Ten hours after the Parkland shooting, Manuel Oliver lost his temper. “Tell us something!” he yelled. It had been a horrible day.
Manuel Oliver and his wife, Patricia, were repeating a ghastly process first improvised in 1999, improved through repetition, yet still horribly inadequate. When a SWAT team rescued hundreds of Columbine students, school administrators had to wing it. They loaded the kids onto school buses, drove them to nearby Leawood Elementary School, and announced the rendezvous point through the local media. Leawood was mobbed by frantic parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and neighbors—complete chaos. So they directed everyone to the auditorium, and marched the kids across the stage. That was great for the kids whose families had arrived, greeted by ecstatic screams from the crowd, and groups rushing forward to envelop them in hugs. It was deeply retraumatizing for the lonely kids who walked the stage to silence. Vital data collection was also haphazard. Police had no triage procedure for questioning or sorting survivors. Astute officers questioned some kids fleeing Columbine, and ran promising leads over to lead investigator Kate Battan, but most fell through the cracks. Battan was racing to establish the killers’ identities while drafting search warrants. The killers’ homes had to be locked down immediately. No telling if more bombs, weapons, or coconspirators were still on the loose. Both lives and evidence were at risk.
So, like everything else in the school-shooter era, smarter protocols were devised, and every cop and administrator in the country got training. In 2018, the Heron Bay Marriott, five miles from Douglas High, was chosen as the rendezvous point in case of an emergency. The first bus arrived about 4:30 p.m. As kids stepped off, they were greeted by a cop who logged their names and birth dates on hotel stationary, and asked if they had witnessed the shooting. Nos were sorted to the huge conference room, where anxious parents waited. Yeses went to smaller rooms, where FBI agents waited to question them, then on to the reunion area. Many families had reunited elsewhere, but it allowed investigators to gather in a systematic way a great deal of information missed at the crime scene.
Inside, the process had come a long way too, but it was still brutal. In tragedy after tragedy, when the last bus unloads and the stragglers stop arriving, everyone looks around, counts the remaining families, and does the math. This is the moment where parents from prior tragedies described praying for a critical injury, or bargaining with God. The death count is usually public by this time, and it gradually aligns with the family count. The last best hope is that their child is coming out of surgery in some hospital, and miraculously calling out their name.
By seven thirty, the buses were long gone from the Heron Bay Marriott, and the reunion room had that sparse feeling of desperation. Miguel and Alex Duque translated fresh intel into Spanish for their parents, and an eight-year-old boy stepped up to translate into Chinese for Peter Wang’s family. Around eight, several prayer circles formed: an African American family, a Jewish family led by several rabbis, and Joaquin Oliver’s family saying the rosary. At 8:40, Sergeant Rossman appeared to ask the families to email photos to match against bodies still in the school. That was grim. For Columbine families, it was a request for dental records, because no one had cameras on their phones then. They had to run home to get them, something constructive finally, in an afternoon of feeling impotent, devastated about not having protected their child. Of course no parent failed that way, but most of them will tell you that’s what they felt.
At Parkland, it was a quick task: flip through your phone, or bounce around social media. Then, nothing. Hours of nothing. Positive ID is a painstaking process, and the police never want to risk a mistake. But they tend to leave families in the dark. Loved ones crave information, anything, even an overview of the process, what stage they are at, or how long it might reasonably take. Cops rarely divulge that sort of thing. They are trained to withhold information until the process is complete. What makes sense in routine cases can be inhumane when mass casualties arise.
At one point, Manuel Oliver got down on his knees to pray. Twenty minutes to midnight, Manuel finally blew. “Where the fuck is my son?!” he shouted.
Prayers stopped, heads turned. Manuel was pacing in front of a sheriff’s officer standing guard. “Let us know what’s happening,” Manuel pleaded. “Let everyone know what’s happening.”
Finally, word came. At 12:02 a.m., Sergeant Brown entered, flanked by additional officers. “Please excuse the delay,” he said. Then he outlined the procedure. One family at a time would be escorted to the adjacent room to learn their child’s fate.
“It’s been ten hours!” Manuel Oliver screamed.
It took another ten minutes for the process to begin. A pair of agents in the familiar navy FBI jackets, with the three yellow letters emblazoned in back, approached the first family and led them out.
