INTRODUCTION

by Roger S. Friedman, PhD

IN THE FIFTY-TWO years since a sniper calmly took the elevator to the top of the University of Texas Library Tower in Austin in 1966, shot and killed fourteen people, and wounded thirty-one others, more than seventy mass shootings have occurred on America’s school grounds and university campuses. This new form of public human disaster has resulted in hundreds of deaths, many more wounded and countless traumatized surviving family members, first responders, police officers, and witnesses. The frequency of such tragedies has increased since 1996, with twenty-nine multi-victim shootings occurring in just the past fifteen years. You don’t have to be a combat veteran to be exposed to violent trauma in America. Hardly. We have learned a dreadful lesson this past half century, that trauma can occur in formerly safe and even sacred public spaces, and any of us, including our friends, neighbors, and our kids, can be victims.

If I Don’t Make it, I Love You pulls together, for the first time, the voices of several generations of survivors from twenty-one school shootings beginning with Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas on May 18, 2018 and concluding with August 1, 1966 at the University of Texas, at Austin. The book includes first-person narratives from Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech University, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and from lesser reported tragedies at New River Community College, Thurston High, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock, among others. There are over eighty contributors, including students who have escaped shootings in their own schools, parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, teachers who have lost students, writers and journalists covering these events, gun violence advocates, and doctors offering medical treatment. These original narratives, some describing experiences just weeks after shootings and some reflecting after decades, provide vivid personal documentation of how trauma affects child and adult survivors—and how human beings, over generations, find ways to lead their lives in the face of haunting traumatic memories and troubling real-time reminders. These brave storytellers describe in great detail the steps forward and backward that occurred in their varied journeys of recovery and the range of strategies they’ve used to cope with making meaning of the trauma they’ve experienced.

An adult mental health counselor, who was a child when her father, a much-loved teacher at Columbine, was killed in that shooting in 1999, describes how in college she found her way into psychology and eventually received a master’s in psychology. Her first job out of graduate school was working with offenders of violent domestic crime, and more than a decade later she is still working in this setting. “I never expected what I found. A room of men from different backgrounds, some wearing business attire, some in jeans, none in wifebeater shirts and . . . no face tattoos.” She reflects that shortly after starting this new work, “it hit me. I’m the teacher like Dad, and these men are students who need me. I finally found where I belonged, in a room full of convicted felons, offering the same things Dad did to those ‘tough kids’ he so often sought out: kindness and encouragement without judgment and an opportunity to work hard to improve their lives.”

One teenage survivor of a shooting at her high school in Maryland says that months after the incident, when she put on the sweatshirt she had worn that day, “. . . my back broke out in hives, like my body was rejecting it.” A Thurston High School student survivor writes, “I fall to the ground. I stare at my hand thinking, I should put that between my legs and apply pressure but then I can’t figure out how to move. I look at my friend and say, I’ve been shot, and he says yeah, me too. Months later, he says we never had that conversation.” A teacher who helped protect dozens of students during the Sandy Hook massacre describes a moment a week later when she stopped at a Starbucks on the way to a funeral. She says she cried as she saw the staff “. . . at Starbucks were wearing our school colors, green and white, in honor of Sandy Hook Elementary School. It took me half a day to realize those were their regular uniforms.”

The residual memories and reminders of trauma stay with us for a lifetime. A survivor shot through the hand at New River Community College in 2013, worries the effects of her injury will prevent her from holding her newborn son’s bottle: “Now, five and a half years later, I’m sitting on my bed. It’s 1:00 a.m. and I’m staring at our new baby. A boy. He doesn’t know it yet, but his life is already affected by gun violence. Specifically, school shootings.”

Even after decades, survivors struggle with how vulnerable they are and how their priorities are different from those of peers who do not share their traumatic experience. A parent who lost a child at Sandy Hook sits in frustration through a PTA meeting when others are arguing about the distribution of donations, and she finally can’t stop herself from shouting out, “At least you have your children!” The sister of a victim killed at Virginia Tech wrestles with deactivating her dead brother’s cell phone, “Not more than eight weeks following your murder, we received a letter addressed to you stating that your cell phone service was going to be deactivated because of your death. . . . Your cell phone recording was all we had left of your voice. I pay ten dollars extra each month to keep your account active. I’d pay anything to hear your voice.”

