'We Know The Next School Mass Murderer Is Already Out There,' Says Father Of Slain Student

FLORIDA — She was, and will always be, Fred Guttenberg's "tiny dancer."

Dancing was a major part of 14-year-old Jaime Taylor Guttenberg's life. She practiced 13 hours a week and once wrote, "I dance because it makes me feel possibilities are endless and limits don’t exist. Every time I leap, I feel as though I’ve touched the stars.”

On Friday, Fred Guttenberg was certain his daughter was dancing in heaven when Elton John sang his song" Tiny Dancer" and dedicated it in Jaime's honor during his sold-out concert at PNC Park in Pittsburgh.

On Feb. 14, 2018, the straight-A student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland was killed as she fled from bullets fired from an AR-15-style rifle.

Fred Guttenberg said he was touched beyond words by the singer's gesture.

"I was blown away," Guttenberg said. "Thank you, Sir Elton John, for recognizing the horror of gun violence and for honoring Jaime."

The inspirational moment was quickly overshadowed on Monday back at the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, where more delays and frustration awaited the families of the 14 students and three staff members killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre.

See related story: Rise In Guns At FL Schools Reignites Debate On Safety Measures

After spending 27 days in the courtroom awaiting word on the fate of confessed shooter Nikolas Cruz, the role of the jury was once again delayed by legal maneuverings.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer, the judge overseeing the penalty phase of Cruz' trial in which the jury will determine whether he spends life in prison or receives the death penalty, refused a motion by Cruz's defense attorneys to step down from the case.

The motion came after Scherer took lead defense attorney Melisa McNeill and her team to task for unexpectedly resting their case after calling only 25 of the 80 witnesses they originally said they planned to call during the trial.

Scherer called the decision "unprofessional."

McNeill said Scherer's reaction to her team resting their case displayed Scherer's "animosity" toward McNeill that "has infected this entire trial."

Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty last October to the shooting rampage that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, resulting in an outcry for school safety improvements, gun law reform and more comprehensive mental health services for troubled students.

Parents' Pain Becomes Their Passion

At the center of it all is a group of once-anonymous parents, previously content to attend school dance recitals, soccer games and graduation ceremonies.

Today, they've become nationally known advocates for school safety reforms that they say are simply not happening fast enough.

Among them is Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son, Alex, was one of the first students to be killed when the shooter entered the freshman building of the high school armed with a semiautomatic rifle that he aimed through the window of Alex’s classroom door.

As the founder of the nonprofit Safe Schools for Alex, Max Schachter now spends his days testifying on school safety best practices at congressional hearings and federal commission meetings, speaking with and providing school safety resources to law enforcement agencies and school districts around the country, and serving as an adviser to the FBI Behavioral Threat Assessment Center and the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center.

In 2019, Schachter told the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that the piecemeal safety fixes being undertaken by school districts around the country highlighted the need for a federal government database of best practices for school safety.

"I traveled the country and came to realize that in all of the 139,000 K-12 schools in this country, each principal has to now become an expert in door locks, access control, cameras, et cetera," Schacter said. "It makes no sense to me that each school has to go and reinvent the wheel."

While some schools are spending money hand over fist on safety features that have proven of little or no value, other school districts are doing nothing to improve safety, he said.

Schachter called for the creation of the Federal School Safety Clearinghouse, which was adopted in June 2019 and is now maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

"We know that we cannot prevent 100 percent of these school mass murders, but we know that we can absolutely mitigate a lot of the risk to students, teachers and staff when they do happen," Schachter said. "Every school can do things today that can improve school safety. Many of those things are basics that cost little or no money."

Among those who heard Schachter's message loud and clear was U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, chairman of the Senate committee charged with overseeing implementation of federal school safety measures proposed in the wake of the Stoneman High School shootings.

While the experts have outlined the necessary steps schools must take to protect students, implementation of these steps has been slow, and Johnson wants to know why.

"To what extent have these recommendations, these common-sense, obvious recommendations been implemented? And if they are not — and I know they are not universally implemented — what is the hold-up?" he asked. "And what can we do to make sure that we can take some of these obvious, relatively simple actions as at least a first step to, if not completely prevent these things from happening in the future, at least mitigating the casualties when one of these attacks occurs?"

He said school districts should heed the lessons learned after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and the Transportation Security Administration spent billions of dollars on airport and border security upgrades. But, at the end of the day, "the most effective action taken after 9/11 was we just hardened the cockpit door," Johnson said. "So let us make sure we are at least doing that in our schools."

Learning From Past Mistakes

Unfortunately, said Schachter, like kids, communities don't always learn from past mistakes.

"In my view, there are two main reasons the national school security crisis has continued with no end in sight: The first is we do not implement lessons that we have been painfully learning for two decades; and, two, we are not being honest to parents and communities about the real situation with safety in our schools."

On the former point, Schachter said the state of Virginia is the exception. After the Virginia Tech Massacre on April 16, 2007, Virginia formed threat assessment teams at all its schools based on the United States Secret Service's National Threat Assessment Center model. The only other state that has followed suit, he said, is Florida.

