South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Even in pain, some help heal others
Some professions mean reliving the Parkland tragedy, every day
There is no getting away from it. Another package arrives with cards for the dead. Another customer takes a seat at the bar, orders a drink and brings up the tragedy. Another worshiper, unable to sleep, requires comfort and spiritual guidance, preferably with a house call. Another day becomes another day becomes another day, and the horror of what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14 doesn’t recede. It is there all the time, and it is your job to help others in your city make their way through it. It is your job to be strong for them, even if you can’t find the strength to heal yourself.
In the nearly seven months following a shooting massacre that left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded, members of the Parkland community have had to confront what should have been unthinkable. Many of them have taken their grief, their outrage, their fear and their need for change public, from the student activists of March for Our Lives to the parents who have started national campaigns to prevent others from losing their children to gunfire. Their names are known far beyond the city’s borders. But there are others, surely many others, in the community who have been working quietly and passionately to help their neighbors endure this time. This is a story about three of those people.
“You have to be strong for them, too, so whatever they need, you’ll move heaven and Earth to help.”
Dawne Gulla, Coral Springs Marriott bartender
“There’s nothing commendable about a rabbi showing false bravado...if we cry together, we can rebuild together.” Mendy Gutnick,
Chabad of Parkland rabbi
“My only saving grace is the fact that I know I’m doing this for the right reasons.... It’s not about me.”
Jeff Schwartz, Parkland Historical Society historian
Dawne Gulla: Raising the bar
Sitting in her car outside Westglades Middle School on Feb. 14, Dawne Gulla saw two teenage boys charging down the sidewalk and shouting about gunfire. Police cruisers screamed past on Holmberg Road toward Stoneman Douglas High School.
Westglades was on lockdown, and Gulla couldn’t retrieve her 14-year-old daughter, Nicolette. Instead, she offered to give the boys, both Stoneman Douglas students, a ride home.
Moments later, Gulla’s ex-boyfriend, a Broward Sheriff ’s deputy, called her phone. “Is there a kid in your car with a burgundy sweater or jacket?” he asked her. Gulla whipped her head around. She told him there was not. “Ask those kids if they know Nikolas Cruz,” he replied. They didn’t.
Four hours later, about 6 p.m., Westglades released its students, and Gulla drove with her daughter to the Marriott, she works as a bartender and where police sent busloads of students evacuated from Stoneman Douglas. The hotel and conference center, a mile-and-a-half from the school, was the biggest venue available to hold families on short notice. It has continued to serve as a meeting place for post-Parkland activists and a site for therapy sessions.
The scene at the hotel on Feb. 14 was chaotic, Gulla said, with scores of law enforcement and homicide detectives interviewing witnesses of the shooting. Upon arrival, Gulla went to work, offering water and coffee to parents and cops, and food and soothing words to terrified students sequestered in the banquet halls. She worked past midnight as officers continued to tell families the whereabouts of their loved ones.
Gulla wanted to cry, especially when Nicolette learned her former band classmate Alex Schachter died in the shooting. But she kept it together, knowing she needed to appear brave for her daughter and the other families.
“I needed to put on a front for these people, because they needed to get through their day,” Gulla said from behind the bar on a recent Friday. “They needed to get through the memorials and the funerals, gathering their families. You have to be strong for them, too, so whatever they need, you’ll move heaven and Earth to help.”
Hotel guests often want to talk to Gulla about the shooting. They ask her how close the Marriott is to Stoneman Douglas. They ask her if she knows anyone who was at the school that day. She tries to move them off the subject as fast as she can. “You got to keep the conversations short and sweet,” Gulla said. “I don’t like the negativity it brings to our town.”
Gulla feels protective of Parkland. She befriended David Wilford, who stayed at the hotel for six weeks while his 17-year-old daughter, Maddy, recovered from three bullet wounds that left her clinging to life. Gulla often played bodyguard, waiting for the media to leave before inviting David down for free meals.
“Do you have any idea what it was like hiding that man in our hotel?” Gulla asked. “It was like, ‘OK, you can come eat now. They’re gone.’ It was so surreal. He was at the bar once, and I told him, ‘No one here knows who you are. I didn’t tell anyone. I just want to know how Maddy’s doing.’ And he gives me this giant hug.”
