3 years after Parkland school shooting, what the survivors-turned-activists are doing

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Almost immediately after bullets stopped ringing out at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, and 17 students and faculty were dead, a crop of surviving students raised their voices to demand action.

They planned and led marches all around the country. They took to town halls and pressured their local public officials. Their faces were splashed on television screens and magazine covers. Their advocacy was rewarded by small, but significant changes in Florida legislation.

Three years later, many of these students are attempting to juggle the normal things young college students these days juggle: Zoom classes, relationships and thoughts about their futures. The only difference is many of them now have hundreds of thousands of followers, national platforms and all the attention that comes with that.

Three years after the tragedy that forever changed them, students have forged ahead with activism and so much more. Here’s a look at how they’ve continued on their paths.

Emma Gonzalez, 21

Gonzalez is perhaps the most recognizable face from the March for Our Lives movement who emerged after the shooting and was named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2018. During the March for Our Lives protest on Washington, D.C., in 2018, she famously stood in silence at the lectern for a little over six minutes to commemorate how long it took for 17 people to be shot and killed during the shooting.

She appeared at the helm of a number of marches afterward, was a familiar face on television and in the pages of publications and even saw her voice sampled by Madonna.

She is now a college student at New College of Florida in Sarasota. Gonzalez couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

In February 2020, she published an open letter to Florida representatives who were considering voting to merge both New College of Florida and Florida Polytechnic University into the University of Florida.

Gonzalez wrote that she always wanted to attend a small school, rather than a large school.

“No part of me was interested in being a face lost in a lecture hall,” she wrote.

The bill was dropped a month later.

In October, she wrote an op-ed for Vogue advocating for the election of Joe Biden. “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for fascism.” In the op-ed she said that she is still struggling with PTSD, anxiety, depression and ADHD.

Later that month, she was featured alongside other members of her graduating class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in the documentary “Us Kids,” which chronicled the March for Our Lives movement immediately after the shooting.

In January, she was one of many voices of former students calling for the removal of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from committees after her disparaging comments about Parkland survivors.

David Hogg, 20

Hogg is another recognizable name who emerged from the student-led movement after the shooting and helped co-found the March for Our Lives organization. He is now a student at Harvard University.

Like Gonzalez, he also couldn’t be reached for comment.

While juggling Zoom classes and fighting back against recently resurfaced claims by Rep. Greene, Hogg also has been busy trying to get a new pillow company off the ground to compete against MyPillow. Hogg’s new company is called Good Pillow. In a branding document shared on Twitter, Hogg pledged that the company will support charitable organizations around the world and will be made in the United States, among other things.

But the news hasn’t been taken well by everyone. Some have accused him looking to profit from his platform and letting down the over 1 million followers he’s drawn as an activist. Hogg fought back against these claims on Twitter. “I am more than my trauma,” he wrote. “I am more than an activist. I’m a human being that gets to decide what I want to do with my life. If I want to start a pillow company to help people, feed myself and create jobs I’m going to do it.”

On Feb. 10, March for Our Lives also announced that Hogg will take a leave of absence from his role as a board member.

Cameron Kasky, 20

After confronting Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at a CNN town hall days after the shooting, Kasky was featured on a Time magazine cover in 2018 alongside Gonzalez, Hogg, Alex Wind and Jaclyn Corin. Wind and Corin did not respond to requests for comment.

Today, Kasky is living in Manhattan and directing his talents for organizing toward the mayoral campaign of Andrew Yang.

Kasky told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that even before the 2018 shooting, he had an interest in politics and organizing.

Although he hasn’t been to South Florida in some time, he said he could see himself returning to support any Democratic candidates who seek to challenge Senator Rubio in 2022.

Kasky said he is not formally involved with the March for Our Lives organization these days, but that he keeps tabs on it and is proud that the organization has evolved from focusing just on Parkland. Today, there are 300 chapters around the country led by students in high school and college. “I’m super proud of them,” he said.

Speaking of the three-year anniversary of the shooting, he said every year is difficult, but especially because the day falls on Valentine’s Day.

Now that he is in a relationship, he feels ambivalent about what he should do.

“On the one hand you want to enjoy a holiday that a very, very evil person took away from people,” he said. “But on the other hand, that day is to remember people.”

