Danny Day works six or seven days a week, sometimes twelve-hour days. Warehouses and distribution centers go up around the industrial highways of northeast Ohio, and Danny’s company comes in to finish the drywall. He muds the doorframes by hand, working so fast and so long with a knife and pan that at night the pain in his right forearm wakes him up. The white drywall mud disintegrates his leather work boots, so every two or three months he has to buy another pair at Walmart. When the crew sands, the drywall mud turns into dust, and the dust collects in his reddish-brown beard and at his temples, where his hair is already turning silver. He is twenty-three years old.
He keeps close to his boss, who brought God into his life, and whom he’s come to think of as a father. He is quite certain that, without this job, he wouldn’t be here at all. Work is everything: purpose and stability and distraction. The bad thoughts don't come when he's at work.
Some months back, Danny ran into Brandon Lichtinger, his old English teacher from Chardon High School. It had been years since they’d seen each other. Brandon gave Danny a hug and apologized. He wished he’d known back then what he understood now about loss, Brandon said. But he was a young teacher; he didn’t know how to help a kid who’d survived what Danny had.
It snuck up on Brandon, the emotional aftermath of what happened. For the first year, he pretended things were normal. It was only later, after his life fell apart, that he realized the trauma belonged not only to the kids but to him, too. He hadn't meant to be in Chardon six years later, living in the same house, teaching at the same school. Some families left afterward. Brandon found he couldn't move.
Brandon was in the hall at Chardon High School when he heard it. It sounded like construction, like a nail gun. That's when he glimpsed Jen Sprinzl, the principal’s secretary, standing at the end of the hall, near the cafeteria. She would come to see that moment outside the cafeteria as the one that separated her life into a before and an after.
Afterward, Jen often wanted to quit her job. But her husband would say, “Well, what’re you gonna do?” and she knew she had to go back to work and return to her office, where the staff would come in weeping because Jen had always been the school’s mama bear. That protective instinct was why she ran out into the hall in the first place, after she heard shots and kids running. It was why she turned the corner when she did, and came face-to-face with the gun.
There’s one high school in Chardon, a town of about five thousand people deep in northeast Ohio's snow belt. Living in Chardon is like living in a snow globe, one resident told me. It was early May the first time I visited, and it had just snowed again. An electronic bulletin board in the town square announced the city’s annual snowfall total, an impressive 128.1 inches. There’s a picturesque nineteenth-century town square, home to a maple syrup festival and a bathtub race, in which citizens push wheeled cast-iron tubs down the town’s Main Street. There are antiques shops and a stylish coffeehouse with framed homilies on gratitude and prayer in the bathroom. One day I caught a middle school drama group in the square, performing skits designed to promote good values. One centered on how Humpty Dumpty should have taken responsibility for his own fall.
CoCo Griffis has lived in the area for close to twenty years and described Chardon as “Rockwellian.” She works for an insurance company and volunteers to raise money for the school system. She and her husband, Dale, who owns a construction company, walked me around the Chardon Living Memorial Park, which opened late last year on a patch of land behind one of the town’s elementary schools. When the project stalled at one point because of bureaucratic complications, CoCo persuaded Dale to donate his time to finish it himself. The park is divided into three sections—an exercise area, a playground, and some walking trails—each of which is memorialized with a plaque featuring a different teenage boy’s face. Inside a gazebo, Dale pointed to a spot way up high, where he’d anchored a small tree branch. On the branch stood three metal birds. For the three boys, he told me.
Six years ago, on a Monday morning in late February, at about 7:30 a.m., a seventeen-year-old boy opened fire in the cafeteria of Chardon High School. Three boys were killed: Demetrius Hewlin and Daniel Parmertor, both sixteen, and Russell King Jr., who was seventeen. A seventeen-year-old boy named Nick Walczak was paralyzed. The shooter is in prison for life.
The first time I spoke with CoCo by phone, late on a weekday evening after my kids had gone to bed, she cried four times. That was when I started to understand just how deeply something like a school shooting could affect people—people who weren’t even in the school or who didn’t lose someone close to them. That it could be a kind of earthquake that still reverberates, six years later. That a whole town could be marked by this day and could send its young into the world marked, too—some of them drinking, depressed, cutting, suicidal.
