You should know the name Kendrick Castillo
Kendrick Castillo was just three days away from graduating high school. Summer, then the 18-year-old with an interest in robotics would go to college to study electrical engineering.
His father had talked with him about to do if there were a school shooting. Don’t try to be a hero, his dad advised.
But Kendrick followed his instinct to protect others when, during a British Literature class at his high school last week, a teenager pulled out a gun saying, “Nobody move.” Kendrick lunged at him, which gave other students time to run.
Most of you have not heard the name Kendrick Castillo, have you?
That’s because the shooting at STEM School Highland Ranch in Colorado May 7 killed only one student and injured only eight.
School shootings have become so common in this country that only large numbers of fatalities attract much attention beyond the affected community. I hope this makes you as angry as it does me.
What does it say about our society, about ourselves, that we are no longer shocked to the core that someone would start shooting in a school? Or a place of worship. Or a concert. Or a movie theater. Or a nightclub. Or anywhere.
Kendrick’s charter school with about 1,800 students is in a suburb of Denver, about seven miles from Littleton where the high school there became synonymous 20 years ago with school shootings — Columbine.
A shooting every other week
At Columbine High School, on April 20, 1999, two students shot to death 13 people and wounded 20 more. The nation was shocked.
But school shootings have become the “new normal.” Parents feel they must talk to their kids about how to respond — and to text them they are OK. Schools put students through “active shooter” drills, eerily reminiscent of the nuclear bomb drills in their grandparents’ day. Back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, kids were taught to hide under their desks if the Russians dropped bombs.
School shootings have become so common that a team of Yale University students developed an “active shooter” alert app to enable faculty and students to communicate immediately and to streamline response times. The app was in reaction to the Valentine’s Day shootings last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which it took 3-and-a-half minutes to learn an active shooter was in the school. Seventeen people died.
In 2018 alone there were 24 school shootings with injuries or deaths (not including suicides) — an average of one shooting every other week — and 35 people died,
79 others were injured, according to Education Week.
Here in Connecticut, the grief and trauma over the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings on Dec. 14,
2012 that took the lives of 20 first graders and six educators remain. Immediately after the tragedy, green signs sprouted around Newtown that proclaimed “We are Sandy Hook We Choose Love.”
I believe that ultimately love will triumph, but love is taking too long.
Since Sandy Hook, our country has seen nearly 2,000 mass shootings (four or more people harmed, in schools and elsewhere); more than 2,200 people killed and nearly 8,200 wounded, according to Vox.
“Since 2013, there has been only one full calendar week — the week of January 5, 2014 — without a mass shooting,” the news site reported.
Let that sink in. Mass shootings are now a way of life in America. Do not accept that; change it.
Stop the violence
There is not one all-inclusive solution.
Gun safety measures are an obvious step, but instead of finding ways to better protect society, discussion has become deeply divisive. It is wrongly framed as infringement on individual Second Amendment rights. No one has the right to own a military-style automatic assault weapon, such as the one used at Sandy Hook. Connecticut has rightfully banned them. Bills that have made it through General Assembly committees this year address safe storage of firearms, which do not impair gun owners and ought to pass into law.
In response to Sandy Hook, groups such as Newtown Action Alliance have worked on the national level for sane legislation, such as universal background checks.
For our country, and children, to be safer we have to move past polarization of rights and come together for the greater good.
Mental wellness has to be part of the equation.
Grassroots groups, such as Sandy Hook Promise, are developing programs — such as “Know the Signs” of someone who is troubled and “Start with Hello,” to break through isolation — for use in schools.
The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation, a nonprofit formed by the Sandy Hook first-grader’s mother Scarlett Lewis, teaches social and emotional learning — responding to others with kindness, compassion and forgiveness — through the schools.
Another organization formed for a slain Sandy Hook first grader, the Avielle Foundation, aims to reduce violence by building bridges between biochemical and behavioral sciences.
All of these endeavors are absolutely worthwhile.
But the courage and determination of those parents do not let us off the hook.
As a community, and individually, we need to consider how our culture makes it “acceptable” to pick up a gun and kill fellow human beings. How do we turn around the culture of violence?
We have become inured to the killings and we can’t let that happen.
‘Funny and smart’
A year after Parkland, and student activists marching in the streets, school shootings are so commonplace that only one dead gets little notice.
In his British Literature class last week Kendrick Castillo should have been analyzing the humor in the movie “The Princess Bride” for an assignment. Instead, he and two classmates were wrestling a teenage gunman to the floor of the darkened room. A second teen with a gun in a different area of the K-12 school was subdued by an armed school security guard.
Classmates called Kendrick, a member of the school’s robotics club, “funny and smart.”
“Kendrick Castillo died a legend,” said Brendan Bialy who with Joshua Jones also tackled the gunman and were injured.
After getting the gun away from the shooter, Brendan tried to get Kendrick to talk, but his friend wasn’t moving. He then helped a teacher who came into the room and tried to give medical aid, according to the account by CNN.
Kendrick loved patriotism, inspired by his late grandfather who was a Marine. “We are Hispanic by nature, but we love America to the core,” Kendrick’s father said.
On Wednesday this week, Kendrick’s parents John and Maria Castillo went to the courthouse for a hearing of the accused shooters.
Then they went to the funeral service for their only child.