It’s a gut-wrenching process, these visits by victims to the crime scene.
The third day of family members touring the 1200 building on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus resulted in more tears, more anguish, and more understanding of how their loved ones spent their last, terrified moments.
Broward School Board chair Lori Alhadeff was among those who visited Friday. She lost her daughter, Alyssa, in the 2018 massacre, which killed 17 and wounded 17 more.
“It was awful, seeing the blood of my daughter Alyssa on the floor, and in my mind, I pictured how she was shot and killed, and then to be able to be in that room and to actually see the space, she ran from her desk, she tried to hide behind the teacher’s desk but there wasn’t enough room,” Alhadeff said through tears. “Obviously you don’t teach your child how to live through a school shooting, you send your child to school you expect them to be safe.”
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Parkland school shooting
School board member Debbi Hixon did the 1200 building tour on Thursday escorted, as all the victims are, by former Broward state attorney Mike Satz, victim’s advocates, and other prosecutors. She was too emotionally overwhelmed to comment about it when she walked out but did discuss the experience the next day.
“When you walk through the building, and there’s glass everywhere and Michael Satz is explaining moment by moment, showing who the blood belongs to, you just feel how terrified they had to have been in that building, and then you get to the spot where Chris was, and it hit me — that that’s where our life together ended, and so, it’s a lot to process, and you just wonder, how did we get here, like how did this happen?” she said.
Chris Hixon was the school’s athletic director. Unarmed, he rushed to confront the gunman and was murdered at close range.
I asked Debbi if seeing where Chris fell, mortally wounded, reinforced his heroism in her mind.
“Yeah, absolutely, it helped for me to put the video in perspective,” Hixon said.
She was talking about the security camera video of the shooting, which she says is like a horrible silent movie playing in her head all the time. The experience of being inside the building, Hixon said, solidified her belief that guns are too easy to obtain.
“The right to own a weapon should not supersede the right to life, and that is what’s happening every single day,” Hixon said.
Going in, Hixon thought she knew what to expect.
“There’s a lot of glass everywhere, but I kind of expected it to look more chaotic, if that makes sense, but then realized, which I think made it even more horrifying, they didn’t run for their lives, they weren’t stampeding out of there, they had to hunker down in place and just hope he didn’t shoot into their room,” Hixon explained.
She and Alhadeff each said the visit inside the crime scene bolstered their determination to make school safety a priority for Broward County Public Schools.
“This experience today will bring me to work that much harder to make sure that we are having as many school safety measures put in place as possible so that this never happens again,” Alhadeff said, also saying the fire to honor her daughter by making schools safer is burning brighter than ever.
Hixon mentioned the idea of installing bullet-proof glass windows into classrooms facing the hallways, which would’ve saved lives in the 1200 building as the killer repeatedly shot through those windows. She also said five and a half years later, she still has the recurring thought that Chris will come home.