CoCo’s youngest child was in Spanish class at the time of the shooting, CoCo told me. Casie is still suffering; she's had panic attacks and was diagnosed with PTSD. CoCo wanted me to understand that 2-27-2012, as the date was rendered on memorial posters, videos, and tweets, had never ended for her family. Every time another school shooting happened, she said, she felt devastated for the people who died and their families. “But I feel equally bad for the people who survive,” she said. “Because I know what they’re in for now.”
Over the course of several months, I talked to many people in Chardon. I talked to a former assistant principal named Drew Trimble, who told me that whenever she hears a fire alarm or a siren, her whole body shakes involuntarily. I talked to the high school athletic director, Doug Snyder, who said he always sits with his back to the wall in restaurants. People told me about panicking at the sight of helicopters or news crews, both of which they associated with that day. Mariah Moore, a therapist at a local mental-health facility who was a senior at Chardon during the shooting, told me that she recently had to ask a young patient to stop blowing up a balloon during a group counseling session. Her whole body had grown taut while anticipating its pop—a sound so much like gunfire that, even though her mind could recognize it was just a balloon, she knew her body would react as if a gun had gone off.
The people of Chardon have had six years to think about what a young man named T.J. Lane did, and what it has done to them. They have different opinions about what could stop school shootings, opinions bound up in politics and ideologies and personal experiences. They have different accounts of what has helped them move on, when they’ve been able to. They know what parts of themselves they've been able to reclaim, and what parts belong forever to that day.
They know what life is like years after a shooting—and they know the anguish that will shape those years. Because there will be more school-shooting victims in America. The people of Chardon know this. We all know this.
Danny had two questions about that day. Why did a kid he barely knew kill Danny’s friends? And why didn’t he kill Danny? He was sitting right there.
Danny was friends with all of the boys at that cafeteria table, but he and Russell King were especially close, like brothers. They hunted and fished together and picked up odd jobs like scooping poop and walking dogs at a facility where the animals were trained to hunt. “Constructive stuff,” Danny called it—not hanging out in the square and acting foolish, like some of the kids their age. Danny believed in work and in the importance of being useful. It was why he’d asked his mom for a worker’s permit for his fourteenth birthday, and why he recently got chickens. “Chickens work all day,” he told me. Russell was kind of an old soul, too, which was why they got along. He was a big guy, built like an ox. They spent nearly every day together.
So, naturally, they were together that morning. Danny and Russell—and Demetrius and Danny P. and Nick and a bunch of their friends—were waiting in Chardon’s cafeteria for the bus to take them to a vocational school, where they spent half the day. T.J. Lane was in the cafeteria, too, awaiting his ride to an alternative school for struggling students. Danny was sitting right between Danny P. and Russell. Demetrius, who’d only recently begun to hang out with their crew, sat just across the table.
Danny was looking at Russell when it happened. There was a popping sound, and Russell abruptly slumped over, his head smacking into the table. Danny turned around, and there was T.J., standing at the table behind him, with his gun pointed straight at Danny’s face. They made eye contact. Danny turned back around, threw his head down, and played dead. Danny thought he felt another shot, the one that killed Demetrius, go right past his ear.
In the days and months and years that followed that moment in the cafeteria, Danny was filled with rage. He wanted "justice": T.J. needed to die. The desire expanded like a balloon, filling his mind with a single impulse. I want to find him, Danny thought, and kill him. He tried to go on for Russell, if for nothing else. He got a half-sleeve tattoo with a cross, Russell’s name, and the phrase “live for."
But it was T.J., not Russell, who consumed Danny’s thoughts. Danny obsessed over the question of why. They had no beef with the guy. A week or so before the shooting, he and Russell had been driving and spotted T.J. walking along the side of the road. “Oh, hey, I know that kid,” Russell had said. “Pull over for a second. He doesn’t have any shoes on.” They’d pulled over and offered T.J. a ride. “No, I’m good, man,” T.J. had said. “Thanks.”
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On the day of the sentencing, in March 2013, it was snowing outside. Inside, T.J. unbuttoned a dress shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the word killer inked on it. He gave the middle finger to the victims’ families, and mumbled through an obscene rehearsed statement that managed to sound both cruel and juvenile. Danny was in the room, and he told me T.J. kept smiling at him. He wondered whether T.J. had simply missed him with that gun, or if he’d spared him on purpose, and if that smile was the expression of some sort of sick joke.