"After Columbine, all responding officers were required to rapidly deploy directly to the threat. Yet in Parkland, eight deputies waited outside for 11 minutes while children and staff were being slaughtered in their classrooms," he said. "In Parkland, first responder radios failed and were not interoperable, delaying help for victims. SWAT teams had to resort to hand signals to avoid shooting each other because their radios failed. Yet as a country we have not truly committed to solving the communications problems. We cannot force all agencies to use a single radio system, but we can make it possible for them to communicate no matter which system they are using."

Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012, Schachter said, "each school should have trained their students and staff how to respond to active shooters. Sadly, many did not. During the 2017-18 school year, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did not hold a single Code Red drill that year, so students and staff did not know what to do when the murderer started firing an AR-15 into classrooms and killing their classmates. No staff member called a Code Red for three minutes after the shooting had already started. And by then, all 17 people were dead, including my little boy, Alex."

Schachter keeps a running total of school bullying, physical attacks, drug use, sexual assaults, weapons possessions and school suspensions in five states, including Florida, on his website, Safe Schools for Alex.

"The second sad reality — which most people do not realize — is that schools are not being truthful about the violence on their campus," he said. "For example, for the years 2014 through 2017, Marjory Stoneman Douglas reported to the state zero bullying, zero harassment, zero trespassing incidents, and many other zeroes. It is not just Broward County that is inaccurately reporting these incidents. This is pervasive across the entire country. The result is a false sense of security which leads to complacency in implementing school safety best practices."

Just as schools receive a grade for academic progress, schools should be rated for safety, he said.

"On college campuses, the Federal Cleary Act imposes financial penalties for inaccurate reporting of campus crime statistics. But in K-12, there is such no requirement. The result is that when you go online to look at school ratings, many of them, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas, have an 'A' rating. Academics are important, but if the children do not come home to their families and staff do not come home, nothing else matters."

Pillars Of Change

Tom Hoyer's 17-year-old son, Luke, was also killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

"The police tell me that he felt the impact of the bullets before he heard the shots," Hoyer said. "One moment he is standing outside a classroom looking forward to the end of the school day, carefree. And the next moment he is on the floor, unable to move and dying. Many times I have wondered what his last thoughts were."

Hoyer is active in a nonprofit founded by the families of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting victims called Stand with Parkland: The National Association of Families for Safe Schools, which has a three-fold mission it calls its "Pillars of Change."

"We understand this is a complex problem, and addressing it in a real and impactful way demands a holistic approach that addresses the triad of school safety enhancements, mental health screening and support programs and responsible firearms ownership," Hoyer said.

The first element of our platform is bringing people together around the idea of securing the school campus," he said. This includes federal minimum school safety standards such as a single point of entry on a school campus as well as federal funding to pay for upgrades.

The next pillar is improving mental health screenings and support programs, he said.

"We need funding to promote suicide intervention programs because more than two-thirds of mass shooters are suicidal," he told the Congressional committee. "We also need Congressional action to relax regulations so that schools, law enforcement and mental health professionals can share information."

Due to confidentiality and privacy laws, he said the threat that Nikolas Cruz posed was never shared.

"My son's killer was known to the school. He was known to the sheriff's office, a local mental health agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation," said Hoyer. "He was known as an
angry, violent and potentially dangerous person. My son and 16 other innocent human beings are dead because these agencies never shared information. They never connected the dots. And in
order to effectively address these potential risks, we have to fund research into threat assessment tools and practices."

The last pillar, he said, is, perhaps, the biggest hurdle because of the tendency to politicize the issue: responsible firearms ownership.

"The safety of our kids and teachers in schools is not a political issue," he said. "We must find ways to keep firearms out of the hands of those who should not have them."

This includes enforcing existing laws, the safe storage of firearms at home where many school shooters obtain their weapons, comprehensive background checks for firearm sales and the use of extreme risk protection orders, or red flag laws, which empower family members or law enforcement to obtain a court order to remove firearms from a potentially dangerous situation.

Alyssa's Law

Lori Alhadeff, too, has become a national crusader for school safety. Alhadeff's 14-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was also killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting.

Less than a year after her daughter's death, Alhadeff successfully lobbied her family's home state of New Jersey to pass Alyssa's Law to address the lag time that occurred at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School before law enforcement responded to the shooting.

According to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Safety Commission, 11 minutes passed between the time Cruz began shooting and the first law enforcement officers arrived.

Alyssa's Law requires silent panic alarms directly linked to law enforcement to be installed in every school.

Alyssa's Law was passed by the Florida Legislature on June 30, 2020, and by New York legislators this past June 23.

The law has also been introduced in the Texas, Virginia, Arizona and Nebraska legislatures and a federal version of Alyssa's Law, titled the Safer Schools Act had been sponsored by U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas.

"It has been 20 years since Columbine, and children continue to be murdered in their classrooms," Shachter said. "We know the next school mass murderer is already out there. The next gun that he will use is already out there. It is not a question of if; it is a question of when. We know what can be done to prevent it, and we know what must be done to mitigate the risk of more lives being lost.