'People heal together': Survivors of U.S. school shootings have advice for Nashville

When Jesse Rizo heard the news about the Covenant School shooting, he knew what would happen next even though he was 1,000 miles away.

The media will come. White House officials will visit. GoFundMe campaigns will be launched. A foundation will be created. Lawyers will arrive.

He saw those events play out last May in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas, when a gunman killed 19 children and two adults.

“Your first reaction is disbelief. It rips your heart one more time,” Rizo said about hearing the news from Nashville. “Then you get angry. The politicians had ample time to address this.”

Schools shootings have become part of the American way of life. The three children and three adults that died on Monday in Nashville join an ever growing list that includes Alexzandria Bell, 15, of St. Louis, Justin Shilling, 17, of Oxford, Michigan, Dominic Blackwell, 14, of Santa Clarita, California, and Rizo’s 9-year-old niece Jacklyn Cazares.

“She just wanted to be like her mom and aunts,” Rizo said about Cazares. “She would pose for pictures and put her hand on her hip like her aunts did.”

Since the mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999, when 13 died plus the two perpetrators, there have been 376 school shootings in the United States, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post. The federal government does not track school shootings.

The Covenant School shooting on Monday was the 17th time this year that American children have gone to school and heard gunshots in their hallways.

Each school shooting, whether or not there are fatalities, changes a community. And it binds that city to a fellowship of survivors that stretches across the nation. The men, women and children who have survived school shootings have lessons for Nashville as the city grapples with the violence of this week.

The days after

On Monday morning, Ryan Ruffo sped away from his workplace toward the Covenant School, where his niece and nephew attend first and fifth grades.

When he got to the church serving as a reunification center, he found his sobbing sister and her husband in a room surrounded by other crying parents. No one knew how many people had been killed.

Children were released three at a time starting with the youngest. His niece and nephew came out together.

"You could see it in their faces that they were not OK," Ruffo said.

Stephanie Cinque, as the founder and director of Resiliency Center of Newtown, has spent the last decade working with children who survived the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. She understands the effect the Covenant School shooting will have on Ruffo's niece and nephew.

"Children's innocence was lost that day," she said about Sandy Hook Elementary. "We need to give them the tools to become resilient and give educators the skills to become more trauma informed."

A slamming door or an announcement over a PA could trigger a response in children and adult survivors.

Cinque, a social worker, said that on average 20% of the people who survive a school shooting suffer from PTSD.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, when 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 were killed along with six adults, Cinque helped run camps where the young survivors could be kids again in a safe environment. The camps also provided mental health services.

Cinque has worked with other towns after mass shootings to create their own resiliency centers. Each one, she said, must be driven by the needs of its community.

"Right now, no decisions can be made. I mean, everybody is still in a fog," she said about Nashville.

And each time another mass shooting occurs, like the one this week in the Covenant School, Cinque gets more calls from people in Newtown who feel defeated and angry.

A shared tragedy can bring a community together, and that can salve the emotional wounds.

"People get traumatized alone, but people heal together," Cinque said.

Over time, however, that unity can unravel.

"Maybe relationships may become strained because they don't know what to say to people who maybe suffered greater loss. That's a survivor's guilt. It's more of a protective mechanism," she said.

Healing through activism

Survivors often turn to activism, which can also cause rifts in the community.

Rizo from Uvalde became a leading voice for the children who were killed. At times it put him at odds with his own neighbors and people beyond his home.

"If you feel the compassion to be called to action, you're going to understand it's a totally different realm," he said. "What makes sense to us will not make sense to the rest of the world."

Already in Nashville, fissures have developed. On Wednesday, state representative Andy Ogles, whose 5th Congressional district includes the Covenant School, posted a Twitter thread that blamed “anti-conservative rhetoric and constant attacks on Christianity” for the shooting.

Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake confirmed at a news conference Wednesday that there is currently “no motive” found in the yet-unreleased writings left behind by the shooter.

Zoe Touray survived the 2021 shooting at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan. One of the four students killed was her friend Justin Shilling.

"I remember him being one of the sweetest people that I've ever met," she said.

Touray, now 19 and a first-year student at North Carolina A&T State University, has traveled around the country this year to meet with other gun violence survivors. She helped lead a group of Oxford high school students on a trip to Uvalde, where they spent time having fun with the younger students from Robb Elementary School.

"We are still children. These are still children," she said. "Hanging out with friends and doing stuff that you used to do is super beneficial."

That work helps her heal, and she hopes to continue it after she graduates from college.

Touray also became a political activist, decrying the Republican politicians in her home state of Michigan who have blocked gun control measures. "Gun violence is not a partisan matter, it’s a matter of life or death," she wrote in an opinion piece for the Detroit Free Press.

She knows not everyone takes seriously the political opinions of a teenager, even one who has survived a school shooting. And she admits she and other young survivor activists have not yet seen many victories in statehouses. But she is not discouraged.

"We're going to outlive a lot of these policymakers that are in office right now," Touray said. "The fact that we are so young means we can fight a little bit longer."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Survivors of U.S. school shootings offer advice for Nashville