On Valentine’s Day, Daniel Duff’s parents and brothers feared the worst. They kept texting him like crazy—no response, but the messages showed delivered. “I was like, ‘Fuck, his phone is on!’” his brother Brendan said. “I was figuring a lot of people turn off their phones, and that happened with a bunch of my friends, so that means something.”
Brendan had graduated two years earlier, so he knew where all the classrooms were located. He didn’t know Daniel’s schedule, but he watched a newscaster talking to a kid in the drama room in the middle of rehearsal, which meant that Daniel would be there. And there was so much misinformation flying around, some of it incorrectly pointing toward drama kids. The whole family was texting Daniel, and it looked bleak.
Daniel’s iPhone battery had been running low. In a brief lull in the melee, he had decided he’d better charge it. He’d set it down, but panic resumed, and he’d run off without it. He hadn’t even had time to plug it into the wall. But it had enough charge to misdirect his loved ones all afternoon.
Daniel was in the drama room, along with most of the kids who would become March for Our Lives. All the leaders were juniors and seniors. All the kids had lost someone they knew, but the upperclassmen were less likely to have lost someone close to them. Daniel was a freshman. He lost seven friends.
As in all these tragedies, a weird hierarchy of victimhood reared up. Often it was about loved ones lost—how many, how close—but months later, Daniel’s dad described another aspect. “Some of Daniel’s friends have taken the attitude ‘Wait, you weren’t even in that building!’ There’s kind of a hierarchy of who was closest.”
That prompted Daniel’s mother to describe a moms’ therapy session she had just gone to. “I was the only mother there, of five women, who didn’t have a child in the building, so I kind of felt guilty. The woman next to me, her son still has a bullet in his arm, and shrapnel—they were very upset. She said he has like a tic now, he doesn’t speak. I almost feel guilty saying, ‘Daniel seems to be OK.’”
Psychologists discount that sort of reckoning—especially since trauma is etched into the psyche at the moment of terror, by the perception of terror. The norepinephrine flooding the brain is just as toxic whether the killer is five feet away or five miles—so long as the victim believes he might arrive momentarily. Actual danger is irrelevant. Rationally, most survivors realize this, but try telling that to the guilt center of your brain.
Daniel looked like a young Corey Haim, down to the brown curls, though he let them fall naturally and didn’t tease them out. He had looked up to Cameron since he was little. Cameron was tight with Daniel’s older brother Brendan, and when the Duffs went on vacation, Cameron looked after their dog. Brendan had graduated from Douglas in 2016 and was studying PR at Elon University in North Carolina. He had rushed home to look out for Daniel, and quickly landed at Cameron’s house, advising the group on media strategy. Brendan was a major player in Never Again behind the scenes. He helped the kids understand early on that the message was the mission, and they would get one shot at a public persona.
“Brendan was one of our great friends,” Cameron said. “So when his brother Daniel started high school, we said he had to join drama. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing there, but he’s trying.”
Daniel agreed and enjoyed it, to a point. The night before the shooting, he had had a long talk with his dad. Drama wasn’t for him. Cameron and Alex were so passionate about it. His loves were music and photography. He would finish out the year, but that would be it. (MSD offered a variety of different theater classes, and like most of the Never Again kids, he had it as a class as well as an extracurricular activity.) His dad was fine with his decision; he had given it a good shot. But what a fortuitous turn that he had connected with the group. Never Again felt like his therapy. It seemed to be getting him through.
But recovery is different for everyone, and activism can also serve as avoidance, a way to sidestep dealing with the fears, either intentionally or not. “I am so proud of them, but worry that it will be very hard when they settle into their grief and trauma recovery down the road,” said Robin Fudge Finegan, who led victims’ advocate teams at Oklahoma City and Columbine, then served as a senior FEMA official. “One cannot go end around grief and trauma.”
Exactly two weeks after the attack, MSD classes were set to resume. Most students were eager to get back but apprehensive about stepping inside. So the school set up an open house on the Sunday afternoon prior, and dubbed it “campus reunification.” Building 12 would be closed off as a crime scene for months, so many classes had to be moved. The rest of the campus was open.
After eleven days watching his campus on television as a crime scene, Daniel discovered that’s how he thought of it. Changing it back to his school was way trickier than expected. The helicopters didn’t help. He lived within walking distance of the school, and the choppers kept hovering for several days. “I would walk outside, look up and see the helicopters, walk back in, look at the TV, and see the footage the helicopters were capturing,” he said. Helicopters were triggers for him, and so were any sort of bang sounds. He described walking with a group of friends, and a car engine “kind of went pop pop pop, and we all started hyperventilating.”
But Sunday, he reunited with all the kids he had gone through it with, and that was a huge relief. He’d known they were all alive, but somehow it took seeing them to feel fully safe again.
Wednesday, February 28, school resumed. Reporters were everywhere. Daniel was annoyed. He was happy to talk to them, but not to be inundated with them. The drop-off line was monstrous that first morning. “Obviously, parents didn’t want to leave their kids alone,” Daniel said. His mom wasn’t afraid of a repeat shooter, so she drove around toward the back gate, which was farther away—but still so many reporters! Daniel was navigating the press gauntlet when a reporter asked if he had a minute to talk. No time, he said—he was trying to make an appointment with another one. They both erupted in laughter.
