‘The silent toll.’ Five years after the Parkland shootings, trauma still rocks the community ‘every single day’

Some days, Tony Montalto can’t get out of bed, weighed down by the realization he will never again see his daughter walk through the front door.

Some days, Mike Kaye draws cartoons to cope with the PTSD that has made his son almost catatonic at times.

Some days, Aalayah Eastmond asks friends to mute the television so the sound of gunshots won’t frighten her.

Five years after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that took the lives of 17 people and injured 17 others, trauma continues to ripple through the community. The painful impact of a gunman’s rampage spreads deep into the homes of children, educators and first responders who witnessed the tragedy firsthand. It spills into the psyches of people living with the scars of seeing friends shot or waiting hours to learn if their loved one survived.

Though half a decade has passed, the battle to recover from the consequences of this tragedy continues. Small steps signal major victories among thousands who grapple with recovery, and triumphs can be as simple as making it to a therapist’s office.

“There is a tendency to say you should be over that by now, or say I understand what you are going through when we could never understand,” said Dr. Scott Poland, a professor in the College of Psychology at Nova Southeastern University. “It’s a challenge every day for some people just not to let the grief and fear consume them.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, parents, students, siblings, teachers and emergency responders followed varied timelines in dealing with their emotions and post-traumatic stress.

“It has taken certain people longer to show their emotions. I didn’t seek therapy until after six months,” said Matt Deitsch, a co-founder of March for Our Lives and friend of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed in the shooting. “Some people still haven’t had their mental health needs addressed.”

Processing the trauma of that day has been complicated, and survivors still are reaching out to access mental health help. Some former students now live hundreds of miles away from Parkland on college campuses where they seek trauma counseling that often isn’t available. Some families have moved to parts of the country where fewer daily reminders exist — but where there is no community support.

Distance doesn’t ease the damage.

On her college campus in New Haven, Connecticut, a loud noise will bring 20-year-old Sari Kaufman back to the freshman building at Stoneman Douglas and the sound of the gunshots, ambulance sirens and pure chaos. In every classroom she enters at her university, Kaufman immediately looks for the exit.

“Gun violence is affecting us every day and following us on to college campuses and into the next part of our lives,” she said. “It’s important to understand we don’t just move on. There will never be a point where we just move on. It’s important to talk about the silent toll it takes on us every single day.”

When Kaufman meets someone, they often ask where she is from. “I don’t always identify myself as being from Parkland because of the burden of talking about that day and explaining it with people you just meet,” she said. “There’s an emotional toll.”

At college in Washington D.C., Aalayah Eastmond, 21, avoids stores as much as possible this time of year, remembering the flowers, heart-shaped candy boxes and stuffed animals strewn on the floor as she and her classmates ran to different corners of the room to avoid the gunfire. Eastmond eventually hid under the body of a blood-soaked classmate for protection.

“Valentine stuff is triggering,” she said. “I have to stay away from that section. Valentine’s Day for rest of the world doesn’t look or feel the same as it does to me.”

Eastmond said she did get therapy at Stoneman Douglas her senior year and she has healed enough to speak at rallies on gun violence. She’s even leading a “Remembering Parkland” event on Feb. 14 in Washington, D.C.

Yet something as simple as a heart balloon on Valentine’s Day can trigger tears or a panic attack, she said. So, too, can gunshot sounds on a television show or fireworks on a holiday. Eastmond says her relationships are affected.

“People around me are impacted by my trauma,” she said. ”My girlfriend doesn’t think about it anymore. If we are watching TV and there’s a gunshot or violence, she clicks the mute button so I don’t get triggered.”

A junior in college, Alyssa Tephford, 20, studies criminology and sociology and plans to attend law school. She has had several years of trauma therapy after hearing gunshots from the Stoneman Douglas building just 100 yards away.

“Everyone’s trauma from that day presents differently,” she said. “Some experienced depression. Some panic attacks. There can be different triggers. When I hear a car backfiring, or fireworks, I have to remind myself I am safe.”

