On day four of the Parkland crime scene walk-throughs, families of the victims were joined by the brand-new superintendent and a Broward County school board member.
The 1200 building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has been left untouched since the day of the tragedy in 2018. One of those who decided to go inside last week to see where his son Alex took his last breaths was Max Schachter — and Tuesday, he went back to the school to pick up some of his son’s belongings.
He carried a box that isn’t physically heavy but packs a ton of emotions.
Tuesday night, Schachter tweeted a picture of the box and it’s received more than 20,000 likes. He wrote, "Just went to MSD High School to retrieve Alex’s book bag from the day he was murdered in Parkland (in this box). They told me the BIOHAZARD sticker means it has Alex’s blood on it & could have bullet holes. I’m afraid I’m not strong enough to open the box. This is horrible."
“I’m not in the right mental space right now to open it,” Schachter said Wednesday.
I asked him what he wants the public to know about what victims like him and the other relatives of the 17 killed that day have been going through for the past five and a half years.
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“Is that it never stops, it never ends, it’s constant, we’re constantly being traumatized, and going through this and having to move forward and deal with these emotions, it’s excruciatingly difficult," Schachter said. "I don’t know how to do it, there’s no playbook for this."
The playbook on school safety and security is still being written. On his second day on the job, Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Peter Licata said he felt compelled to see the crime scene for himself. School board member Daniel Foganholi, newly appointed to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, joined him.
“Incredibly impactful, angering," Licata said, describing his tour of the crime scene. "I think I’m still angry, saddened, it’s a lot of mixed emotions."
“It was extremely hard,” Foganholi added. “Extremely difficult to walk through because that father part really hit me, and it was really tough to see that scene, but for us to be here, to learn, make it a mission to make Broward the safest in the country.”
“School safety doesn’t just stop, it’s always moving and you have to be ahead of the game,” Licata added.
Schachter, meanwhile, is trying to process another discovery made in his son’s classroom.
“Eventually it all comes to a stop, but you won’t know when or how, but you will know it’s time to get off and start over,” Schachter said, reading Alex’s poem called, “Life is a Roller Coaster.”
“And they found the poem that Alex wrote, the poem I found at 5 o’clock in the morning before his funeral and was struggling to write his eulogy,” Schachter explained. “And the original was in that school, and I wanted it back. They were so nice, they found it for me, but that was in evidence as well, and when I got that back, there was a bullet hole through it. It’s just unbelievable.”
Alex had turned the poem in for an English assignment. It was in a stack of papers on the teacher’s desk, and one round from the murderer’s gun apparently ricocheted from the ceiling down and ripped through all of those papers. There’s a slit in the middle of the page.
