She didn’t see the gunman or hear the shots, but she knew what was going on.
When the young man took a fatal shooting at Florida State on Thursday, Stephanie Horowitz saw the vast campus and saw the horrifying reminder that brought her back when she was a teenager at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School during the Parkland massacre seven years ago.
“You could barely see the silence. You couldn’t see the soul, and you had left your belongings brought in like an open laptop or bag,” Horowitz said in an interview with the Associated Press. “I did this before so I knew what it meant. I know what the aftermath of a shoot at school looks like.”
Horowitz, a graduate student at Florida State University, is one of a small group of people who were traumatized in the Parkland massacre and now in the shootings at a university in Tallahassee, and is forced to withstand the second school shooting in the early stages of adulthood.
“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you for the first time. You don’t think it’s going to happen to you twice,” said Horowitz, 22. “This is America.”
Two people were killed and six others injured after a 20-year-old man identified by police as Phoenix Echner opened fire around lunchtime near a student union building on Florida State University’s campus on Thursday.
The suspect, a university student and the son of a sheriff’s aide, was hospitalized with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, police say.
Logan Rubenstein, a Florida student, was in eighth grade when he was forced to be evacuated at middle school during the massacre at nearby Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School.
“What we went through was our mission to ensure this never happens again,” replied Rubenstein (and this is the second shoot I had to go through.”
The Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, killing 17 people and injuring 17 people on Valentine’s Day in 2018.
Jaclyn Schildcloth, who leads the Gun Violence Research Group at the Rockefeller Government Institute in New York, said experiencing shootings at multiple schools could prolong the emotional healing process for a person.
“It seems like all the progression of what you’ve come to look like at first glance, and you’re quickly back to the starting line,” she said.
Lori Aradeff, whose daughter Alyssa was killed in a Parkland shooting, said her son Robbie had a wave of panic washes in text that he had an active shooter in Florida, where he was a student.
“That’s not the message you want to get that there’s a shooter at your child’s school,” Aradev said. “Your brain is really starting to spin. It’s traumatic and obviously very triggered by me, my husband and son.”
She said her son was at the Student Union about 20 minutes before the shooting, but left before the shooter arrived.
“I pray for the family who lost someone yesterday, but this should be unusable,” Alhadeff said. “This shouldn’t have been my son’s second experience in school shooting. We need to do better.”
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Izaguirre reported from Albany, New York. Matatt was reported from West Palm Beach, Florida. Associated Press journalist Mingson Lau was a contribution from Wilmington, Delaware.