In addition to this painful frustration about never again fitting into society if you are a trauma survivor, there is a hopeful theme that emerges from these narratives. A decade after her younger brother had been killed at Sandy Hook, his teenage sister says that “seeing my dad work for gun violence prevention for so long and so tirelessly is amazingly inspiring to me and makes me proud to be part of this family. My parents showed me that when things are wrong you stand up and fix them because it’s what absolutely needs to be done.” What we hear in the more recent voices of the contributors to this book is an escalating, more political and hopeful response to the long-term effects of trauma. What half a century ago were viewed by society and survivors themselves as “accidents or private mental health problems” that individuals and institutions should best deal with in silence, is now being redefined as a public health disaster that demands an outspoken narrative, political organizing, and social action. The survivors, with the help of family members, progressive political leaders, and the communication power of the Internet, are leading this redefinition of the problem and, in so doing, are fostering social change while also finding important communal ways to heal.

Today survivors from different shootings, across the country and across the past fifty years, are connecting with each other through groups like the Rebels Project (Columbine Rebels), Columbine Memorial, Sandy Hook Promise, Survivors Empowered (Aurora Theater shooting), Koshka Foundation (Virginia Tech), March For Our Lives (Parkland), Safe and Sound Schools (Sandy Hook), Swim for Nick (Parkland), and Everytown for Gun Safety (Sandy Hook). The March For Our Lives movement, with leadership from Parkland survivors and their families, organized a student-led demonstration in support of tighter gun control that took place on March 24, 2018. Two hundred thousand people marched in Washington, D.C., alone, and there were over eight hundred similar events occurring throughout the United States and around the world on the same day. In September 2018, March For Our Lives organizers began focusing on the midterm elections and broadcast the following banner on their website to millions:

VOTE FOR OUR LIVES!

Now is the time for the youth vote to stand up to the gun lobby
when no one else will.

On November 6th, we can elect morally just leaders who will
help us end gun violence in the U.S.

On November 6th, we can change the country.
November 6: Save the date, save America.

We learn from these personal reflections that trauma is not just an event that takes place some time in the past. It is the imprint left by that experience on our brain, body, and relationships for years and perhaps generations. The survivors teach us that both private and public remedies are needed to cope with their traumatic stress. To feel that you are not alone is the first and most basic step in healing. They discuss how family support and clinical help can be useful in the immediate aftermath of such terrifying experiences and that there is no “right” way to cope with trauma. They eloquently express how important it is to form lasting connections with other survivors and build a capacity to manage dark memories and unsettling symptoms that can recur unexpectedly throughout their lives. As many of the survivors are now adults and some parents themselves, finding positive meaning in the public tragedies they experienced is the biggest challenge they face.

It has been a unique personal experience for me to hear the voices of a new generation of survivors of public school shootings—who, no longer isolated from each other and much more socially conscious, no longer see the rampage of gun violence in America as a private problem to quietly manage, but rather as a public epidemic that demands a public response—and most importantly, they believe they can lead this public response with proud flags waving. I am of an “older generation” of school shooting survivors. My best childhood friend, Paul Sonntag, and his girlfriend, Claudia Rutt, were killed on August 1, 1966, during what we now know was the first incident of public school shootings in the modern era at the University of Texas at Austin. Paul, Claudia, and I were eighteen years old that summer, and thought we would be heading off to college in just a few weeks. The story of how this inexplicable loss as a teenager haunted me throughout adulthood, and the important connection I maintained with the Sonntag family for many years is told in the Foreword to Tower Sniper: The Terror of America’s First Active Shooter on Campus.¹ That Foreword, “Sanctuary of Time,” is available in full in this book’s digital archive. I’m now much more conscious of the importance of grieving my loss of Paul and Claudia with others and sharing my experience with those who are interested. I know I must be involved in progressive political action and support candidates who will legislate gun control and other policies to stop or slow down this epidemic of public shootings. In writing my reflections on the Texas tragedy, I returned to the people, memories, and places of fifty years ago in Austin where I grew up. I learned that I wasn’t the only one whose internal life had been shadowed by the legacy of that traumatic day. Far from it. It seems only common sense, but if I can stay connected to those who share these horrific experiences with me, and listen to the voices of the brave generation of survivors you are about to hear in this book, none of us need pass this way so alone. The fearless narratives in If I Don’t Make It, I Love You teach us how to endure the trauma of life, and in a certain way, help us find a sense of hope for the future of our country.

ROGER S. FRIEDMAN, PHD

SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

NOVEMBER 2018