
Haviland recalled how much her community and schoolmates blamed themselves for the inexplicable attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. “These students are saying, ‘No, no — these things are happening because you all can’t figure it out.’ They’re angry, and I think that anger is appropriate. And I hope they don’t let us get away with it.”
Mass shootings at predominantly white schools draw the most attention from journalists and lawmakers, but The Post has found that children of color are far more likely to experience campus gun violence — nearly twice as much for Hispanic students and three times for black students.
In analyzing school shootings, The Post defined them far more narrowly than others who have compiled data over the past few years. Everytown for Gun Safety’s tally, for example, contains episodes of gunfire even on late nights and weekends, when no students or staff were present. The Gun Violence Archive disregards those events but does include others that occur at extracurricular activities, such as football games and dances.
The Post only counted incidents that happened immediately before, during or just after classes to pinpoint the number of students who were present and affected at the time. Shootings at after-hours events, accidental discharges that caused no injuries, and suicides that occurred privately or didn’t pose a threat to other children were excluded, though many of these can be
deeply disturbing. Gunfire at colleges and universities, which affect young adults rather than children, also were excluded.
In total, The Post found an average of 10 school shootings per year since Columbine, with a low of five in 2002 and a high of 15 in 2014. Less than three months into 2018, there have been 11 shootings, already making this year among the worst on record.
At least 129 kids, educators, staff and family members have been killed in assaults during school hours, and another 255 have been injured. But the analysis went much deeper than that, exploring the types of attacks, the impact on minority students, the role of armed resource officers, the weapons used and where they were obtained, and the characteristics of shooters.
Schools in at least 36 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a shooting, according to The Post’s count. They happen in big cities and small towns, in affluent suburbs and rural communities. The precise circumstances in each incident differed, but what all of them had in common was the profound damage they left behind.
The day had just begun at the high school in Memphis, Tenn., when a sophomore walked up to a senior during gym class and pointed a .22-caliber pistol at him. In a room packed with 75 students on that morning in 2008, Corneilous Cheers, 17, opened fire, striking his schoolmate in the leg, the groin and the head. As his rival bled on the floor, Cheers turned to their gym teacher at Mitchell High and handed him the gun. “It’s over now,” the teen said. The term “school shooting” most often conjures a black-clad gunman roaming the hallways, firing at anyone he sees, but those attacks are considerably less common than the ones aimed at specific victims.
Cheers, for example, shot the other teen after a feud that peaked, investigators said, in an off-campus confrontation days earlier. Although determining motive is not always possible, The Post found that targeted shootings were about three times as common as those that appeared indiscriminate.
This underscores just how difficult it is for schools to stop most shooters, particularly in a country with more than 250 million guns. The majority intend to harm just one or two people, so the attacks typically end within seconds, leaving little or no time for staff to intervene.
Keeping weapons out of schools has proved just as difficult. At Mitchell High, students had passed through metal detectors one week earlier, but they weren’t being used the day Cheers brought his pistol into the building. Even schools that screen students every day sometimes fail to prevent gun violence from spilling onto their campuses.
In targeted shootings, gang members or estranged husbands attack students and educators on campuses simply as a matter of convenience — the perpetrators know where their intended victims will be and when.
A year ago, in San Bernardino, Calif., a man who had long harassed his estranged wife walked into her classroom and, without a word, fired 10 shots from his revolver, killing her and also fatally wounding an 8-yearold. He then took his own life.
In 2016, just as hundreds of students were letting out for the day from Linden-McKinley STEM Academy in Columbus, Ohio, a 16-year-old in a passing car opened fire and wounded two students — one 12, the other 15 — on the front lawn.
Cases such as that one, which was gang-related and didn’t kill anybody, seldom prompt demands for reform. The same is true of accidental shootings that cause injuries (at least 16 since Columbine) and suicides committed in a public space or that included a threat to other students (at least four have occurred over the same period).
The emotional damage children suffer from these shootings, however, can be just as crippling as what others endure during highly publicized assaults. A study published in the journal Pediatrics in 2015 concluded that kids who witness an attack involving a gun or knife can be just as traumatized as children who have been shot or stabbed.
“In some ways, the distress caused, especially when the victim is a child or other close family member, might even be worse,” said Sherry Hamby, a clinical psychologist and co-author of the study. “We don’t do enough to acknowledge the collateral damage of gun violence. We are asking too many to carry this burden.”
One day in 2008, Columbine graduate Haviland sat on the floor of a school library’s back room, the lights off, the door locked. Crouched all around her were teenagers, pretending that someone with a gun was trying to murder them.
No one there knew that Haviland, then a counselor in her mid-20s, had been at Columbine nine years earlier. On that day, April 20, 1999, she had been in the cafeteria, selling chips and soda from a food cart to raise money for the golf team. Haviland, always an overachiever, had taken second place at a tournament the day before and felt so good about it that she’d worn a blue dress and high-heeled clogs to school. As hundreds of kids ate their lunches, she and three friends talked about prom, which they’d gone to the previous weekend.
Then two girls burst into the room. Someone had been shot, they screamed. Someone had a gun.
Haviland froze, but her friends grabbed her, and they fled into the back of an auditorium. Moments later, she heard four or five shots and an explosion. Everyone sprinted out as Haviland briefly paused to take off her shoes. Barefoot, she ran after them and into the hallway, and just as she reached one door, it closed in front of her. A teacher in another part of the building had pulled the fire alarm and, as she would later learn, it saved her life, because down that corridor, Harris and Klebold were slaughtering anyone they could find.
Afterward, as the shock and grief solidified her plan to become a counselor, Haviland didn’t get counseling herself. She didn’t deserve it, she thought, not when classmates had died or been maimed. Many others had suffered far more, Haviland decided. She would be OK.
But now there she was, a decade later, sitting in the darkness, practicing once again to escape what so many of her friends did not. Then she heard footsteps. Then, beneath the door, she saw the shadow of an administrator who was checking the locks. Then her chest began to throb, and her body began to quake and, suddenly, Haviland knew she wouldn’t be OK.
Researchers who study trauma still aren’t certain why people who experience it as children react in such different ways. For some, it doesn’t surface for years, making the effects harder to trace back to their origin. For others, the torment overwhelms them from the start and, in many cases, never lets go.
One high school friend sent Haviland a message online a few weeks ago, saying that, since the Las Vegas, Nev., slaughter this past October, she’d been so stricken with anxiety she could barely leave her house.
A decade ago, after Haviland’s panic attack in the library, she finally got therapy and has come a long way since. She goes to movies and malls and political rallies. She has so often told her story — of hearing the shots, taking off her shoes, sprinting barefoot through the hallways — that telling it again doesn’t wreck her anymore.
She knows, though, that the trauma remains.
Three years ago, someone accidentally pressed a panic button in the school where she was working, signaling to police that a shooter was in the building. Haviland wasn’t there at the time, but she pulled up in her car just as the officers did. Then, in front of her, she saw students streaming outside, their hands in the air.
She began to sob.