Class schedule began that day, but not really class. “So much Play-Doh, and so many comfort dogs,” Daniel said. “I don’t know what kind of meeting they had before, but every classroom had Play-Doh,” he said.
Daniel was getting restless. “I did use the Play-Doh one time—I was really bored,” he said. “I didn’t really make anything. I kind of just squished it around in my hand.” The comfort dogs, though—those were great. He was eager to get back to work—not full speed, but something. But some of the kids were still in shock, not ready for any stress, so they had to take it slow.
And sometimes he needed it slow—especially in the classes he had had with Jaime and Gina. “I was really good friends with Gina, so sometimes I’ll look over and see the empty chair, and I know I talk about that a lot and I know a lot of people talk about that a lot, but that’s one of the things that hits me the worst.”
Daniel was excited to have a diversion—both from his grief and his activism. “Something to be a part of that isn’t political,” he said. “To be a kid again. I’m wearing a March for Our Lives shirt right now.”
And he was still looking to do something creative with his life. He reflected on his artistic ambitions, seriously considering photography. But just mentioning it dredged up a painful memory. “I was so mad at all the photographers at the vigil the day after the shooting,” he said. “The moment of silence, I just heard camera shutters clicking the whole time. My friend Emma was like bursting crying and she was hugging me for support and there was a camera in my face taking pictures of me.”
Four weeks later, it still burned.
Jackie had some rough moments returning to school, too. “Normal” would never be the same, but a key first step is resuming a normal schedule. Hard to get back on track for five AP tests when you’ve got your hands full fomenting an uprising. That first Sunday, she went to “campus reunification” with her parents. A car ran over a water bottle, the cap popped off, and it made a bang. “I legitimately freaked out,” Jackie said. “I had an anxiety attack, and started crying. And I wasn’t even the one to hear gunshots, but I’m terrified. So if it affects me that much, I can’t even imagine the people that were actually in the room.”
She had no empty desks to acknowledge, but she had an odd surprise her first day back in precalc. What was Alfonso doing there? “He was in my math class all year and I did not know him,” she said. New friends: the silver lining.
Jackie Corin will never command a stage like Emma González, match the fire of David Hogg’s Twitter feed, or keep the faithful giggling like Cameron Kasky. But while they lit up the Internet, along with Delaney Tarr and Sarah Chadwick, Jackie was the driving force behind the scenes. Movements are born from hope, but they are built brick by brick. Jackie had been laying the foundation for MFOL before she knew it existed.
Jackie is an implementer by intuition, but a natural leader as well. She has a quiet charisma that doesn’t project from a stage or transmit through a TV set, but is powerful in the room. She knows what to do, takes charge, and then she’s relentless. Cameron’s mom had noticed it that first Saturday, when she returned from the cruise to find the team organizing in her living room. Among all the silliness and horseplay, Jackie seemed on a mission. “My first impression was she was like superintensely trying to organize these buses,” Natalie said. “And I was like, ‘Of course she’s class president. She’s organized. She’s capable. She’s a leader.’”
Jackie was never political, not even a little. The sharp turn in Jackie’s trajectory is captured in her Instagram feed: all activism post-Valentine’s, not a whiff of politics prior. So many chummy girlfriend poses and scenic vistas before the attack: tie-dyed shirts at Camp Blue Ridge, fluorescent face paint at a Miami Dayglow concert, wading the Chattooga River with big American flags. Even the aesthetics flip: the before side is all choice lighting, cropping, and color saturation, carefully curated to present a vibrant, digitally enhanced life. Dingy grays and muted colors after, hastily documented cinema verité style. And dividing them, that stark post, a plain white background with the small silhouette of an AR-15 beneath three huge words, the last in red, make it stop. It would be months before Jackie would return to the carefree poses of “normal” life.
Two weeks into the struggle, Jackie had identified a new enemy: fear. Politicians were afraid of the NRA and its supposed political omnipotence, which would crush their careers if they dared step out of line. Reasonable gun owners were afraid of making modest concessions that they actually agreed with, because ceding the momentum would supposedly ignite a wave of dizzying defeats ending in the abolishment of the Second Amendment and the end of deer hunting. The NRA preached “Never give an inch.” Don’t support measures you agree with; support holding the line.
“I think people are scared to make such a big change,” Jackie said. “Even though maybe their moral compass is saying it’s right. Just like the civil rights movement . . .”
Never Again was facing a bit of a branding issue. They were using two names regularly, and interchangeably, drifting slowly toward MFOL. They were keeping rather quiet about why for a while.
And there was a problem with the march. The DC mall was not available. The conflict involved a small student group filming a video on some of the same grounds. The park district followed a strict first-come, first-served policy. They suggested Pennsylvania Avenue. That would require permits from the city for the streets and from the federal park service, which had jurisdiction over the sidewalks and parks along Pennsylvania Avenue.
So the kids had a choice: move the date, or move the venue. Easy, Jackie said. “We were told it was already booked, so we were like OK, Pennsylvania Avenue, even better. It’s in front of the Capitol.”
The changes also meant actual marching would be figurative. Instead of a march to a rally, it would just be a rally. But that would be enough.
It was already enough. Coni Sanders’s father, Dave Sanders, was the teacher killed saving students at Columbine. Coni had become a prominent champion of gun reform, waging a relentless struggle; the activists seemed to lose every skirmish on every front. I got a gushing message from her around that time. “I am in awe of what is happening,” she said. “It’s working, Dave. All these years and it’s working.”