Parkland High School Shooting

At 2:21 pm on February 14, 2018, a former student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and began firing an AR-15-style assault rifle. When the shooting stopped some six minutes later, 17 people lay dead or dying. Another 17 were injured in what is the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history.

The shooting

Nikolas Cruz, 19, a former Stoneman Douglas student who had been expelled for disciplinary issues, took an Uber to the school, entered the freshman building, and opened fire. The gunfire set off a fire alarm, and some students flooded the hallways. Amid the confusion, students were unsure if it was a drill or an actual school shooting. Some students were saved when teachers guided them to hiding places, including closets.

Cruz, armed with more than 300 rounds of ammunition, killed 11 people in an initial attack on the first floor of the school. He then moved between the floors of the building. At one point he aimed at students who had run outside seeking safety but was stymied by hurricane-resistant glass. In more than one instance, he wounded students in an initial barrage only to return and shoot again, killing them. Among the 17 people he killed were three school employees, Scott Beigel, Aaron Feis, and Chris Hixon, all of whom died trying to protect students, according to those on the scene.

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Not all the adults charged with protecting the school behaved in a similar fashion. Cruz was seen entering the building by an unarmed school monitor who said he was suspicious and alerted another monitor but did not otherwise sound an alarm. An armed Broward County sheriff’s deputy acting as the school’s resource officer, Scot Peterson, reported hearing what could have been shots or firecrackers and ordered a lockdown but remained outside the building as the shooting took place. Within five minutes of the first 911 call being made, officers arrived at the school and were ordered by Peterson to stay “500 feet away” from the building. Just as police arrived, Cruz had dropped his gun and remaining 180 rounds of ammunition and left the building, mingling with students fleeing the carnage. It was 2:27 pm.

A little more than an hour later, Cruz was spotted by police in a nearby neighborhood and arrested.

The victims

Seventeen people died as a result of the shooting. They are:

• Alyssa Alhadeff, 14, student
• Scott Beigel, 35, geography teacher
• Martin Duque, 14, student
• Nicholas Dworet, 17, student
• Aaron Feis, 37, football coach
• Jaime Guttenberg, 14, student
• Chris Hixon, 49, athletic director and wrestling coach
• Luke Hoyer, 15, student
• Cara Loughran, 14, student
• Gina Montalto, 14, student
• Joaquin Oliver, 17, student
• Alaina Petty, 14, student
• Meadow Pollack, 18, student
• Helena Ramsay, 17, student
• Alex Schachter, 14, student
• Carmen Schentrup, 16, student
• Peter Wang, 15, student

The response

In the wake of the shooting there were renewed calls for changes to gun laws in the United States. In Florida, Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed legislation that was opposed by the National Rifle Association to:

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• raise the age for buying a gun legally from 18 to 21
• extend the three-day waiting period for gun purchases to include long guns
• ban bump stocks, which allow guns to mimic automatic rifles
• allow teachers and school employees to carry guns in schools

The action fell well short of the renewed assault weapons ban that many had called for, including a group of students who survived the shooting and who in the following weeks and months held protest marches around the country and in Washington, D.C. In the process they created a movement, #NeverAgain, and founded an organization, March for Our Lives, through which they began to raise money, lobby to change gun laws, and back candidates who supported more gun regulation.

At a march in Washington just weeks after the shooting, Stoneman Douglas student and shooting survivor X González was the last speaker to address a crowd reported at 800,000. They invoked the names of their classmates and school employees who had died and then fell silent, staring straight ahead as tears streamed down their cheeks. They stayed on stage for 6 minutes and 20 seconds, the amount of time it had taken for 17 people to be killed.

González and other student activists were not always applauded for their stances. Some on the far right, including commentator Laura Ingraham and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, accused some of the students of exploiting the tragedy. Greene called survivor David Hogg, who was one of the students hiding in a closet and who recorded their terror, an “idiot.”

The police investigation that followed the shooting revealed that Cruz, whose adoptive mother had died shortly before the shooting, was deeply disturbed. Examinations of his online activity showed that he had searched the phrase is killing people easy. He had written a note just weeks before the shooting: “Everything and everyone is happy except for me I want to kill people but I don’t know how I can do it.” He pleaded guilty to 17 charges of murder and 17 charges of attempted murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole in 2022.

The law enforcement response to the shooting was found to have failed in significant ways, including the delayed response of officers to enter the building to try to find and disarm the gunman.

The findings were eerily reminiscent of the delay of Colorado law enforcement to enter Columbine High School during a mass shooting there in 1999. In that shooting, investigators determined that an hours-long delay in entering the building cost some of the wounded victims their lives. The scene would play out again in 2022 when officers failed for more than an hour to enter the classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers.