659: Before the Next One

Ira Glass

It's a school trying to do the right thing, a school trying something new, trying to keep its students safe. So they bought handguns, seven of them, Glock 9mm, to use if a shooter comes into their building. And a week and a half before school started, after a bunch of training, they were running their first drill in the school building with their guns, fresh out of the boxes.

Ira Glass

The building's mostly empty, no kids around. It's a district in rural Ohio that let us record on the condition that we not say their name on the air. It's eight people on this team. Only two teachers volunteered for it.

The rest are a guidance counselor, two custodians, and the three administrators who run the school. One of them is the only woman on the team. Producer Lisa Pollak watched them doing this. Lisa, so explain how this works exactly.

Lisa Pollak

OK, so the seven guns are locked in these small safes that have been installed in locations all over the school. I saw them run a bunch of drills. And in all of them, the goal was to run to the nearest safe, get the gun out of the safe, and then get to where the shooter is as soon as possible. And they time each drill.

Ira Glass

OK. We're going to play a tape of this. I just want to warn listeners there are loud gunshots from blanks that they fired during these drills.

Lisa Pollak

So the first little glitch they came to was that some of the team members actually had trouble getting into the safes. You have to put your finger on the sensor.

Ira Glass

It's like a fingerprint thing?

Lisa Pollak

Right. And it's a little tricky.

[BEEPING]

Lisa Pollak

There's a sheriff's deputy. He's playing the shooter.

[GUNSHOT]

I'm following a guy named John. He's the principal for grade six through 12. He's running from his office, darts by the cafeteria. He's got a gun. He's wearing a bulletproof vest. He's holding a walkie talkie, very focused, very aware the clock is ticking. He's told me that every few seconds in of one of these shootings, another kid can be killed.

Ira Glass

Elementary wing-- the building also has middle school and high school.

Lisa Pollak

Right. So the principal's running down the hallway, and he's just about to get to the area where the elementary kids are. But there's a door there, and it's locked. This happens automatically when the school goes into lockdown. So he and the two guys with him are stuck. He fumbles for his keys, and he's trying to find the right one.

Lisa Pollak

He's trying to unlock the door.

Lisa Pollak

Door opens. They're on the elementary school side. And they find the shooter right there. So that's the goal of the exercise. They got there. And they don't pretend to shoot him or anything. They're just timing the response. And it wasn't great.

Ira Glass

Lisa, it's so controversial to put guns into a school. Like, why did they choose to do it here? Like, why did that seem like the best option to them?

Lisa Pollak

Well, I talked to John, the principal, about this.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Lisa Pollak

For a long time, he agreed with people who think guns in schools is a bad idea. And even now, he doesn't think it's something that's right for every school. He says he's not a gun guy, didn't grow up with guns, had never used one. Then he came to this school. And this school is pretty remote, in an area that doesn't even have its own police force. So if a shooter got in the building, they could be waiting a long time for help.

Lisa Pollak

After that, he went through a lot of training, including one class where he was really forced to think through what it would mean, in a very literal way, to have to shoot someone in school. In one exercise, the instructor said--

Lisa Pollak

Though, of course, he might have to shoot one of his students. In a lot of these shootings, that's who the shooter is.

Ira Glass

These shootings do just continue to happen. Today on our program, we have all kinds of people trying to figure out what to do to prepare, like the staff at this school. In general, it seems to plan for disaster, school administrators and others look at previous shootings. They look to the past to anticipate the future, knowing full well the whole time there's a limit to what any planning can accomplish. If a shooter gets into a school, the sad fact is you cannot stop every tragic possibility. You can't stop everything.

Act one of our show today, we have people who are trying to learn from the past. They're trying to put in measures. They're trying to be as thoughtful and thorough as they possibly can, and it's still not enough. Act two, we have people who have invented something that actually seems to work and help.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, "Ready As You'll Never Be." For any school that's trying to figure out the best ways to prepare for a gunman, there's an example out there that might be really helpful, and that's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Just a month before the shooting that killed 17 people in that school, the teachers trained their students on new procedures they should follow in that exact situation. This came after a total overhaul of the school's emergency response planning. And the day of the shooting in a television interview, one of the teachers reflected on the effectiveness of that training.

