Florida State student Logan Rubenstein was in eighth grade when he was forced to shelter in place at his middle school during the Parkland massacre nearby.
“What we went through, we made it our mission to ensure this could never happen again,” Rubenstein, 21, said.
“And I’m sorry that we weren’t good enough because now this is the second shooting that I’ve had to go through.”
Senior Ilana Badiner, 21, told The Washington Post that she was at the middle school next to Stoneman Douglas High School when she and her classmates were locked down and escorted out by a SWAT team in 2018. When gunfire erupted near the student union Thursday, Badiner hid in the basement with several dozen students from her bowling class.
“The whole scene after was the same: People calling their parents, texting, police officers,” she said, adding that having multiple gun violence experiences had become “kind of the new normal”.
Loading
Josh Gallagher, a law student at Florida State University, wrote in a post on X that he lived through the Parkland shooting and “never thought it would hit close to home again”.
“Then I’m in the FSU Law Library and hear [an] alarm: active shooter on campus. No matter your politics, we need to meet – and something has to change,” he said.
Robbie Alhadeff was also at the middle school next to Stoneman Douglas – where his 14-year-old sister Alyssa was killed – in 2018. He told The Washington Post he was just walking out of a cafeteria next to the student union on Thursday, when his friends started blowing up his phone with texts about a shooter on campus.
“It was really bad having to relive the moment like I did seven years ago,” he said.
“It’s very scary,” he said. “It could happen again at any moment.”
Robbie Alhadeff (right) with his sister Alyssa, who was killed in the 2018 Parkland school massacre.Credit: AP
His mother Lori said she felt a wave of panic wash over her when Robbie texted her that there was an active shooter at the campus.
“Your brain just really starts to spin, and it’s traumatising and obviously very triggering to me and my husband and my son,” she said.
“I pray for the families that lost somebody yesterday, but this should not be normal. This should have not been my son’s second experience with a school shooting. We need to do better.”
Lori Alhadeff in 2019.Credit: AP
Jaclyn Schildkraut, who leads a gun violence research group at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, said that experiencing multiple school shootings could prolong a person’s emotional healing process.
“It’s like all of that progress that you’ve made seemingly goes away and you’re right back at the starting line,” she said.
AP