Parents’ lives changed too

Although five years have passed, parents like Mike Kaye and Ellen Fox-Snider still fight the daily battle to make their children whole again. They are just a few parents of the students who saw peers killed, heard the killer’s footsteps, or hid to avoid a barrage of bullets. Many Stoneman Douglas students never returned to a classroom, or tried and eventually withdrew.

Kaye said his son’s post-traumatic stress surfaced six months after the shootings. Dylan was in the building where students were killed. He heard the thud of the gunman’s footsteps and the jiggle of the knob on his locked classroom door. Dylan returned to his high school when it reopened after two weeks.

“We thought everything was fine, but six months later we got called in and learned he had straight Fs. The teachers told us, ‘He needs help.’”

Kaye has been struggling ever since to get his son on medication and therapy, and even hospitalized him for a period. “I feel like any amount of stress will make him break,” Kaye said. “My son had ambitions to be a math teacher, and he can’t at this point. It’s a hard, uphill battle.”

The Parkland father said he has written a comic book as his own form of therapy, with proceeds going to a PTSD-related charity. It’s the story of a superhero fighting brain demons.

Fox-Snider, whose daughter attends college, said most Parkland parents help their children process the tragedy as they themselves work through their helplessness, sorrow and anger. A mental health counselor, she led workshops in the community to teach mind-body skills to adults and children, but her healing process is ongoing, and lately she said she feels defeated.

“We continue to be re-traumatized by every shooting,” she said. “It’s hard, but we want to be hopeful.”

In her circle, Fox-Snider has seen a gamut of reactions from teens whose coming-of-age experiences became overshadowed by the tragedy.

“Students who had underlying issues or pre-existing psychological vulnerabilities or anxiety definitely had more of a difficult time moving through the trauma and processing it,” she said. “It’s very individual, but there’s still a lot of need out there. It may seem quiet, but in our circles, we are talking about it.”

The Eagles Haven Wellness Center, which opened in 2019 after the suicides of two shooting survivors, is set up to address the community’s mental health needs. The center offers crisis support and case management as well as yoga, art classes, meditation and dance classes.

Deitsch, an early organizer of March for Our Lives, says tools such as meditation, yoga, deep breathing and a network of support have helped him deal with the post-traumatic stress that built up as he led marches and bus tours and organized speaking engagements to protest gun violence.

Originally, he said, there was a sense of hierarchy in Parkland around who needed trauma therapy and could access the resources. “That made no sense. There are people who were in the building who were fine and people who were not at school who weren’t fine.” He hopes by now, people who need the help got it. “I think people are either on a path of healing or a path of harm.”

Some of the buried emotions in the community rose again during the 2022 sentencing trial of the Parkland shooter. Eagles Haven provided comfort rooms for victims’ families who testified. Rebecca Jarquin, director of Eagles Haven, expects to continue its mission of helping people heal from the tragedy for many years.

“Even when you do work on trauma, it could resurface years later with another trauma or another life event,” she told a Coral Springs publication. “Something occurs in your community, or another shooting happens, and that trauma resurfaces and PTSD resurfaces, and you are back in the same place.”

The entire Montalto family immediately went into therapy when their daughter Gina was killed. Still, says Tony Montalto, there is continual pain. “The loss of a child never leaves you. Some days it’s a struggle for me and my wife to get out of bed. Most days we support each other and find a way. Some days we don’t get out of bed, and it’s okay.”

First responders deal with emotional trauma

An understanding exists among the hundreds of emergency professionals who consoled frantic parents and teenagers as well as tended to the wounded at the high school. Every one of them recognizes it was a scenario in which no training could prepare them for the mental toll. Their experiences not only affected them but traumatized their families, the 911 dispatchers and bus drivers who took the terrorized students to a community center to meet up with their parents.

On Feb. 14, 2018, Capt. Ed Derosa of the Coral Springs Police Department rushed into the east stairwell of the 1200 building of the high school, unsure of what awaited him.

‘What really what sticks out in my head is the faces, the faces of the kids coming out and that feeling when we were going through the building of ‘Where’s this guy?’ — because we really had no idea and we were just waiting for him,” Derosa said.