Even with T.J. behind bars, his act of violence continued to destroy. On the second anniversary of the shooting, Russell's dad, Russell King Sr., died at age forty-eight from an overdose of heroin and alcohol. Danny went and got another tattoo, on the underside of that same arm, this time for Russell's dad.
There was something else, beside the anger. For a long time, Danny wanted to kill himself. He told me this was not a decision made in a rush of emotion, but one based on a levelheaded assessment: Being dead sounded better than being alive. He could not feel joy. He could not get excited about things. He thought and thought about it. He told me he had plans, but ultimately, he couldn’t do it. One humid day, we sat at a picnic table at a park about twenty minutes from his house. What eventually stopped him, he said, was the thought of his mom talking and laughing with him. He thought, “How many more times is my mom going to smile on the couch after work if I’m not here?”
So his mother became a saving grace. There were a few others, like Joan Blackburn, the wise, approachable social worker the high school brought in after the shooting. Danny respected her. A kid could talk to Joan about anything. Throughout the rest of high school, he spent a lot of time in Joan’s office. When he could not focus—or when he wanted to escape the curious and sympathetic gazes of classmates who knew where he’d been sitting on 2-27-2012—he found sanctuary there.
Andy Fetchik, his principal, was another. In the weeks after the shooting, Danny was walking around the school half out of his mind on assorted drugs. He’d started experimenting with them before the shooting; after, there seemed no reason to stop, and plenty of reasons to double down. One day, Andy stopped him in the hall. Danny figured he was in trouble.
Instead, his principal asked if he wanted a job. Andy had a friend who ran a drywall company and was looking to hire someone. “I want somebody I can help,” the friend had said to Andy. Andy told him about Danny, and the friend said, yes, that was exactly who he wanted to hire.
One morning in late May, I met Brandon Lichtinger at his beautiful old fixer-upper of a house. We sat on the porch, and he made black tea flavored with mint from his garden. He waved to his neighbors as they walked by, and tracked a wily squirrel tormenting a cat. It was hot, and he wore shorts and a black T-shirt listing an A-to-Z of famous writers’ names, from Alexie and Bradstreet through Updike, Vonnegut, and Zindel. He told me he’d bought the house with his ex-fiancée.
They’d become a couple a year before the shooting, when they were in their mid-twenties, and it seemed like they had plenty of time to decide what to do with their lives. He was thinking about grad school. She could take her nursing job anywhere. A midsize city like Asheville would be perfect for what he called their “fun couple” phase, before vows and children. Or maybe Portland, Maine, or Ithaca, New York. Maybe Europe. Brandon always had ideas about the future.
After the shooting, though, his priorities changed. He felt an overwhelming desire to put down roots. He proposed to his girlfriend. They set a date and bought the quaint old house. The knowledge that life was short filled him with a grave sense of urgency. Later, a friend would tell him it made sense. “You didn’t feel safe,” the friend said.
Now, looking back, Brandon told me he could see all the ways that day had changed him. How he’d turned his rage and despair inward. How his three years with Teach for America, where he taught prior to Chardon, in a school dominated by gangs and the constant threat of violence, directly fed into the trauma of the Chardon shooting. How he felt like he was on high alert all the time, on the lookout for potential threats, waking up many mornings at 4 a.m. in a state of hyperarousal and unable to go back to sleep. How, after the shooter’s sentencing, when he realized the kid felt no remorse, Brandon felt that his understanding of human nature had been exploded by one teenager’s “brazen evilness”; it caused a "cosmic shift" in his sense that there was "goodness in the world." He came to feel that he couldn’t trust himself, and that, somehow, what had happened was his fault. He’d chosen to move to Chardon; he felt “marked by badness,” he told me. If he left, who was to say he wouldn’t bring that badness with him? His therapist and his fiancée both wanted him to quit his job, but, even if he did, he couldn't imagine a future where he was happy.
“All the color drained out of everything,” Brandon told me. The world was “gray garbage.”
About three months before the wedding, after the venue was lined up and the security deposit paid, Brandon went to Staples to buy envelopes for the invitations. He found himself in a sea of off-white, trying to distinguish between eggshell and cream—“Get the cream ones,” she’d said—when he suddenly thought: I can’t do this. He was miserable at his job, miserable in his life. He didn’t want to fake his way through a wedding, pretending he was happy. So he went home and told her: I love you, but I don’t want to get married. Not now. She was shocked and hurt and angry.
