After the Apalachee High shooting, 14-year-olds worried they’d be next. Sought places to hide. And fixated on one fact: The alleged killer, and both slain students, were their age.
Hannah NatansonOctober 29, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
The ninth-grader never let himself think about it for long, but he always had questions. Where it happened. What gun the shooter used. Where the weapon came from. How many people died. Whether any of them were children, like him.
Then, when Alex had heard enough, he tried to forget. Block it out, he would tell himself. Block it out.
But on a Wednesday evening last month, after another massacre, this time at Apalachee High School in Georgia, his first question was the one his mother dreaded most: How old was the shooter?
“Wow,” Alex replied. “That’s my age.”
On Sept. 4, he and millions of other 14-year-olds had just begun their freshmen years, among the most formative of their lives. It is a season of awkward homecoming dances and chaperoned mall dates, of ill-timed pimples and longed-for learner’s permits. This year, it also began with word — from TikToks, Snaps, Reels, Stories, whispers from classmates and sit-downs with parents — that one of their peers had become the youngest alleged mass school shooter in a quarter-century. Two more ninth-graders, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, were dead.
After the Apalachee High shooting, 14-year-olds worried they’d be next. They fixated on one fact: the alleged killer — and slain students — were their age. (Video: John Woodrow Cox, Hannah Natanson, Reshma Kirpalani/The Washington Post)
The gunman, also accused of killing two teachers, has since been charged with murder, as has his father, who authorities say gave the teen an AR-style rifle he used in the attack.
The lives of America’s freshmen had long been shaped by the threat of gunfire in their classrooms. Nearly all of them had practiced how to hide in darkened corners from gunmen. Since they were kindergarteners, according to a Washington Post database, at least 245 shootings at K-12 schools have killed 110 people and exposed more than 213,000 students to gun violence.
To many ninth-graders, though, Apalachee felt personal.
“Why? How?” then-14-year-old Mackenzie Priest, of Minneapolis, asked when she learned how old the shooter was. “He’s the kid that should be afraid of being shot, not the one shooting.”
A freshman in California grew so fixated on the shooter’s age — her age — that she began studying her classmates’ faces at lunch, wondering if one of them could draw a gun. A freshman in Alabama skipped his first homecoming game after his mother pleaded with him not to go. A freshman in Georgia, at a school 30 minutes from Apalachee, couldn’t shake the fact that he shared both the age and first name, Christian, of a student who was killed.
The Apalachee shooting unnerved Alex, whose family asked that he be identified by his middle name, but he found solace in his approach to staying safe at school. He worked hard to avoid conflict, drawing lessons from one of his favorite TV shows, “Survivor.” The game’s winners, he had learned, were seldom the most aggressive or adversarial; they made friends, played in the middle, followed the flow.
“You just gotta be nice,” Alex said. “You don’t have to, like, treat people mean. You should be kind. We’re in the same world.”
So that’s what Alex did, secure in the expectation no one had any reason to harm him.
But there was something he didn’t know, because his parents never told him, because they wanted to protect him, because he still is just a kid who plays with Pokémon cards. A year earlier, his name had been found on a middle school “hit list.”
Authorities quickly determined that the note’s author didn’t intend to harm anyone, but what Alex’s parents knew he would never understand was the one word that appeared next to his name: “Die.”
Her seventh day of ninth grade had ended, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, but there was still an hour before her stage crew meeting, so Mackenzie Priest decided to explore. The aspiring Disney engineer, who wants to build roller coasters, wandered into one of her Minneapolis high school’s two theaters.
Intrigued by the catwalk, Mackenzie climbed its steps and spotted a hatch set into the far wall, high above the stage. She walked over, opened the door and peered into a small gray room. Eyeing the word “WEED” graffitied on one wall, she sat down to imagine how high-schoolers used the hideout: To play hooky from class. To make out. Clearly, to smoke pot.
Then she had another thought: “If there’s ever a school shooter, this is where I would go.”
For the next half-hour, Mackenzie stayed cross-legged on the catwalk, plotting routes from each of her classes to the hatch. How many kids could she fit inside? Nowhere near her entire grade, not even one full class. She’d have to be selective.