Ira Glass

Did the training they received save lives that day or didn't it? It's actually an open question. One of our producers, Robyn Semien, went to Parkland to talk to the teachers about what was actually in the training and how well it did or did not prepare them for what they went through.

Robyn Semien

The training they did at Stoneman Douglas High School was an attempt to be as prepared as possible for a wide range of emergencies-- bomb threats, hurricane warnings, a bank robber nearby, an active shooter. Douglas is a school with 11 buildings and over 3,000 students, so upgrading all their emergency procedures took months to plan and coordinate with faculty and district officers, police and fire departments.

Melissa Falkowski teaches journalism at the high school. She's the teacher in that news clip you just heard. And the training was on her mind that night because she was on the committee that set it up. She's an enthusiastic teacher, a planner. She believes in a good hard think and being proactive.

Once she and the other teachers had been trained, they ran their students through all the new drills. The whole school did this over two days in January. Teachers were told--

Robyn Semien

School colors, silver and burgundy. They're on an alternating schedule. Melissa says her kids took the drill seriously.

Robyn Semien

The school told every teacher to cover the tall, rectangular windows on their classroom doors with paper, and leave the paper up all year. Just in case if there were one, it would make it harder for an active shooter to see in. That's a lesson from previous shootings. Get out of sight.

Before Columbine, very few schools did active shooter drills. Now, nearly 20 years later, most of them do. Ashley Kurth teaches culinary at Douglas. She's levelheaded, pragmatic, like a person who's spent years working in busy restaurant kitchens, not losing her cool, which she did. Ashley remembers being trained with the other teachers on the new procedures last year. It started with them listening to 911 audio from Sandy Hook.

Robyn Semien

Hide, lock down. It's probably the most common response in schools all across the country. But out of Sandy Hook, another lesson. Schools told teachers, keep your classrooms locked all day, every day. Again, Melissa.

Robyn Semien

The details of this are not exactly right. At Sandy Hook, it was the front door and bathrooms that were locked. The classrooms weren't. But the lesson is the same, keep your door locked at all times.

Other details got hammered home, like what to do if a fire alarm goes off during a code red. The thinking on this is a lesson from the Jonesboro Middle School shooting in Arkansas 20 years ago. There were two shooters, both kids. One of them pulled a fire alarm to get the school to evacuate to a field, where from the woods, the boys shot at them. Five people died.

In the training at Douglas, they addressed this exact thing. If a fire alarm and a code red happen to coincide, ignore the fire alarm, mind the code red. Ashley told her students--

Robyn Semien

The main question from students, both Melissa and Ashley told me, what if I'm in the bathroom and I hear gunshots? What do I do then?

Robyn Semien

Unlike Melissa, Ashley had been through this kind of training before at a school she taught at before Douglas. That school had a drill that really freaked Ashley out, with very loud, realistic sounds of gunfire. Ashley says there were blanks.

Robyn Semien

Surprise drills with blanks, while not the norm, appeal to some schools who say there are benefits to learning how you'll act under pressure. But surprise drills with blanks are controversial. For one thing, they're disturbing.

There have even been lawsuits about them. In one, a teacher claims she got PTSD after a man in a black hoodie came into her class, pointed a gun to her face, fired, and said, you're dead. The teacher heard a pop. She smelled smoke. She really thought she'd been shot. She had no idea it was a drill.

I talked to several school safety experts about these drills with blanks, these surprise drills that are hyperrealistic. None of them thought they're a good idea. One guy who trains teachers using video simulations told me that teachers who've been through one of these surprise drills perform worse on his simulations than teachers who have no training at all. They forget crucial steps, like calling the police, and commit more dangerous mistakes. Some find the blanks so upsetting they can't even finish the simulations.

And there's a more basic problem with these surprise drills. If you know one is coming and you hear shots, how can you tell if it's a drill or the real thing? At Douglas, Ashley and Melissa both thought this was the kind of drill they'd have, unannounced with a fake shooter firing blanks. Ashley told her students that's what they should expect.

Robyn Semien

Which brings us to the day of the shooting. At 2:20 in the afternoon on Valentine's Day, a former student with an AR-15 began down the hallway of the first floor of the building that everyone calls the freshmen building. In an adjacent building, Ashley's culinary class had just finished their shrimp scampi lab. They were plating and cleaning up.

