PARKLAND, Fla. — As the years pass, the Parkland community pauses each Feb. 14 to remember victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Hundreds of people gathered at an afternoon wellness event and an evening vigil to mark the fourth anniversary of the tragedy in which a gunman murdered 17 people and injured another 17.
In the early afternoon, Scott Amos attended a wellness day event at Eagles’ Haven Wellness Center, which included therapy dogs, art therapy and a candle lighting and dove release.
Amos, a 19-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student who was in Building 12 the day of the shooting, said that on some days healing feels impossible.
”I tend to kind of withdraw within myself sometimes,” Amos said.
The meditation helped ground him, he said, on a day where he particularly struggles with symptoms of PTSD. But his healing, he said, takes “one day at a time.”
”One foot in front of the other,” Amos said.
The Parkland community is still struggling and reeling these four years later, said state Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, who was the mayor of Parkland at the time of the shooting.
”You have family members who went through their fourth Thanksgiving ... These just bring up such awful memories and there’s always an empty seat at the table, and you have young people who have now gone off to college but are still dealing with the trauma that they experienced that day,” she said.
”And as a community, I think people just want to be remembered. I think the families want their loved ones to be remembered. I think the students who were there that day want people to acknowledge what they went through and that they’re still going through it. The same with the teachers and the staff — that this was a trauma that everybody is still working through in their own way,” Hunschofsky said.
For Diane Wolk-Rogers, a former AP world history teacher at Stoneman Douglas who retired in 2020, Monday was the first anniversary that felt different for her.
”It’s been a four-year process for me and I would have to say this is the first time ... where I woke up this morning on the 14th, I didn’t have the chills, I didn’t feel nauseous and I just wanted to come here, look at them and remember the joy and the love that they gave people. I truly feel that,” she said.
She helped lead the group meditation at the wellness event that ended with the group of about 30 jumping, laughing and dancing.
”There’s hope in healing,” Wolk-Rogers said.
At Pine Trails Park just before sunset, a sea of people gathered in the field for a commemoration that included speeches and prayers from community religious leaders, singing, a tribute video to the 17 victims and a drum circle in front of a board displaying the victims’ photos.
String lights hung above the wall of photos where attendees walked up to lay flowers, many embracing each other in silence. The tribute video displayed the 17 smiling faces in childhood photos, on family vacations and at school sporting events.
A moment of silence followed the reading of each of the 17 names: Alyssa Alhadeff, 14; Scott Beigel, 35; Martin Duque Anguiano, 14; Nicholas Dworet, 17; Aaron Feis, 37; Jaime Guttenberg, 14; Christopher Hixon, 49; Luke Hoyer, 15; Cara Loughran, 14; Gina Montalto, 14; Joaquin Oliver, 17; Alaina Petty, 14; Meadow Pollack, 18; Helena Ramsay, 17; Alexander Schachter, 14; Carmen Schentrup, 16; and Peter Wang, 15.
Jennifer Naile, a 22-year-old Florida Atlantic University student who was a senior at Stoneman Douglas in 2018, said the anniversary is a day to remember “how amazing each person was and who they were in their lives.”
”It’s very hard as the years go on ... ‚” Naile said. “It’s just really, really hard to still see it, to know that this was so just long ago and it just gets further and further away from who they were then.”
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