Gulla thought about the Wilfords’ struggles in July when she attended a petand art-therapy session with Nicolette in the Marriott’s conference center. The session, moderated by an Orlando police officer who worked the Pulse nightclub shooting, proved vital for Gulla. “It finally helped me connect with Nicolette, because I didn’t know how to help,” she said. “I think it helped her deal with the loss of Alex.”
At the hotel, Gulla is exposed to uplift and heartache on a daily basis. Before the summer, student activists Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg frequently visited the Marriott, bringing “lots of inspiration,” Gulla recalled, especially when Gonzalez gave Nicolette a hug.
Still, Gulla felt that she needed permission from her daughter to grieve. In late July, Gulla waited outside Stoneman Douglas for Nicolette, now a freshman, to finish band practice. It was her daughter’s first time on campus since the spring, and Gulla was nervous.
When Nicolette got in the car, her expression was unreadable. “How was band?” Gulla asked her as they drove away. “And how were you?”
“It was a little weird,” Nicolette said. “But it was OK.” That night, at home in bed, permission granted, Gulla finally cried.
Rabbi Mendy Gutnick: Sharing the pain
In the days immediately following the massacre, Rabbi Mendy Gutnick teetered on the edge of serious illness.
Doctors three years earlier had diagnosed Gutnick with Susac’s syndrome, a rare disorder that caused migraines and blocked the flow of blood in his eyes, leaving his vision patchy. Doctors blamed stress. But this past January, neurologists gave the 42-year-old rabbi a clean bill of health.
Then, Parkland happened.
On Feb. 14, he raced with one of his Chabad of Parkland congregants, Lori Alhadeff, from hospital to hospital in search of her 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa. Later at the Coral Springs Marriott, Gutnick watched families reunite in conference-center ballrooms, while others waited in agony for word of their loved ones.
“I was completely out of my depth,” Gutnick recalled. “I didn’t feel strong. What could I do when I myself am feeling shock and pain? So that’s when I said, ‘I’m just going to be there as a friend.’ ”
By midnight, Gutnick was with Alhadeff in a Marriott sales office, attempting to comfort the woman as a homicide detective told her that Alyssa was dead.
Since the tragedy, Gutnick’s role in the community has changed dramatically, if not irrevocably. He now frequently calls on the homes of MSD students, offering consolation, prayer candles and mezuzah, parchment mounted over a doorjamb that symbolizes spiritual protection. In August, the rabbi met with a student who told him how a fire alarm gave him flashbacks to the shooting.
These visits are hard on his health. His time with Alhadeff while she sat shiva “would knock me out for the rest of the day,” he said. His doctors have warned him that he might relapse if he doesn’t lower his stress.
He doesn’t hold anything in. It’s against Gutnick’s nature to display courage when he doesn’t feel it. When he needs to cry, he cries.
“There’s nothing commendable about a rabbi showing false bravado — ‘I’m your rock, I’m your anchor’ — because if we cry together, we can rebuild together,” Gutnick said. “That’s my job — to comfort and assist in any way that I can — and I’m willing to give my all. But I have to be careful, because I know the risks [to my health].”
When his congregation assembles for Shabbat services, Gutnick avoids talk of politics and the shooting. Those words are triggers. “Even the word ‘trigger’ can be a trigger,” he said. He prefers to address the shooting and its aftermath through parables from the Torah, espousing inner strength in teachings of why God brings both blessings and curses.
“Motivating people to have direct conversations is getting harder,” Gutnick says. “People don’t feel comfortable hearing it out loud, to be burdened by the sadness. There isn’t one child who doesn’t feel at least one or two degrees of separation from the victims. So when we do talk about it, I keep it generally positive and full of brightness and promise.”
On a recent Saturday, optimism was the theme in the cafeteria of Pine Trails Elementary, where some 40 Chabad worshipers gathered for Shabbat services. “The [Torah] teaches us human beings must flow and move forward, and not just protect ourselves from the bad stuff,” Gutnick told his congregants. “To not just say, ‘OK, my children are safe and we’re not worried.’ ”
Mitchell Glass, a Parkland father whose 14-year-old son, Nick, escaped unharmed from Stoneman Douglas, agreed. “My son witnessed something so horrible at the school,” he said of
Nick, a marching-band student who knew Alex Schachter and Gina Montalto, who died in the shooting. “And he told me, ‘I wish you wouldn’t bring it up.’ But we had to grow from it. We are not a family that buries things. It’s healthier.”