Robyn Semien

The fire alarm. Dust set it off, dust from acoustical tiles hit by a round of gunshots. No one knew that at the time. Melissa, in a building farther out than Ashley's, didn't hear any pops, just a fire alarm. She went into action running that drill, the fire drill.

Robyn Semien

Her emergency folder. That's the training.

Robyn Semien

But was this a real code red? Melissa didn't know. She knew a fire alarm could go off during a code red, but the whole thing was confusing.

Robyn Semien

Teachers at Douglas knew that code red trumps a fire drill. They even had a plan for how to straighten that confusion out-- make an announcement, clarify the code red. On that day, an assistant principal, Mr. Porter, did that.

Robyn Semien

In culinary, Ashley heard the code red. She's not sure about it, but she's going through the motions. She goes to her door to pull it shut. And as she does--

Robyn Semien

She pulls them into her classroom, tells them to get in the storage closet with her students. But she's still thinking drill, right? It must be. It must be for practice. Even seconds later, when she hears--

Robyn Semien

It's unclear how many teachers thought like Ashley and Melissa did, that this was not a real code red, but the promised code red drill, and if this cost anyone their life. I spoke to the Broward County chief of staff in charge of organizing the district's safety upgrades where Douglas is. He said he didn't know any teachers at Douglas came out of that training expecting an unannounced drill with blanks. But eight of 14 teachers I spoke to said they were anticipating what Melissa and Ashley were, a surprise active shooter drill using blanks.

After those two boys tore around the corner yelling, it's a shooter, it's a shooter, Ashley stood for another second in her doorway, still confused. Then she glanced to her left all the way down the hall to a set of open doors, the face of the freshmen building.

Robyn Semien

She knew it was real.

Robyn Semien

She shouted back to her kids, stay put and get down. She's still in her doorway when she realized there's another group, a smaller group.

Robyn Semien

They were following instructions. Remember, if you're not in a classroom, run. Keep running away from the sound.

Robyn Semien

Ashley wasn't the only teacher to stand in the doorway and say to hell with what she had been taught. You can choose to follow the protocol or follow your instinct. For some teachers, it wasn't a choice at all.

In her classroom, Melissa got her attendance sheet out of her emergency folder. She counted 17 of her 25 students, and two from a different class she'd pulled in from the hallway. The group was small enough to fit in a supply closet, so Melissa told them to leave their backpacks out of sight, as she'd been taught, and move there. In the closet, it was hot and dark, except students' faces lit by their cell phones. Melissa had her phone out too.

Robyn Semien

An hour went by.

Robyn Semien

They didn't cover that in training.

Robyn Semien

She really just had to guess about whether to trust this was a cop and not a group of shooters saying they were cops.

Robyn Semien

Melissa told me that Ashley was one of five people she knew who had broken protocol that day, by holding their doors open longer than they were supposed to.

Robyn Semien

Stacey is the teacher whose arm was grazed. She survived. Scott Beigel in the room next to Stacey's did the same thing Stacey did, waited a little with the door open. He's one of the 17 who died that day, standing in his doorway.

There's very little evidence about whether school shooting drills of any kind actually work. The data doesn't exist. School shootings, for how much we think and talk about them, are still statistically rare. But now, Melissa and Ashley have been in that rare situation, the one that's hard to study.

And they both told me that having a playbook for what to do helped. Now I lock my door. Now I count the kids in my class. Now I move us all to a closet. But they also both had ideas coming out of this, about ways they could have been better prepared. Melissa, for instance, wanted trauma kits with gauze in every classroom and training on how to treat bullet wounds with it. Gauze actually has saved lives in mass shootings.

I really wanted to find some expert to weigh in on Douglas, to tell me, did the teachers' training help? Did more kids survive because of it? What might have worked better?

Cheryl Jonson researches what's effective in these drills at Xavier University and is a training instructor for ALICE, one of two big companies in the US that train schools how to respond to active shooters. ALICE has its own way of doing things, just like the other big outfit, Safe Havens International, has its own way of doing things. There's no one single way, no agreement on what's best.

Cheryl Jonson didn't want to get into the specifics of what happened at Douglas, partly because it's still too soon. The investigation isn't done. But she did talk to me more generally about some of things I knew they'd done at Douglas, like papering over windows. Cheryl doesn't think it helps much.

Robyn Semien

Also, code red, all the codes, their colors and meanings. The consultants I talked to said no to this too.