Ryan Deitsch, 21

Immediately following the shooting, Deitsch was thrust into prominence after the footage he filmed hiding in the closet with classmates was shared around the world. He later became a founding member of the Never Again and March for Our Lives Movement and has been a staunch advocate for mental health.

Today he is a sophomore at American University in Washington, D.C., but, like most college students, much of his learning happens on Zoom.

Deitsch told the Sun Sentinel he is still involved with the D.C. chapter of March for Our Lives, where the organization is lobbying the Senate and House for further gun reform. Although he is happy about local legislation that has passed since the shooting, such Florida’s red flag law, he hopes federal action can happen under President Joe Biden.

“This is the first time that we are directly advocating under President Biden,” he said. “I have a good feeling where things are heading.”

Deitsch said the anniversary of the shooting has never been easy for him. “Trauma is just something that very much sticks with you.” He also said the attention he’s had on him ever since 2018 has been difficult to handle at times. “I just sometimes want to stop altogether.”

But he said he ultimately feels a responsibility to his community to continue the fight that started in the days after the shooting. “I realize that because I am in such a privileged position and because I have this platform, I’m going to use it until the day that no one listens to me.”

One area that he has been particularly vocal about is mental health resources and space for healing. He said that he believes officials in Parkland and Broward County have not done enough to ensure students who were impacted by the shooting have the resources they need to heal. He also criticized officials for the lack of a permanent space off-campus that students and other members of the community can go to mourn and reflect.

After the shooting, Deitsch said he had a dedicated trauma therapist funded by a grant. But he said he no longer qualified for the free care once he moved to D.C. He worries that as the last class who witnessed the shooting graduates this summer, local officials won’t continue to prioritize the same resources and support that were immediately available after the shooting, especially to students at Westglades Middle School who were also on extended lockdown that day.

“My sincerest fear,” he said, “is that the community will continue to normalize the situation and move on but in a way that isn’t conducive to healing.”

Carly Novell, 20

Three years ago, Novell was hiding in a closet with classmates. When she emerged, she became the second person to survive a mass shooting in her family. Her grandfather survived one in 1949.

Novell is currently living in Washington, D.C., and studying journalism at George Washington University.

She told the Sun Sentinel that she has always been interested in journalism (she wrote for the paper as a high school student). But her own difficult experiences with members of the news media after the shooting only further motivated her to pursue a career in the field.

“I was 17 and some of the ways I was talked to as someone who just went through a traumatic experience was really off-putting,” she said. “But I realize I can use my experience to be a better journalist for the stories of other people.”

In addition to keeping most of her classes online, she said the pandemic has made this year’s anniversary especially difficult because of the isolation.

It doesn’t help, she said, that people such as Rep. Greene are in the news bringing up the sort of conspiracy theories that Novell said only hurt survivors of the shooting. “The whole point of them is to distract from the real problem, which is gun violence.”

Unlike other students the Sun Sentinel spoke to, Novell said she isn’t getting her hopes up about wide-scale changes to gun laws.

She said Biden has talked a good game, but words don’t count for much. “We’ve seen the plan, but we haven’t seen the action,” she said. “I’m waiting for the action to happen.”

Sari Kaufman, 18

Kaufman says she was lucky to have escaped Marjory Stoneman Douglas thanks to a fire alarm that went off three years ago, in the midst of the shooting.

But the sounds of those gunshots have never left her mind. She went on to organize large marches in Parkland and Tallahassee and pen op-ed letters against arming teachers at school.

Now she is a freshman at Yale planning to major in political science. She told the Sun Sentinel she is looking toward a possible future in public office.

“After experiencing the shooting and seeing how politics is just so intertwined with what happened and the inaction that followed, it made me want to go into politics,” she said.

When she isn’t on Zoom for classes, Kaufman has taken up a new cause to advocate for: voter education.

She said she got the idea while organizing early marches after the shooting and realizing that most young people, including herself, never paid much attention to who their local leaders were.

She recently started an organization called MyVote Project, which creates digital voter guides so young voters can know who is running for office in their communities.

She has already assembled a team of 200 high school and college volunteers across the country.

Because it has been three years since the shooting, Kaufman said she knows a lot of people who didn’t experience it first hand may have forgotten about what happened. Which is why she believes it is important that the victims are honored every year.

“It is very important for people who weren’t there to remember how they felt when they found out that 14 children died at school,” she said. “It’s important that they remember how they were mobilized afterwards and continue to press lawmakers to pass common-sense gun safety legislation.”

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