‘I feel like there’s still people inside’: Parkland’s 1200 building houses unwelcome, haunting memories

Rafael Olmeda, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Updated ·5 min read

The 1200 building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the scab covering Parkland’s deepest wound, has not been in use since Feb. 14, 2018. It’s scheduled for demolition this summer. For some, it can’t come down soon enough.

For some, but not for all.

You can’t tell why from the outside. It just looks like a nondescript, fenced-off, three-story edifice showing the earliest signs of neglect. Why bother touching up the exterior paint job or cleaning the windows of a school building no child will ever set foot in again?

A gunman named Nikolas Cruz shot and killed 17 people there, 14 of whom were students. In 2022, he was sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. Everyone whose life he touched was sentenced to remember it happened.

From the inside of the building, it becomes clear why no one would want to return to the cursed classrooms and haunted hallways. There are some who still hear the screams, who feel the air vibrating with each shot of the rifle, who still smell the mix of gunpowder, blood and falling plaster.

But while many look forward to the eyesore coming down, there are those who want it to stand. As long as the 1200 building remains, they say, it still has one final lesson to teach.

It seems to depend on where you were when it happened, where you are now, and what you lost six years ago on Valentine’s Day.

Stacey Lippel

Stacey Lippel still teaches language arts at Stoneman Douglas. In 2018, her classroom was on the third floor, right by the stairwell where the gunman emerged after having wreaked his havoc on the first floor. She took a bullet in her arm as she rushed her students into her room and hid, hoping the gunman would just keep walking. He did.

Today she teaches in a different building, struggling, and usually failing, to avoid catching a glimpse of where it happened.

“It’s traumatizing for those of us who lived through it,” Lippel said. “I just don’t look up. But if I do have to see it, I’m looking straight at my classroom.”

Room 1255. She went back late last year when the building was opened to those who worked there, who left belongings behind, who lost children and family.

“I went back to my classroom to get closure. I really needed to see how things were left.”

Lippel recovered posters, yearbooks, writing samples from her students, some of whom died that day.

For her, there’s no reason to go back inside. Standing outside during the demolition is another story.

“I think I’d like to be there for that.”

Bradley Golub

He was one of the lucky ones. Bradley Golub was unharmed.

Physically.

When it became clear the sound on the third floor was gunfire, Golub, 14 at the time, ducked into the closest classroom he could find. There he huddled with other terrified students as the horror unfolded in the hallway.

When it was over, a SWAT team arrived.

“We didn’t know whether to trust them until we saw them in uniform,” said Golub, now 20 and a student at the University of Central Florida. “They told us to leave, and to not look down. ‘Keep your head up.’ I didn’t want to look down. But you could still see the blood on the walls.”

Golub was a freshman at the time, and he stayed at Stoneman Douglas, graduating in 2021. He was last on campus in December for a varsity basketball game.

“It was like Fort Knox on campus,” he said, complimenting the security measures no one thought was necessary before it happened. He tried to block out the building itself, but like the blood on the walls six years ago, it could not be unseen.

“I would say most people are looking forward to it coming down,” he said.

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Few have been allowed inside the building since it happened. Investigators. Lawyers. There was a reenactment last year — someone went through the building with a rifle much like the one used by the gunman so that people outside the building could hear what it sounded like. It was all part of a lawsuit filed by the victims and their families against the Broward Sheriff’s Office and those who were supposed to provide safety at the school.

In August 2022, the jury charged with deciding whether to sentence the gunman to death or life was escorted through the building, followed by five news reporters (this South Florida Sun Sentinel writer was among them).

Once the courts were done with the building, the Broward School District allowed only a select few people inside: students, teachers, family members of the victims and government officials examining the real world effects of gun violence. The last of those tours, for now, was held last month.

Ivy Schamis

She taught in room 1214 on the first floor for the entire time the 1200 building was in use, from 2009 until it happened. Ivy Schamis was teaching a Holocaust Studies lesson when the first shots were heard. She saw two of her students, Nicholas Dworet and Helena Ramsey, both 17, murdered in front of her eyes. She was helpless, wondering if she and the children with her were next.

In the years that followed, Schamis kept teaching at Stoneman Douglas, determined to stay until the last of her 2018 students graduated. “I initially really thought we would eventually go back into the building and teach again,” she said. “I just thought we would go back in. But of course we couldn’t.”

Even driving or walking past the building was traumatizing. “I was in shambles driving past it every day.”

Now living in Washington D.C., Schamis is worried she may not be allowed to return to her room and maybe find a hint of closure before the building is razed.

“It needs to come down,” she said of the structure. “Everyone wants it torn down so we can move on.”

The parents

Not everyone wants it torn down. Max Schachter, who lost his 14-year-old son Alex, and Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Jaime, have been through the building repeatedly, accompanying elected officials and government department heads as they gingerly stepped over the shattered glass on the floor and silently tried, and probably failed, to grasp how frightening it must have been to live through it all, to step over the bodies while trying not to look at them as police escorted the lucky ones to the exits.

Tear it down? No, said Schachter.

“There’s nothing like this. It’s a life-changing experience to walk through that building,” he said. “The stories it tells, no one else can tell.”

Guttenberg agreed. “It still serves a meaningful purpose,” he said. “I understand those who want to move on, but for the 17 families, there is no moving on.”

There will come a time when the building has no more lessons to teach, Schachter said. “When all schools are safe.”

The opinion is not universal among the parents. Few opinions are.

Anthony Borges

That he survived the shooting at all could easily be seen as a miracle. Anthony Borges was shot five times in the third-floor hallway, but none of the shots were fatal. He lived to tell two juries about it.

“I drive by because I still live around there,” Borges said. “I don’t know why it’s still there. I feel like there’s still people inside screaming for help.”

Like he was, though he didn’t say it.

He said he’ll celebrate when the building comes down, but he understands the parents who want it to stand.

“I’m not a parent,” he said. “I don’t have a child who died there. I have the trauma of what I went through, and that’s all I can talk about. They have their pain. It’s different. It’s different for all of us.”

Rafael Olmeda can be reached at rolmeda@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4457.