As soon as she made friends, Mackenzie decided, she’d show them the secret room. So they could stay safe, too.
When Mackenzie’s mother picked her up that day, the teen was eager to share her discovery. As Bernadette Priest pulled into a gas station, Mackenzie announced she’d found somewhere to hide from a gunman.
Her mother sighed. “Oh honey,” she said, “is this because of the Georgia shooting?”
“There was another shooting?” Mackenzie later recalled asking.
Her mother relayed the basics: Four people dead. Two Mackenzie’s age.
That night, Mackenzie shut her bedroom door and opened TikTok. She searched “#apalachee” and “#apalacheeshooting.” She watched clips of kids sobbing, hiding under desks. She saw no blood or bodies. Still, flipping from post to post, she felt herself slip into the state she calls “trauma block.”
She felt bad for the students huddling in fear. But her sadness was distant, like she’d slid the volume of her emotions to mute — because that was what “trauma block” did.
Mackenzie first entered trauma block in sixth grade, when her pediatrician was killed by a gunman. Now it took over whenever things got dark: During fights with her mom. When classmates bullied her. Or when Mackenzie, who lived in Texas until this year, heard about the school shooting in Uvalde, then a two-hour drive away.
In the days after Apalachee, Mackenzie felt a flash of trauma block every time she walked by the school theater. It made her think of the catwalk, which made her think of the hatch, which made her think about children dying of bullet wounds when they were supposed to be learning.
But by Friday, she had managed to make a friend. So Mackenzie led the girl into the theater. Up to the catwalk. To the hatch, and the room it hid.
Her new friend worried they were breaking the rules. She started walking away. “Come on,” Mackenzie told herself. “Do it.”
“This would be a perfect place to hide,” she recalled saying, tumbling the words. “From a shooter.”
Mackenzie’s friend looked at her. “Okay,” she said.
The two girls left the theater in silence.
Charlee Amaro heard that the teen accused of the attack at Apalachee had begged his family for therapy, so one evening she asked her mom how she would react if Charlee or her twin, Caleb, made the same plea — or, worse, threatened to shoot up a school.
The question didn’t startle Devon Torrez, whose 14-year-olds often raised big, complicated issues during family discussions at their home outside Kansas City, Missouri. Gun violence had become a frequent subject.
Torrez, a former parole officer, told Charlee she would first remove her handgun from the safe and get it out of the house. After that, Torrez said, she would contact an inpatient treatment center.
Caleb, a mellow kid who spent much of his time playing in the woods, was furious when he heard that the AR-style rifle used in the Georgia shooting had been a Christmas gift from the teen’s father.
“Nobody should have a gun like that,” he said. “There isn’t a scenario where you need one.”
Charlee resented that so few of her classmates talked about how school shootings affected them or what their generation should do to address the crisis. Her brother figured every child their age thought about it, but sharing those fears out loud would only make them feel more real.
They already felt real to Charlee, who had never forgotten when her fifth-grade teacher told the class to keep scissors and pencil boxes handy in case they needed to throw them at a gunman.
The Apalachee shooter’s age bothered Charlee, but it was the victims’ ages she couldn’t get over.
To her, they were just kids, because she was just a kid. Charlee still climbed on jungle gyms. She played with Barbies.
So much of her life had yet to come, existing only in her mind.
She would marry someone kind, move to the country, have four babies. She would work in a hospital, maybe as a pediatrician. She would travel to Spain and admire the architecture. She would adopt as many cats as she wanted to.
But the news from Georgia reminded her that none of it was certain. She suspected that Mason and Christian, the students shot dead there, had imagined futures of their own.
Jolene Lamberti climbed into the car after her first day of high school, clarinet in hand, to find her mother taking slow, deep breaths.
“Are you okay?” Jolene recalled asking. “You look like you’ve been crying.”
“Just so you know,” Erin Lamberti said, “there was another shooting.”
Jolene, 14, asked the question she always does: “Why is this still happening?”