Robyn Semien

Keeping classroom doors locked, resounding yes. But the idea that this is all you do, that you lock the door and put every kid under a desk, all the consultants I talked to said that's outdated. Cheryl says people need many more options, many more ways to respond to a shooting.

Sometimes you stay in your room. Sometimes you evacuate, like if you're far enough away from the shooter or in an open space with more exits, like a cafeteria or a gym. As a last resort, you fight. Basically, trust your ability to make a decision.

I told her about Ashley Kurth, how she had stood in her doorway, grabbing up dozens of scared students. Remember, it was a break from her school's protocol. Cheryl's such an advocate for thinking on your feet. I wondered if she maybe believed Ashley did the right thing, pulling in kids.

Robyn Semien

One thing that was part of the training at Douglas was barricading your door, basically pushing lots of furniture up against your classroom door. But Melissa and Ashley didn't do it. Seems like very few teachers did. Though if Ashley had done it, if she'd followed the protocol, locked and barricaded her door right away, it would've been way harder to pull all those kids into her room from the hallway. She'd have to unbarricade herself first. Fewer kids would have made it in.

Reporting on this for several months, I knew what I was looking for, something concrete to tell my daughter's school. My daughter's nine, fourth grade. Last year, she did a traditional lockdown at her school, squat and hide. But when I asked her what the drill was for, she said, I don't know exactly. They didn't say. It's not great.

I keep thinking about this one shooting, the Red Lake Indian Reservation shooting, and how in that one, a classroom of students did a traditional lockdown, squat and hide, because they practiced it, and how an investigator on that case told me that drill did not help them at all. They'd have been better off without it. And the researcher who told me we should not do drills in school, period. It's too traumatizing for kids. We don't pretend to crash on an airplane. We just deal with the possibility of crashing by hearing some instructions.

Where I come down on this-- I don't agree with no drills at all. I want my daughter to know everything. I want her to know about barricading, and I want her to know about running and fighting back. I want her to know about active shooters because it's a thing to reckon with. I want her to know there's nothing that can keep her completely safe because it's the truth.

One more thing I'd say to my daughter's school, Cheryl's point about don't say codes. Call it like it is. I don't want someone to come over an intercom and tell my daughter code red. I want someone to say, listen up, there's a person with a gun in our school. Of course, I never want someone to say that at all.

This year at Douglas, there are new gates, new fences, new cameras, gym bag searches, key card entry for staff, gauze-filled trauma kits in every room, 15 campus monitors compared to five last year, three school resource officers instead of one. And they already did a code red drill, only this time there was no confusion about when it would be. The school called parents, told all the students and teachers in advance. When it started, the principal came on the PA and told everyone, OK, here we go. And this is our code red. And try to breathe. Keep breathing.

Only real surprise since school started, if you can call it that, the fire alarm. It's gone off seven times so far this year-- malfunctions, maintenance, a special ed kid pulled it twice. Two times it happened right before school got out. Melissa said the first time it happened a week in, she cursed. Students cried.

One student, Julia, froze. Julia, Melissa said, you're OK. Am I? Julia said.

What the school does not do during the fire alarms, evacuate, like they're supposed to. No one goes outside to the parking lot. No one jokes about culinary. No one moves. Not a single class evacuates.

Melissa says it's too scary to be out there standing in the parking lot like that, vulnerable. What if there's a sniper? It's what they know now. Drills have blind spots.

Ira Glass

Robyn Semien is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, a couple returns to the worst thing that ever happened to them, over and over again. Why? In a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "Before the Next One." Now the mass shootings have become the new normal in our country. We have stories of people preparing for the next one in various ways. We've arrived at act two of our program, act two. Keep breathing.

So there's a whole infrastructure that springs into action every time a mass shooting occurs. There's Red Cross, fire and police departments, SWAT teams, therapy dogs, the Billy Graham prayer truck. But now, there's also a group of people who show up in the immediate aftermath for more personal reasons. These are the parents of kids who've died in other mass shootings.

And what they do at these shootings is so simple and kind of amazing to hear. Producer Miki Meek talked with two of these parents. It's a couple named Sandy and Lonnie Phillips. Their daughter, Jessi, died when a gunman opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado back in 2012. And since then, they have organized their lives to be able to reach out to other parents like themselves. Here's Miki.

