Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there. Today, we’re bring you an episode from our archives. We thought this conversation felt more urgent than ever after the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. This episode is about the school shooting generation, the first wave of school shooting survivors who are now adults and have grown up watching these types of mass casualty events happen over and over again. This episode is hosted by my former co-host, Duarte Geraldino.
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Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: This is “In Conversation,” from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Geraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
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Geraldino, Narrating: When Marin Cogan was in sixth grade, she went out one night to play mini golf with friends. Next door, the kids two grades older were attending the eighth grade dance.
Marin Cogan: We had just started playing and we heard what sounded like a bunch of balloons popping.
Geraldino, Narrating: Marin and her friends didn't think much of the sound, that is until they saw a bunch of eighth graders running out of the dance hall toward the golf course.
Cogan: They were crying and seemed very upset. Suddenly I heard that one of the eighth-grade students, who I knew, had a gun and that he had shot Mr. Gillette, who was an eighth-grade teacher and also a student council advisor, in the leg.
Geraldino, Narrating: Marin remembers a friend telling everyone to take cover.
Cogan: My childhood best friend, on instinct, yelled "Everybody get down on the ground." So we all got down on the ground. We were crouched together, just listening and waiting. I remember the eighth-grade students crying, and then I remember eventually someone said, you know, "They got 'em, it's all clear."
Geraldino, Narrating: It was 1998, a year before the massacre at Columbine High School. This was around the same time that, Marin says, the modern school shooting era began.
Cogan: When I think about what I'm referring to as the start of the school shooting era, I think about this period in 1997 to 1998 where there were five shootings in eight months. And mine was one of them. And then almost a year later was Columbine.
Geraldino, Narrating: Before these tragedies, mass shootings at schools were almost unheard of. There weren't active shooter drills in schools or widespread laws on the books about anonymous reporting systems and school threat assessments. This was a different time. School counselors, they weren't trained to help students cope after a shooting. Kids, educators and parents, they didn't even know how to talk about the trauma they had experienced.
Cogan: The thing I keep coming back to is we just didn't have the language to discuss what had happened. It was so new, it was so unexpected, and it was-- it was so sad, but it was also so strange.
Geraldino, Narrating: Today, Marin is a reporter at "Vox." And in a recent article, she connects with survivors of these early school shootings. Like her, they're now in their 30s and 40s, and they recount what it was like going through this horrific and traumatic experience before almost anyone else in the U.S., and how not having the tools and resources to cope affects them to this day.
Marin started by telling me the story of two survivors from the school shooting generation. Their names are Hollan and Missy.
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Cogan: So it was December 1st, I believe, 1997, and Hollan, Missy, and another classmate Craig Keen, as well as several others, were doing their morning prayer group. And the prayer group had just broken up and they were just sort of walking away to go to class and they started hearing gunshots and it happened really quickly. The shooter, who they all knew pretty well, didn't appear to be aiming at anyone, but he did end up shooting, you know, many people in the prayer group. So Hollan, Missy and Craig were all shot and… You know, Missy remembers lying there for a long time and realizing that she couldn't feel her legs. And she had a twin sister who was coming to her and teachers who were saying, you know, Just hang on, the ambulances are coming. Hollan remembers seeing Craig and seeing a wound in his neck that was bleeding, and then he remembers looking down and seeing red drops coming from his own head and realizing that he had been shot.
Geraldino: You write about how Holland told you instead of going to trauma counseling, he spoke with his pastor about how it felt for him to live through a school shooting. And he admits, and this is a direct quote, it was "really grossly inadequate." And then he goes on to say, "And that's what you get when you let a 14-year-old boy lead his own mental health response to a crisis." Now, a lot of the adult survivors that you spoke with had similar experiences where they led their own mental health response. Why was it so often left up to minors to develop a coping system, their own mental health response?
Cogan: Yeah, I think it gets back to that thing I was saying about there being a lack of language. And not just a lack of language, but a lack of resources. I think, you know, something I feel, and I think something all of the adult survivors feel is that, you know, our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders, our community leaders, they did their best, you know, they were trying, but this was a pretty unprecedented situation, and it wasn't clear what one should do after surviving something like this. Missy had another quote in the article that really struck me where she said, you know, When I was in the hospital, I had counselors who helped me adjust to living in a wheelchair, to using a wheelchair, but I didn't have anyone who focused on the fact that I saw someone get shot in the head. And, you know, a lot of the teens didn't feel comfortable talking to adults. It was like, how can you explain what it's like to watch your classmates get shot to an adult you don't know who almost certainly has never been in this situation? So there was a real, I think, instinct among the teen survivors to talk to each other and sort of form their own informal networks of healing. You know, the one I think about is Missy and her friends started an informal therapy group, and it was overseen by their guidance counselor, but they were essentially just having sleepovers and getting together and just talking about what they experienced and validating their experiences for each other. And that was sort of their way of creating their own therapy network.
