Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Parents’ tears for Carmen ‘part of our daily routine’
When April Schentrup tuned in her favorite country station the other week, the one she used to listen to with her daughter Carmen, the song “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away” was playing. In the past, April would sing along. This time, she bawled. She switched to Pandora. “If I Die Young” by The Band Perry came on. She and Carmen saw the band perform a few years ago.
“Will I ever be able to listen to country music again?” April wondered.
“Crying is now part of our daily routine,” Phil Schentrup, Carmen’s father, said this week.
Carmen Schentrup, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, was among 17 killed at the school on Valentine’s Day. She was a bright girl who skipped a grade, played violin and piano, and liked music of all types, including country. Her parents said Carmen wanted to become a medical researcher. “She didn’t want to be a doctor, because she couldn’t stand blood,” April said. Carmen died seven days shy of her 17th birthday.
On the day after the massacre, the mail
brought a letter informing Carmen that she had been named a National Merit Finalist. A few weeks later, her acceptance letter to the University of Washington arrived. Phil flashed back to their father-daughter trip to Seattle in January, when they toured the campus and hit tourist spots such as Pike Place Market.
“Tissues are always in supply,” April Schentrup said.
In a lengthy interview with the Sun Sentinel, the Schentrups opened up about their pain, the path ahead and the awkwardness they feel when friends and strangers approach to offer hugs and words of sympathy and support.
“Most people don’t know what to say,” Phil said.
“We don’t know what to say,” April added. “But we feel the love, and that helps enormously.”
Carmen’s parents, college sweethearts who met at the University of Florida and have been married for 20 years, are trying to move forward by turning grief into action. They are honoring their daughter’s memory with two fundraising efforts: Carmen’s Fund, devoted to bringing about what they call “sensible gun laws,” and the more apolitical Carmen’s Dream, which will go toward ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) research. Carmen lost two people close to her — her greataunt and a church choir leader — to the disease, and she wanted to work on a cure.
The Schentrups are also trying to return to a normal routine. They have other children to care for — their youngest daughter, Evelyn, 14, attends Stoneman Douglas; their son, Robert, attends the University of Central Florida in Orlando — and jobs to get back to. April is principal of Pembroke Pines Elementary, Phil works for a technology company that services cruise ships.
But the parents said nothing will ever be the same without Carmen. April said there have been days where she has been driving to work, says, “I just can’t do this today,” and turns around to head home. Phil said the couple ditched their usual staycation weekend at the Tortuga Music Festival in Fort Lauderdale because it just didn’t seem right. April said she has entered Carmen’s bedroom once, to pick up some clothes left on the floor.
“You know how teens are,” Phil said.
April said she sometimes wears a pair of Carmen’s earrings that she took from the room, a way to keep her late daughter close to her. On a recent afternoon, April also wore a button with Carmen’s photograph on her shirt and two bracelets that had been given to her by friends and Carmen’s fellow students. One was made from block letters and spelled out, “RIP CARMEN.” The other said, “Faith, family, love.”
Carmen loved the theater, as does her sister. Last Christmas, April and Phil gave the girls tickets to see “Wicked” during its February run at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The gift dovetailed with the girls’ birthdays: Evelyn’s on Feb. 16 and Carmen’s on Feb. 21. The family held four tickets to the Feb. 21 performance. The parents were still numb and in shock on Carmen’s birthday a week after the massacre. CNN was holding a town hall meeting for Parkland families that same night. April and Phil asked Evelyn what she wanted to do. Evelyn said the family should go to the show, because that’s what Carmen would have wanted. They brought a friend so as not to have an empty seat.
Their son Robert attended the CNN town hall to represent the family.
“We figure out things as we go along,” April said.
The past week has been a whirlwind. April and Phil took part in an ALS charity walk with more than 60 friends and coworkers in Davie. Phil went to Washington, D.C., for one-on-one meetings with U.S senators, including Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson of Florida, to push for gun reform. And the family attended a Stoneman Douglas Orchestra concert dedicated to Carmen’s memory at the ArtsPark in Hollywood, the city where Carmen was born and where the Schentrups lived until they moved to Parkland seven years ago.
Carmen played violin in the orchestra her first three years at Douglas. Before senior year, her father urged her to take it easy and lighten her hectic schedule.