Miki Meek

Sandy and Lonnie Phillips have traveled to eight mass shootings since Aurora. It started with Sandy Hook and Isla Vista, San Bernardino, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, and then Santa Fe, Texas, which is where I met up with them in May, right after a student walked into the high school and killed 10 people. They pulled up in front of the school in their truck. Even though they have done this a lot, Sandy told me the discomfort and awkwardness they feel about showing up like this in a community has never gone away.

Miki Meek

But in Santa Fe, they just launched themselves in anyway. They're each wearing a big button with a photo of their daughter, Jessi, smiling. A memorial had just gone up on a big, grassy lawn out front. There were 10 wood crosses, each with a red heart and a photo of the student or teacher who had been killed. People were starting to leave teddy bears, flowers, and balloons.

What the Phillips do here is just talk to whoever wants to talk. They figure that'll lead them to families they might be useful to. And within seconds of getting out of their truck, they bump into a dazed teenage girl wearing shorts and a Santa Fe High School soccer T-shirt.

Miki Meek

And here, the sound gets muffled because Sandy's tiny mic gets crushed when they hug. It's the main sound I remember from that day.

[TAPPING ON MIC]

Miki Meek

Another girl, a junior with light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, walks up to them and stares at their buttons.

Miki Meek

Sandy is good at making people feel comfortable. She has a round, warm face, framed by a gray bob. She's maternal and keeps her comments caring and brief.

Lonnie stands right next to Sandy with his arm around her. Sandy's the one who mostly talks to the kids, but he's always by her side, listening intently. His presence helps her do this. He looks out for her, sometimes running ahead to start the AC in their truck before she climbs in.

Miki Meek

I was surprised at how quickly people opened up to the Phillipses.

Miki Meek

The girl who said Jessi was pretty, she started telling them that she escaped the shooting by hiding behind a building with other students. Now, she just wanted to stay at home. But at home, all she could think about was the shooting. Scenes from that day kept replaying through her head. Sandy doesn't miss a beat here.

Miki Meek

The Phillipses don't make money off this. They're volunteers, and they're not wealthy either. They're retirees living in a 245-square foot trailer, surviving off of modest savings and social security. Sandy is 68 and used to work in tourism for the city of San Antonio. And Lonnie is 74. He used to own some car lots.

Miki Meek

One thing I quickly realized going to Santa Fe is that there are now so many of these mass shootings that they become grim reunions for all the people who show up to them as part of their jobs or volunteer work.

Miki Meek

Sandy and Lonnie ran into an emergency responder from the Las Vegas shooting, and then bumped into this other guy who travels around, putting up all those white crosses you see at almost every mass shooting. He made one for their daughter, Jessi, in Aurora too. Standing on the patchy brown grass next to the crosses, Lonnie interrupted him to do this thing he and Sandy do a lot.

Miki Meek

They suddenly call out the time.

Miki Meek

11:11 is a thing. A lot of people see it as an auspicious sign or a time to make a wish. And it was a lyric in one of Jessi's favorite songs.

Miki Meek

They told me, I know it's silly, but I take it as a hello or a god wink. It helps.

Miki Meek

As the day went on, people kept dropping by the memorial in front of the high school. Parents and students stood huddled together, staring at the crosses or writing messages on them. It was quiet and hot and still. There was a low generator hum from the gigantic Billy Graham ministry truck set up in the parking lot. And then all of a sudden, this young guy started wailing. Sandy made a beeline for him.

Miki Meek

He immediately threw his arms around her.

Miki Meek

He graduated last year. There were crosses set up for three people he knew well. One of them was a teacher named Ms. Perkins, who he really loved. He said she always tried to be strict with him but could never keep up that front for very long.

Miki Meek

After a few minutes, he's caught his breath enough to talk. He tells Sandy he wants the shootings to stop. He wants to take action somehow. And then he suddenly switches gears and starts spilling out his feelings about guns and gun control.

Miki Meek

He plans to get a concealed handgun license when he turns 21 later this year. The Phillipses are actually gun owners too. They have a 12-gauge shotgun. They believe in the Second Amendment. But they're also advocates for universal background checks and tight regulations on the types of guns, ammunition, and accessories, like bump stocks, a person can buy.