Along with those images, he recalls the panic of a fellow police officer in that stairwell whose son attended the school. “If his son was not all right, I was not sure what I was going to do.” Derosa vividly remembers the relieved look on the officer’s face when he saw his son boarding a bus.

Derosa said the officers there that day have been through debriefings, peer-to-peer trauma counseling with police officers from nearby cities, and meetings with psychologists. They received follow-up checkups six months later. For a few, the trauma was exacerbated when they responded to calls from families of survivors who took their lives a year after the tragedy.

And then there are those officers who testified in the shooter’s sentencing trial.

“There are still some officers who feel anger, some who still have personal issues. This is not something you forget,” Derosa said. “There has been nothing that resulted in anyone retiring or relieved of duty as a result of MSD. We have provided resources to cope with what they are feeling.”

Deputy Fire Chief Mike Moser led the Coral Springs/Parkland firefighter response on Feb. 14, 2018.

Everyone on the force experienced trauma that day, even those who weren’t at the school, he said. “We live here. We know people who went to school there. Our families are a part of the community.”

In the immediate aftermath, first responders from other cities who had been through 9/11 or school shootings guided the locals through the forms of post-traumatic stress to expect and how to deal with the mental toll. Some needed additional and continued therapy.

Moser, who chairs the Parkland17 Memorial Foundation, a charity formed to build a public memorial to the lives lost, said giving back has helped him heal.

The members of his force, he said, are in varying stages of healing. “Some may have completely healed. Some on the far end of spectrum may have a much harder reaction to what they saw. I don’t know if they ever will be healed. The community as a whole is in a much better place than day of, but I couldn’t tell you everyone is completely healed at this point — and some may never be.”

Teachers

Every school day, Dara Hass musters the strength to return to the campus where a gunman shot to death three of the students in her classroom and wounded several others by firing through a window in the door.

She fights the images of debris flying, students crying and young bodies going limp. Instead, she focuses on the students who are there now to appreciate literature and good writing.

Initially, returning to Stoneman Douglas felt overwhelming. Hass took time off, left South Florida and temporarily worked for the school district. “It took me a while to process,” she said.

But in the fall, she returned to the high school to teach.

Five years later, the students at the school during the tragedy have moved on. Yet Hass and some other educators still teach on the campus where the freshman building remains preserved as evidence and a portable-turned-wellness-center serves as a refuge for those who need a quiet moment.

Hass credits trauma therapy and determination for her ability to teach at the same school where she witnessed young lives cut short.

“I do my best to focus every day on the positive,” she said. “I have changed my style of teaching to be 100% present and I get more enjoyment out of my days. With my family I make more time for the fun and the memory-making events. The same in the classroom. I want to enjoy the students. That’s where my healing process has pushed me to.”

Whether at Stoneman Douglas or dropping her daughters at their school, Hass always worries about safety. “I’m nervous and I think a majority of parents feel the same way.”

Small changes reflect her desire to feel safer in her classroom after what she endured. Her current classroom is in a different building.

“I now have things closer to the door that can be pushed in front of it, like a tall filing cabinet,” she said. “Also, I requested a room that has a closet [to hide in]. The rooms in the 1200 building didn’t have that. I refused to go into a portable because the walls are too thin and there is no closet.”

The research, the future

Emerging research is just beginning to document the mental health consequences of school shootings on hundreds of thousands of children and educators.

A 2020 study of the effects of 44 shootings at primary and secondary schools across the United States found that antidepressant use among youth near those schools increased by over 20% following the event. The same study found students who had been exposed to a shooting at school were more likely to be chronically absent and to be held back a grade in the two years after the event. Long term, substance abuse is another concern with those who suffer PTSD.

Poland, the psychology professor at Nova Southeastern University, said in Broward County he would like to see more outreach to the Parkland shooting survivors and their families, including their younger siblings.

“I think it’s important that people be given permission to move on, but at the same time those who are still struggling, we need to reach out to them,” he said. “Hopefully we have learned to be there to listen and embrace the valiant efforts that survivors are making.”

Sun Sentinel health reporter Cindy Goodman can be reached at cgoodman@sunsentinel.com.