Geraldino: One thing that really struck out to me about this story: Hollan Holm was shot in the head and yet he tells you that he didn't feel that he was injured enough. How common is that experience or that feeling among survivors?
Cogan: Incredibly common, incredibly common. And it was interesting talking to his classmate, Missy Jenkins, who was paralyzed, and she said to me something I found so interesting, which was, she said, You know, I almost felt lucky because I was injured and that did give me the ticket to heal. I was allowed to be a victim, and some of my classmates felt they were not. And she felt such tremendous sympathy for them because she had seen the ways that had it affected them and they had suffered, and at the same time, they felt, like Hollan, that they weren't injured enough to be traumatized by this event.
Geraldino: You spoke with some of the survivors of the Columbine massacre, specifically Heather Martin. She survived the shooting, but her life after was a little difficult. I mean, what was it like for her to live in the shadow of that memory?
Cogan: I think it was really hard, and I think she is one of those people who was able to speak really well to this notion that she wasn't shot, you know, she wasn't injured, but she really struggled with the aftermath and the pain and with living in a world that just didn't know how to handle survivors. So, she talked about going off to college and a teacher asking her to write a final paper about school violence epidemic, and she tried to explain to the teacher, You know, I was at Columbine, I don't know that I can write this piece, and the teacher said, Well, you need to write it or you're going to fail the class. So she ended up failing the class because she just couldn't do it. There are all these little moments of trauma for her that, you know, were triggered by different events, large and small, and she was often dealing with people who just didn't have a sense of why that would be difficult for her as a survivor. So she did really struggle with it for you years, she dropped out of college for a time… You know, she, she had a hard time recognizing that it was Columbine, that it was her own experiences with trauma that were making it hard for her in her adult life. And it took, you know, years for her to go back to school, get back on track. She ended up starting this organization to help other survivors, and I think that has been really helpful and therapeutic for her. But I think, again, this gets back to this idea of she just kind of had to figure it out for herself because there wasn't necessarily-- you know, there's no guidebook to recovering from these kinds of things, and finding the right resources, even when they are available, can be really tough.
Geraldino: Let's talk about some of the numbers. Is it that the number of shootings have increased or the media attention?
Cogan: What we've seen overall is that the number of incidents of school shootings have gone up since that period of time. And I think we should also acknowledge that school shootings happened before Columbine and even before this period that I'm talking about in 1997-1998. The difference is they were much less frequent, and they were much less deadly. With some exceptions. Sam Leam, who I wrote about in the story, was in a school shooting in 1989 where five students were killed and 30 people were injured. But in the period before that, there were incidents of school shootings, but they were much less deadly, there were, you know, fewer injuries. And I think part of that is that the types of weapons that were available and the sheer number of weapons that were available in this country were less than what we have now. You know, we now live a country that has more guns than people, so it's just a very different world in terms of how many guns are available and the lethality of those guns.
Geraldino: A lot of the victims that you spoke to now are adults, and they have children of their own. Some of them live in the same communities where they witnessed this violence and sent the kids to the same school. How did they make that decision and how are they dealing with that?
Cogan: So, it's different for each of those parents. The two sets of parents I spoke to, who married people that they met in high school, so that means both partners had experienced the shooting in their school, and it played out in very personal ways for each of those couples. So one of the couples, when it came time to decide where to send their kid to school, this woman Kristen Dare, who was one of the survivors, told me that her husband said, You know, I don't want him going to that school. I don't want to be going back there for every parent-teacher conference, I don't want to constantly be reminded of that. I'd like to just move on. It's going to be too much because we're going to be involved in his schooling a lot. So they chose to send him to a different school. Another set of parents I spoke to sent their sons to the same school. And this one survivor Nichole Burcal was telling me that she had a moment where she was supposed to sign her son up for I think it was track and field, and she went to step into the cafeteria, which is where she had been shot, to sign him up, and she just realized she couldn't do it. She could not step over the threshold and go to the place where the shooting had happened. And so she went to the front office and said, I can't go into the cafeteria. And they sort of looked at her quizzically and said, Why not? And she said, Well, I kind of got shot in that cafeteria, and they were really understanding. But it was interesting to me because, you know, there are people who experienced this who now have kids of their own who are living in a world where, you know, active shooter drills and lockdown drills are still very much a requisite, and it's a requisite in part because of what their parents went through as kids.