However, Sandy says they don't push their political beliefs on survivors when they're doing outreach. Their primary goal is to support. But it's impossible for grieving parents to avoid the politics around guns. There's a whole movement of conspiracy theorists who believe that the US government stages mass shootings to make guns look bad.

Miki Meek

Alex Jones, of course, is famous for saying that mass shootings are fake. He's now a defendant in several defamation lawsuits. When the Phillipses ran into him face-to-face at a gun control event, he accused them of inventing their entire story.

Miki Meek

Lonnie got into it with Jones, stood right in front of him. It looked like a shoving match was about to start, until Sandy stepped in and broke it up. I reached out to Jones through one of his lawyers, who declined to comment. The conspiracy theorists, known as truthers or hoaxers, troll families of victims on social media immediately after any mass shooting.

This can get dangerous. After the Phillipses' son gave interviews in Aurora, he got death threats and had to get the FBI involved. The man who was threatening him ended up in jail. So hoaxers are one of the things the Phillips has warned parents about. They tell families to brace themselves.

After watching Lonnie and Sandy in Santa Fe, I wondered why in the world they were throwing themselves back into this setting, reliving their worst moment over and over again. The answer, of course, starts with their daughter's shooting. They got the news in the middle of the night when they were asleep at their home in Texas.

This was back in 2012. And their daughter, Jessi, was in college at the time. She got to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, with one of her friends at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado. About a half hour after the movie started, Jessi's friend called Sandy from the theater.

Miki Meek

This was a coincidence. Jessi had left a food court in a mall just three minutes before a man walked in and opened fire.

Miki Meek

Lonnie found Sandy in the living room, sliding down a wall. He picked her up and took her to their couch, where he held her. Jessi was one of 12 people killed that night. Another 70 people were injured. And then five months later, there was another mass shooting, Sandy Hook, where 20 first graders and six educators died.

Days later, the Brady Campaign to prevent gun violence contacted the Phillipses. They were reaching out to families from other mass shootings and asked if they'd be willing to travel to Newtown to talk to parents there. Sandy says they didn't even have to think about it. They immediately said yes, because they wished they'd had someone to talk to right after Jessi died.

But when they arrived at a community center in Newtown, Sandy says they felt nervous and uncomfortable. Maybe they were intruding. They weren't sure if these parents would feel angry or grateful about their presence.

Miki Meek

She wanted to help these parents acclimate to their new reality. Looking back, Sandy says it was probably too soon for them to be out there trying to comfort other parents when they were still so raw. But the Phillipses said there was also a strong and instant sense of kinship that they couldn't turn away from.

While they were there, they ran into parents from other mass shootings, too, parents from Virginia Tech and Tucson. These parents had lost kids suddenly and violently in places where they thought that they were safe. The Phillipses now had parents that they could lean on too.

This was the moment that launched the Phillipses into what's become their life work. They could see the need. There are no experts on what to do when your child dies in a mass shooting. The only experts are the people it's happened to.

So to help them find each other, Lonnie and Sandy have set up an organization called Survivors Empowered. They help families navigate their grief, plus a bunch of other practical things, everything from medical bills and charity scams that use kids' photos to raise money, to how to get your child's body home if you live out of state. However, this new mission was hard for their family and friends to comprehend.

Miki Meek

The Phillipses and a few other parents told me, because it's so hard for people to understand that the grief never fades, old relationships start to fall away. People you were closest to disappear, which makes this informal support group even more crucial.

What that support looks like over time and what it means to the parents who get it, I've got to see all that when Sandy and Lonnie got to know a couple from Florida who lost their son in the shooting at Parkland. Annika and Mitch Dworet. I met them at their house.

Their son's name was Nick. He was the captain of Parkland swim team and was about to go to the University of Indianapolis on a swim scholarship. He was a six-foot tall blond kid who collected different flavors of Oreos and waited for supreme drops. Mitch said they'd just reached a point where they were becoming real friends. They talked about relationships, shared playlists, and watched Scarface together.

The day of the shooting, Mitch and Annika got phone calls and texts all day from people who said they'd heard Nick was OK. One person said they heard he'd been moved to a staging area for all the students who'd witnessed the shooting. Another said a police officer was giving him a ride home. And then a nurse at a local hospital said she saw a patient who matched Nick's description. But by that evening, the Dworets' still hadn't heard directly from Nick, so they went to an area that law enforcement designated as a meeting area. They sat in a ballroom with other parents and waited.