It was glacial. The entire deceased list was complete, but the notification process dragged on past three a.m. The agents reappeared every fifteen to twenty minutes, and the waiting families often cried, held hands, or tried to change the subject. Then they braced for the reaction from the next room. “The screams and cries of some pierced through the walls, while others didn’t make a sound at all,” Univision reported. It’s hard to believe this was the protocol perfected. By one a.m., most of the families had moved out into the hallway, where the screams were less audible. Manuel and Patricia Oliver and their family were escorted out at 1:41. Joaquin was dead. No shouts were heard.
His friends called him Guac, for “guacamole,” because some of them had trouble pronouncing his name. Joaquin Oliver was seventeen. He was born in Venezuela, emigrated with his parents at three, and earned his US citizenship just a year before he was killed. He never lost his admiration for the Venezuelan national soccer team, and took part in a South Florida protest against President Nicolás Maduro. Guac was shy until middle school, when he suddenly turned into a colorfully exuberant kid. “He kind of went from a caterpillar to a butterfly,” his sister, Andrea Ghersi, said. Andrea had looked after him as a toddler, and they were very close.
Guac was a huge sports fan, first baseball, then basketball, his true love. His hero was the Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade. He dressed his first Build-a-Bear as Wade. Frank Ocean was often booming through his earbuds, and Ocean’s Blonde album inspired Guac to bleach his hair: long and blond on top, short and black on the sides, sometimes with a full black beard and mustache. His funeral was held at a huge mausoleum, with at least a thousand mourners, many of the boys in sports jerseys with “Guac” on the back in masking tape, and their hair bleached blond on top and shorn on the sides in solidarity.
College was on the horizon for fall, but Joaquin hadn’t settled on a school yet, or a major. Marketing maybe, like his dad, who ran a successful business fusing branding, marketing, and original art. Guac had just begun honing his voice as a poet and writer with his creative writing teacher, Stacy Lippel. “His writing always had such depth and emotion in it,” she said. “That talent was in him the entire time.” He was quite the social butterfly now. “If he wasn’t there in my class one day, it was very strange, very quiet,” Lippel said. Guac’s muse was often his girlfriend, Victoria González. He told his sister that Victoria was his soul mate, and wrote a poem about wanting to live forever, as long as it was with her.
Manuel Oliver knew he had to do something different. He was awed by the MFOL kids—they called him Tío (Uncle) Manny, which he asked to be called. He threw his voice behind them, but needed to be more than an echo. He was a successful artist, so he went for something creative.
He began with a mural. He started at an art exhibit in Miami called Parkland 17. It was headlined by Guac’s hero Dwayne Wade. Manny painted a twenty-foot mural on drywall before a live crowd. It featured a stunning likeness of Joaquin’s head and shoulders, six feet high, black and white, with a yellow background and graffiti-style block lettering: we demand change. Then he picked up a sledgehammer. He slammed a huge hole, straight through the drywall, tore it back out and repeated that sixteen more times. “The sound of the hammer . . . boom, it’s like a bullet,” he said. The sound is jarring, the violence is jarring—that was the point. Tío Manny would paint many more walls, and vary the image each time, but seventeen holes would always be struck. Every audience shuddered. And then for every wall, he slid yawning sunflowers into each hole, because the seventeen blasts were horrible, but not the end of the story. Life bloomed again.
He chose sunflowers because the night before the tragedy, Joaquin had asked him to pick up some flowers for his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. Manny’s last image of Joaquin is him holding the sunflowers as he hopped out of the car at school that morning, saying, “I love you, Dad.”
Tío Manny said it back, and added, “Dude, you make sure you call me back.” He wanted to hear Victoria’s reaction. “And he never called back. But I do know that Tori got the sunflowers. So, he had time to give them to Tori.”
Tori split the flowers in half, sealed them in epoxy, and made a necklace each for Patricia and Tío Manny, which they hold dear.
Tío Manny called his murals Walls of Demand. He planned seventeen. They were the first major initiative of Change the Ref, a nonprofit Manny and Patricia created in March “to raise awareness about mass shootings through strategic interventions that will reduce the influence of the NRA on the federal level.”
The name came from a basketball incident in the last days of Guac’s life. Gauc got called for a foul by a ref he felt had a grudge against him. Guac argued and the ref threw him out. He came back to the bench, where his dad was coaching, and asked for help. Manny contested the call and got thrown out, too. Guac thanked him on the ride home. Manny said, Don’t worry about it. That wasn’t just a bad call; it was a weird call. You can’t win with that ref. All you can do is change the ref. That’s what we need to do here, Tío Manny said. So many politicians getting so much money from the NRA. You can’t win if the ref is paid off. Change the ref.