Geraldino: Did you ask some of these survivors how they feel about guns and gun control laws today?
Cogan: Yeah, so it was more complicated than one might expect, which was part of why I wanted to ask them about it. You know, several of the survivors I spoke with want nothing to do with guns, are deeply frustrated with the lack of progress to control some of the guns that are out there in this country, particularly weapons that are more lethal. But not all of them. You know, a few of them felt like the problem is not guns, the problem is people. Some of them have guns of their own. Sam Leam, the young man I spoke with who was shot when he was seven, owns the same kind of weapon that he was shot with. It's an assault rifle. But he said to me, I wouldn't be upset if the government banned this. The government can ban this and I'll be okay with it. But part of the reason I wanted to include that is to say, Look, some of these people still own guns. Most of them think that we could do better at regulating guns in this country and making sure that we are limiting opportunities for this type of violence to take place. But I think what I discovered was that your relationship to guns is pretty much informed by where you grew up and the sort of culture of where you grew up.
Geraldino: It seems… [SIGHS] …like for a lot of the adult survivors, some of them are taking action today, they're using their own experiences, so that the next generation, and it's-- it's a very difficult to even say this because while we know it's true, it's hard to admit it-- the next generation of school shooting survivors are going to get the type of resources that that first generation didn't. What do the adult survivors say they wish they had gotten that they are now prepared to give the next generation of school shooting survivors?
Cogan: I think the big thing is that they wish that there had been better access and understanding of trauma-informed therapy and the ways that it can help people. I will say a number of them also want to live in a world with fewer guns. I think all of them share this goal of, like, not having these experiences repeated again and again, even if they might differ somewhat on the actual politics. And, you know, some of them-- like Hollan, for example, has become a gun control activist. He was deeply upset when there was another school shooting just about 30 miles away from where he experienced his in 2018, and that, that in addition to his daughter going through an active shooter drill, really inspired him to start taking action. He said, I was silent for 20 years and this never went away, and it keeps happening and I'm really frustrated by it. And I do think that despite, you know, some of the political differences, the overall message I got from talking to the other survivors is we need to create a world where, and a country where, this doesn't just keep happening. And I think that once we accept these things as a part of our lives, you know, we begin to not expect any better, and I think that is a real tragedy.
Geraldino: The world has changed in a lot of horrible ways. A lot of victims of the shootings, they don't get the sympathy that they used to. You know, after the Sandy hook shootings, there were conspiracy theories on the internet that suggested the kids at the school were actors. The families of victims got death threats. And then there was this conservative backlash to the Parkland survivors. How do you make sense of that and how might that impact the children who are experiencing this today?
Cogan: I just look at this as one more way in which we, as a society, have really failed our children collectively. I mean, it's not just that we have failed to prevent these types of horrific experiences from happening again and again, we've also placed the burden on them to become the activists, to become the political actors, to tell us that we need to do better. And it's not just that we've placed that burden on them, it's that now we have a segment of the country who will judge them very harshly and, in some cases, even deny that their experiences really happened. Sam, who I spoke with who was injured when he was seven, told me that he knows people who, whenever there's a shooting, he'll see people he knows on Facebook saying that, Oh, they're crisis actors. And, you know, Sam says, What about me? This happened to me. You know me, and they always say, Oh, not you, not you. But I think it's just-- On some level, I think it's a way of people avoiding something that is really painful, and something that might force them to change their opinions about guns in this country.
Geraldino: Your personal experience is really telling because there are a lot of people who, after living through something like this, would not walk into a situation like this, would try to avoid situations that could re-traumatize them. But as a reporter who covers this, you continuously go and seek out some of these survivors. What is that like for you?
Cogan: There was something Missy told me when I was talking to her, which is, she said, I realized at a certain point that I was using reporters as therapists because they were adults who were really curious about what happened to me, and I could share it with them and not feel weird about it. And in some ways I sort of saw myself as the flip side of that or the mirror image of that. I think I keep coming back to it again and again, and it's been a sort of theme of my writing over the years, in part because I'm looking to interrogate my own experiences. And I will say that I don't think I've ever done a piece that was so illuminating for me personally as talking to these other survivors and realizing that there were so many commonalities in our experiences, and it was almost a chance to take all of these things that have been just sort of floating around in my mind for the last 20 years and give a voice to them and hear them reflected in the voices of the survivors that I with. I found that to be really powerful and sort of therapeutic for me as well.
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Geraldino: Thank you so much for being on Apple News Today. Your work is superb.
Cogan: Thank you so much.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Marin Cogan's article about the school shooting generation, as well as her latest article for “Vox,” which she wrote after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on Apple News app. You can find the link on our show notes page.
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