.
Weddings became fraught affairs after that. All of their friends were getting married, it seemed, and moving on with their lives. Once, during a fight just before leaving for yet another wedding, Brandon was in such despair that he grabbed a plastic Santa lawn ornament and smashed it on his head. Blood was everywhere, and his fiancée was freaked out.
He hated himself for so many things. After she left, he hated himself for that, too.
Finally, nearly four years after the shooting, Brandon went to his boss, Andy Fetchik. Something was wrong, Brandon said, and he didn’t know what.
“I know what’s wrong,” Andy said. “You have PTSD.”
Andy told Brandon to take a six-month leave of absence, assuring Brandon that his job would still be there afterward, if he wanted it. Brandon tried what he called a “geographical cure,” driving through Oregon and camping in Big Sur. But the beauty and the wildlife and the mountains did not cure him. So he came home and tried a strange-sounding therapy recommended by his next-door neighbor, a fellow Chardon teacher, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR. Twice a week for eight weeks, he spent an hour or more recalling his memories from that day, working through his emotions and the beliefs attached to them, till he was exhausted.
It helped. It was only this past February, Brandon told me, on the sixth anniversary of the shooting, that he could experience what he described as “normal sadness” for the first time. He could finally accept that the shooting had happened in the past. That it was truly over. He could see slow progress in the fact that he’d begun to imagine a life outside Chardon again. He considered becoming a paralegal at a record label, a dream job for a music nerd. He got into an expressive arts therapy program in Boston, though when he thought about moving, and working with traumatized kids, he decided maybe he wasn’t ready for that just yet. Still, he thought he could leave if the right thing came along.
We finished our tea. He thinks about her, he said. “You can’t make someone wait around for you, you know?” She’d moved away and started dating someone else. He couldn’t blame her, but he wished she’d waited.
Geauga County, where Chardon is located, saw a spike in both concealed-carry weapon licenses and residential mental-health treatment rates for teenagers after the shooting. The event also caused a sizable cluster of people to seek out EMDR, the type of therapy that helped Brandon. In EMDR, patients recall traumatic memories while focusing on one of a variety of stimuli that oscillates from left to right—handheld pulsers that take turns vibrating, or alternating tones in the ears, or a therapist's finger that moves back and forth in the patient's field of vision. It’s unclear how it works, but the American Psychological Association (which, along with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, says it can be an effective treatment for PTSD) says the therapy is intended to change the way memories are stored in the brain. Something about the bilateral stimulation may soften the impact of distressing memories, allowing people to see them as events that have passed, rather than ever-present threats.
EMDR success stories passed like good gossip in the small town. Twenty-two staffers in the school district alone tried it, including Jen Sprinzl, about two years after the shooting. The hallway haunted her; she could not forget what she saw that day when she turned the corner, and it seemed as if it might always be there waiting for her. Once, when she had to take that route, another teacher walked down ahead of her and turned the corner, saying, “It’s okay, there’s nobody here.”
“People will tell you it’s okay,” Jen told me one afternoon. She pointed to her head: “It’s not okay in here.” She worked with a different therapist for six months, a year maybe, just the two of them walking that hall over and over.
She was in the student-services office on the morning of 2-27-2012, talking to another secretary, when she heard the commotion and the pop-pop-pop, and the kids yelling, He has a gun. She ran toward the cafeteria. Kids were racing out, and she told them to go, get out of here, and she kept chasing the source of the sound.
The shooter—whom she will not name, because naming him would give him recognition and power—was walking out of the cafeteria, and suddenly Jen was in his line of sight. His eyes were a dead stare, and his gun pointed at her. Behind him was the school's assistant football coach, Frank Hall, who'd been in the cafeteria that morning and had chased the shooter out. “Don’t shoot!” Jen remembered the coach yelling. She threw her arm across her head and collapsed onto the ground. Then the boy with the gun ran down the hallway, where he saw Nick Walczak, a student he’d shot already several times in the cafeteria. Nick was bleeding and trying to get away; he might have been okay, only the shooter shot again, and a bullet lodged into Nick’s spine, paralyzing him.