In private, Gutnick mourns with his wife and six children, ages 2 to 17, and especially his 12-year-old daughter, who met Alyssa Alhadeff two years ago when she prepared for her bat mitzvah in the rabbi’s home.
When the weight of the tragedy and the needs of his 1,100 congregants overwhelm him, the rabbi refers people to local therapists.
“It’s dangerous [to my health] for me to engage someone with serious issues,” Gutnick says. “I keep going back to that night, when it felt so surreal. So I just remove my own emotions and say instead, ‘How can I make this person feel better?’ ”
Jeff Schwartz: To preserve and protect
The day after the massacre, the phone rang at Jeff Schwartz’s house in Parkland. It was Ken Cutler, a Parkland city commissioner.
You’re the president of the Parkland Historical Society, Cutler told Schwartz. The shooting is part of history, and it should be recorded.
How do you preserve the history of a fresh tragedy? Schwartz wondered.
The answer lay on the fields of Parkland’s Pine Trails Park, where 17 wooden crosses and Stars of David had been turned into shrines, decorated with sports jerseys and jewelry, teddy bears and undelivered Valentine’s Day cards.
There were hundreds of candles. Hundreds more tributes appeared on the Stoneman Douglas campus.
Schwartz volunteered to save it all.
“There’s no guidebook on conserving memorials based on mass shootings,” Schwartz says.
“You had to show sensitivity and professionalism for the families leaving mementos, but you couldn’t wait long.”
By mid-March, the items were deteriorating. Schwartz, a Parkland employee, needed to act fast, so he took a team of volunteers, mostly from MSD’s alumni group, to the park and school and packed objects into 227 boxes.
They’re now archived at Florida Atlantic University’s Wimberly Library, where they’ll be cleaned and eventually given to victims’ families.
But Schwartz’s work is far from over. Objects from all over the world keep arriving at Stoneman Douglas, he said, because well-wishers have no proper address to mail them.
So he stores these items in the cramped office of his two-story, Spanish-tile home on a quiet equestrian road in east Parkland.
Schwartz’s job is to preserve the history and artifacts of the 55-year-old city. It’s not his job to keep these objects in his house. Still, he spends his nights and weekends sorting through them.
“There’s no fun with this job. I spend lots of nights without sleeping,” Schwartz said on a recent Wednesday in his home office.
“It’s an avalanche in here. I just got a phone call from the school last week, and they wanted me to come back and pick up more goods.” Schwartz reached into a box filled with leather-bound photo albums, and pulled out a patchwork quilt of rainbows, balloons, doves and emoji faces with heartshaped eyes.
Some items are filtered out for being too morbid, such as the 17 bulletproof riot shields shipped to the school in August, each emblazoned with a victim’s name and the phrase “Enough is enough.” (“We’ll keep one, and give the rest to the police department,” Schwartz said. “What would a parent think?”)
So when is enough enough for Schwartz? Even Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which became inundated with toys and teddy bears following a mass shooting in 2012, pleaded with the public to stop sending items. What’s a parent to do with a thousand teddy bears?
Nothing sent to Parkland is thrown away, Schwartz said. In fact, he and his wife, Judy, mail thank-you letters to senders.
“It’s only enough when the public has had enough and doesn’t want to send them anymore,” he says, sounding exhausted. “In the meantime, I’m the guy that’s touching [the] mementos left behind. It’s in my face.”
Judy wants them out of the house.
“I’m done. It’s time,” Judy says, showing a mosaic sculpture of a Stoneman Douglas eagle she helped glue together. “These particular boxes have been sitting here a month. We live in the middle of a shrine.”
Daily exposure to these objects has caused Schwartz heartbreak. He may “pass the torch” to another historian when he retires in three years.
“My only saving grace is the fact that I know I’m doing this for the right reasons,” says Schwartz, who has two children in their 20s.
“There’s so much love here, man. It’s not about me.”
What bothers him most, other than the tragedy, is how he’ll present these items to April Schentrup, Andrew Pollack and other parents of the shooting’s victims. How will they react?
“I’ll say, ‘We share your condolences and the community’s heartbreak over this, and we hope that some of these memorials will bring some degree of peace to you and your family,’ ” Schwartz said. “What else can you say?”