Back in elementary school, when teachers asked Jolene and her friends to sit in a corner and keep very, very quiet, they said it was to practice in case a wild dog got into the building.
Jolene believed her teachers. Until sixth grade, when someone threatened to shoot up her middle school on Snapchat. A friend told Jolene about the post in homeroom — and that was the moment she learned people with guns sometimes walked into schools and killed children like her.
As she got older, she read about school shootings elsewhere in the country: a new one every month, it seemed.
When she heard kids had died, Jolene started to cry. Everyone knew this was a problem. Why couldn’t the adults stop it?
Each time, she and her parents had a version of the same conversation: Jolene asked why, and they described a complex political landscape that made it difficult to enact gun control. They told her how important it was to vote.
In Jolene’s eighth-grade year, one of her classmates was shot dead while visiting his grandmother in Boston. For days afterward, Jolene was distraught. Gun violence had stolen away a boy she knew. Tyler.
Then one day, sitting in the cafeteria, she realized: The kids around her were talking again, but not about Tyler. They had continued without him. She needed to move on, too.
Sitting in the car last month, Jolene listened to her mother recount the list of dead and wounded at Apalachee High. Erin parked. Jolene hugged her mother, said she loved her and headed to marching band practice.
The band struck the opening notes of “Shut Up and Dance.” As Jolene rested her fingers on the clarinet’s keys, she told herself to focus only on what she was doing — not to picture dead students sprawled in a Georgia classroom. It was important, she reminded herself, to move on.
She thought about getting the notes right. About not messing up. She drew a breath, then blew.
By the end of the song, all Jolene could hear in her head was the music.
Ava Olsen couldn’t move on.
Every detail from Apalachee — the timing, the place, the age of the shooter — took her back to a September morning eight years earlier when she picked up a chocolate cupcake and walked out onto Townville Elementary’s playground with the rest of her first-grade class. She saw the pickup truck rumble toward them, saw the 14-year-old step out of it, saw the black handgun. She heard the pops.
Her teacher was shot in the shoulder, and another child was struck in the foot. Only Ava’s best friend, Jacob Hall, died. He was 6.
At the funeral in their rural South Carolina community, he lay inside a small gray casket dressed in a Batman costume. Ava couldn’t bear to look at him.
She came apart after that, suffering through long stretches of quiet anguish that were often interrupted by bursts of rage. She hit herself and yanked out her eyelashes, once clawing her nails so sharply into her elbow that it caused an infection. She also began repeating what the shooter had screamed on the playground: “I hate my life.”
Ava was so consumed by trauma and fear that her parents withdrew her from Townville. She transitioned to home schooling, not setting foot inside another classroom for six years.
In seventh grade, though, she went back. And she thrived.
Ava still heard about school shootings, and sometimes they gave her bad dreams, but she kept getting on the bus and going to campus, determined to resist the isolation that had stolen so much of her young life.
She started high school with big plans, to ace her honors courses, try out for cheerleading, score goals for the soccer team.
On Sept. 3, just a month into ninth grade, Ava turned 15. She had long refused to celebrate in September, the month when Jacob was shot, but she’d reclaimed that part of her childhood, too. This year, she got her nose pierced and went roller-skating with her boyfriend. Instead of a cake, she asked her mom for makeup from Urban Decay.
Then, after school on Sept. 4, she opened TikTok and saw the videos.
Another shooting. Another 14-year-old. Another school, this one just over an hour away.
The next day, she forced herself to board the bus.
“me and a bunch of my friends said if someone tries shooting up the school we’re NOT staying,” she texted her mother, Mary, that afternoon. “were running into the woods.”
“Yes run away and don’t look back,” her mom replied.
“Mommy I’m sorry I’m not a good daughter sometimes,” Ava continued. “If a shooter comes to my school i js wanted you to know i love you.”
That weekend, on Sunday evening, Ava saw a list of area schools that someone on social media had threatened to attack. Hers was on it.
“Nobody’s ever going to stop this,” she told her mom.
On Monday morning, Ava didn’t get back on the bus.