“She dropped orchestra but kept her six AP classes,” Phil said.
At one point during the performance, Phil got up from his lawn chair and wandered to a far corner of the park. He looked up at the dusk sky for a long time.
The Schentrups wonder what the future might have held for Carmen — she also was accepted to the University of Florida’s honors program — but now their focus is on the changes that have to be made for the sake of their surviving children and the other kids at Stoneman Douglas, Pembroke Pines Elementary and everywhere around the country.
For them, that means common-sense hardening of schools with a single point of entry at all times (the gates at Stoneman Douglas were opened early for dismissal) and common-sense gun reforms, including universal background checks and a ban on military-style, rapid-fire weapons and high-capacity magazines.
“Where is safe?” Phil Schentrup asked, noting that shootings have occurred at schools, malls, movie theaters, churches and workplaces. “We have other kids, and we don’t want to go through something like this ever again.”
April Schentrup, who started as a preschool and elementary teacher before becoming an administrator, said, “I feel like I’m responsible for my [students]. I always thought that’s what the No. 1 job of a principal is, to keep students safe.”
The Schentrups are aligned in spirit with the Parkland student activists of the Never Again movement, but Phil Schentrup said he will continue to personally lobby for change with funds that go to Carmen’s Fund. The Schentrups went to D.C. in March for the March for Our Lives. On the night before the march, April spoke in favor of gun-control measures and read a sonnet Carmen gave her for Valentine’s Day at a prayer service at the National Cathedral. They also were buoyed by a talk former vice president Joe Biden gave to their group before the march.
“He’s been through a lot of loss, a lot of tragedy in his life, and he has still been able to go forward and do so much,” Phil said. “He spoke of the way he has bonded with all the families of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the time he spent talking and listening to them.”
“We haven’t gotten that same treatment in our dealings [with the current administration],” April said.
After his latest D.C. trip this week, Phil said things “are trending positively” and that Sens. Rubio and Nelson told him they would work together on some measures, including trying to get so-called “red flag laws” (taking weapons from individuals a judge deems dangerous) passed. Schentrup said he also met with staffers from other key senators, such as Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican from Iowa who chairs the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Roy Blunt, the Republican from Missouri who chairs the subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies.
About the Parkland student activists, April says, “They bring us hope for the things that need to be done.”
April kept quiet in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, but she said she is gearing up to become more visible, starting with a Twitter account, @AprilSchentrup, that she launched this month as a way to counter some of the vitriol being directed at Douglas students and the Parkland community.
“People sometimes forget that we’re all human and we’re still grieving,” April said.
The Schentrups also decided to launch Carmen’s Dream for ALS research to give people who may not agree with their gun-policy views a way to honor their daughter’s memory. The effort began with the $5,628.84 that Carmen had in her savings account.
“Her life savings,” Phil said. “Each of our kids have savings accounts. The rule in our house was any money they earned from chores or jobs they could spend, but anytime they got cash as a gift, for a birthday or Christmas, it had to go in the account.”
Carmen spoke of wanting to find a cure for ALS after the disease claimed her great-aunt, Ruth Maxson, and Stephanie Heilig, the wife of her first piano teacher, who also was her church choir leader when she lived in Hollywood.
The Schentrups said they moved to Parkland in large part because of better schools.
“We thought going to Douglas would give Carmen the opportunity to do more things and be challenged, even though she’d be swimming in a deeper pond,” Phil said. “She never got a B, but she was something like 20th in her class. She loved languages. She took Latin. Our family went on vacation to Germany last summer so she studied German. She was already looking to a graduate program at Heidelberg University, one of the best medicalresearch programs in Europe.”
Phil doesn’t know if Carmen would have stayed close to home at UF or traveled to Seattle, where his company is based and where he spends one week every month for work. “She’s not the outdoors type, but she might have liked the change in scenery,” Phil said.
At the ALS walk last weekend, April’s colleagues from Pembroke Pines Elementary, where she has been principal for seven years, and past colleagues from Davie Elementary (where she was assistant principal) turned out in force. They helped raise another $7,500 for ALS, and a national effort in Carmen’s name has raised more than $70,000.
The walk took place April 14, two months after Carmen Schentrup’s death. Was it harder for her parents to be around people that day because of the date?
Phil pondered a moment before shaking his head.
“Every day sucks,” he said.