Miki Meek

Then their names were called out.

Miki Meek

Nick's body was still at the school because he died instantly, and the building was still a crime scene. It'd be two days before they could see him. Annika wanted to look at his injuries. Mitch did not.

Annika says, this is just how her brain works. She's an ER nurse. She needs details. The director at the funeral home, wanting to protect her, called the medical examiner's office to ask about Nick.

And the person that answered the phone said, oh, let me take a look. What's the name again? It's Nicholas Dworet. He's the swimmer. Oh, the swimmer's perfect.

Miki Meek

He'd been shot three times. A bullet in his chest destroyed his heart and lungs.

Miki Meek

The Phillipses had traveled to Parkland a couple of days after the shooting. They didn't know the Dworets, but a mutual friend thought they should talk. And so this friend, with Mitch's permission, gave Sandy his phone number. Sandy called and got no answer, so she left a voicemail.

Miki Meek

She let them know that she and Lonnie would be in Parkland for a few more days. Mitch called back quickly. He did want to meet with them in person, thought it would be helpful to talk to another family who'd been through a mass shooting. But he told Sandy the timing wasn't going to work. His house was packed with family in town for Nick's funeral.

Miki Meek

Mitch asked her to stop by their house the following day. While Mitch was on board with the Phillipses, Annika had a different take on total strangers stopping by their house.

Miki Meek

Their house was so crowded that the only private place to talk was their bedroom. Annika and Mitch sat on the bed, Lonnie and Sandy on chairs. Annika remembers feeling a little uncomfortable and thinking to herself--

Miki Meek

They asked questions about Nick. And before long, they were just talking. Lonnie remembers Mitch asking if they were religious and if they ever got signs from Jessi. He told Mitch that, like them, they weren't, but they took 11:11 as a hello from Jessi. The conversation went on for three hours.

Miki Meek

And a few days later, when the online conspiracies started appearing about Nick, that he didn't exist or that he was living in California, they remembered Sandy's warning. It was still upsetting, but less upsetting because they knew it was coming. They've helped in other ways, too. The Dworets took the Phillipses' advice and got in to trauma therapy right away, both individually and as a family.

Their younger son, Alex, has been through a lot. Nick was his best friend. One of the last things Nick did on the day of the shooting was walk Alex to his English class. Alex was injured in the shooting and sat by a kid who died right in front of him. Annika says managing her grief, along with her son's, has been tough.

Miki Meek

Sandy's son was 25 when his sister died. Sandy tried to talk to him about it, which ended up pushing him farther away. When she talks to parents, she talks about her own mistakes, too.

Eight months after they first met, Mitch is still in touch with Sandy. They text or call each other every couple weeks. Mitch relies on Sandy more than Annika, who unlike him, already has a built-in network of friends she talks to all the time.

Miki Meek

He's right about that. Sandy spends almost every day at her tiny kitchen table in her trailer, fielding texts and phone calls from survivors, and messaging with people on social media who ask for help.

Miki Meek

A little bit of a lifeline or something?

Miki Meek

Mitch and Annika told me that when they're feeling stronger, they'd like to do for other families what the Phillipses have done for them. They said, god forbid another shooting happens. But if it does, we'll be out there with them.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak and Robyn Semien. The people who put the show together today includes Elna Baker, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Damien Graef, Michelle Harris, Chana Jaffe-Walt, Seth Lind, Anna Martin, [INAUDIBLE], Miki Meek, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Reiman, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our managing editor is Susan Burton.

We had some original scoring in today's program by Matt McKinley. Special thanks today to Andy and Barbara Parker, Heather and Seth Adams, Nicole Hockley from Sandy Hook Promise, Michael Dorn of Safe Havens International, Harvey Shapiro and James Fox at Northeastern University, Carrie Klein, Kate [INAUDIBLE], Joe Eaton, and Jim Irvine.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. We also have an app that lets you download our entire archive and lots of other features. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to our programs co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he was watching this documentary on rock and roll in the '60s, but it complained it was taking them forever, forever, to get to The Rolling Stones.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - BAHAMAS, "NEVER AGAIN"]

Never again, never again will I let you go. Never again, never again will I let you go. Never again. Never again.