The second wall went up in Los Angeles, a month later, and this time Tío Manny was ready to push it. He wasn’t sure how Patricia would feel about it, or Andrea. Were they really OK with any of this—their son and brother’s face appropriated, six feet high, the face of a political movement? So the day before the L.A. painting, they all sat down and struck “an emotional deal.”
“If any of us is not OK with it, then we stop doing it,” Manny said. “And that included everything. If I need to stop doing walls right now, you just let me know.”
They were on board. Joaquin would be proud. Tío Manny knew that was so. He pointed to a post Joaquin had retweeted in December. It cited the fifth anniversary of Sandy Hook, and it said that if you believe mentally ill people should have access to guns, let alone AR-15s, “then you need to realize the NRA has you brainwashed.” It wasn’t a one-off, Tío Manny said—they were close, and Joaquin was committed. “Sometimes I use this as an example that tweeting and retweeting is not enough,” Tío Manny said. “Me and Patricia are all the way for the rest of our lives and will not only tweet and retweet but also create and find untraditional ways to make statements.”
The next day, Tío Manny went for it. The L.A. mural featured four separate images of males of various ages. The first three are similar: young boys in backpacks, innocently walking down various streets. The oldest, in the center, Joaquin, is checking his phone, and all three are unaware of the giant gun scopes encircling their bodies, bull’s-eyes over their chests. Then Tío Manny painted a big crimson splotch over each boy’s point of impact. The fourth image was different: no target; a young man facing the other three, crying out in pain. Manny raised the sledgehammer, and drove seventeen bullet holes, one through each of their hearts. we demand 2 stop the bs, he painted around the boys.
He sped up the pace. Every few weeks Tío Manny painted another mural at a strategic moment. All were livestreamed. May 5, the NRA’s annual convention began in Dallas, and Tío Manny painted his mural a block from the convention hall. President Trump and Vice President Pence were both featured speakers, so Tío Manny expanded the scope, and featured Trump dressed as a circus ringleader and Dana Loesch as a clown clutching an AR-15. Joaquin was in the gun sights again. That drew lots of national media.
The murals were left as permanent markers, but the third wall, in Springfield, Massachusetts, was destroyed by vandals after three days. “We don’t actually really care that much,” Tío Manny said. That was part of the message, documenting the resistance, the anger, the attempts to silence Guac’s voice. “Someone destroys your good points just by showing power,” Tío Manny said. “It’s a reflection of what’s going on with the conversation.”
Change the Ref launched a second big initiative in April, one even more creative. They partnered with the ad agency Area 23 to create a site that would convert Tweets or Facebook posts into letters to congresspeople in Guac’s handwriting. Users could then print them from the site, or let it handle delivery.
The idea was based on the Congressional Management Foundation’s finding that personalized postal letters were the most effective means of influencing congresspersons’ votes. Guac’s handwriting added a special poignancy, for both the sender and receiver. “We are giving a voice to Joaquin,” Tío Manny said. “So he can talk.”
Thousands of Guac letters were submitted to Congress in the first few weeks. David Hogg and Emma González were two of the first correspondents. The project won three awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the most prestigious event in the advertising and marketing worlds.
Through it all, Tío Manny worked closely with the MFOL kids. Same cause, different strategy. “We think it’s more powerful if we do separate things,” Manny said. They coordinated, publicized, and reinforced each other, and they appeared together at key moments. The kids wore Change the Ref buttons and wristbands, making sure they were prominent in their photo shoots—to honor Guac, and to spread the word. Emma began embroidering a great big Change the Ref patch, stitching it onto the bomber jacket she would wear at the March for Our Lives, right across her chest, just above where the podium would rise, so millions of eyes would catch it in every shot. Tío Manny added MFOL logos to many of his murals, and wore a March for Our Lives wristband on his left hand, his painting hand, so that all the close-ups would capture their bond. Each group understood branding and cross-promotion. They wanted to convey how deeply they supported each other—to the public, and to each other.
The kids adored Tío Manny. They even waived the no-adults policy at their meetings for him. Even their parents were forbidden, no exceptions, except for him. “I just got a call from Cameron, asking me to come over today to have some pizzas with them,” he said during an interview. “That’s the kind of relationship we have. Patricia and I feel better by believing that Joaquin is one of them. ‘My kid is right here, fighting along with you guys, making a big noise. . . .’ And Patricia and I feel honored as parents of one of the kids who is leading the movement.”