The shooter ran out a back door, followed by Coach Hall. Jen raced to Nick and tried to calm him, and a teacher in a nearby classroom pulled the boy inside. Jen sat by Nick's head and tended to him, and she was so absorbed that it was some time before she thought to look up, where she saw a whole class of teenagers, crying and huddled together on the floor, staring at them.
.
As the months and years passed, Jen struggled with a thought not uncommon to Chardon residents: If only. If only she’d had the presence of mind to trip the shooter; then the coach could’ve wrestled him to the ground. If only the shooter had shot her instead of shooting Nick again; after all, he saw her first. “If he would have shot me, Nick wouldn’t have been paralyzed,” she told me. I kept asking her about that, to make sure I heard her right.
Jen and her husband, Joe, were high school sweethearts. They’d built a house just outside Chardon, where they raised their two kids. Jen didn't want to leave the house after the shooting. She longed for the weekends, for the comfort of her couch, where she felt safe. Joe tried to persuade her to get up, go for a walk, go golfing, but the world beyond the couch was too scary.
They’d planned to downsize eventually. But it happened sooner than they’d expected, in part because they had a neighbor who liked to do target practice in his backyard. The sound of gunfire sent Jen down to her basement, where she couldn’t hear anything and would wait out the sound.
When we finally met in person, Jen and Joe were sitting in the living room of the condo they’d moved into three years ago. It was quiet here. Chipmunks frolicked through the window behind them. Joe spoke in a low tone. Jen spoke haltingly, pausing to find the right words. She said that, despite therapy, she continues to struggle. Recently, while standing in a restaurant buffet line, another diner started to choke; the commotion that ensued sent Jen's whole body into a state of panic, her heart racing, her breath fast and shallow. Just the other day, a student pulled out what looked to be a pocket knife, and it terrified her, until he opened it up to reveal that it was just a comb. She said she knew that some of her colleagues thought she should be over this by now, six years later, but it wasn’t that easy.
Even so, things had improved over the last year. “I let him win for five years,” she said, referring to the shooter. Then one night, she'd had a kind of breakthrough. She and Joe went to dinner down the road, and she told him, “I’m sorry if I’ve been a burden. I can’t control this.”
“You’re not a burden,” he told her. He was there to help her, he said. However long it took.
And after that, she said, crying, “it was like I was free.” In that moment, Joe had taken a great weight from her. She realized she didn’t need to protect him from her pain; he could help her carry it.
In the living room, Joe said he understood that healing from trauma takes time. He turned to Jen. “I knew it wasn’t going to be the same—six months later, or a year later, or ten years later,” he said. “Will you ever be 100 percent back again like before, before the shooting? I hope so.”
“I hope so,” Jen said.
But if she had to do it again, she said, she would. She would go toward the sound, and toward the children.
“I know you would,” Joe told her.
One evening I met CoCo and her daughter, Casie, at an outdoor bar. Casie brought along her new psychiatric service dog, Rain. Rain had already helped immensely in the two weeks she’d had her, Casie told me. When she woke up from night terrors, Rain soothed her by licking her face.
Casie was opinionated, funny, bitter. She’d just turned twenty-one: still so young that she wasn’t sure how to properly sip the cocktail she’d ordered, but world-weary nevertheless. We talked about politics, and the theater, and the playwrights she loved, and about her anxiety and depression. She told me she’d hoped that talking about her experience publicly might help other people, a way to make something good come out of something bad.
As she talked, I thought I could actually feel her rage. It came radiating off her like the waves of heat that shimmer up from a sunbaked airstrip. When I asked how she’d changed since freshman year, she told me she missed her old self. She missed the girl who wasn’t so angry all the time.
I was struck by how much Casie’s trauma, and her coping mechanisms, manifested in her physical body. Casie did not know the boys who were killed, but one of her brothers had been friends with the shooter’s half-brother. After the shooting, she experienced a kind of survivor's guilt premised on the belief that this connection somehow implicated her. In her fourteen-year-old mind, it went like this: Because the boys were dead, they could not eat. Because they could not eat, she should not eat, either.
We were at CoCo’s house when Casie told me about this. CoCo was listening, occasionally getting up to play with the dog, or offering us food, or wiping tears from her eyes. She recalled how, when Casie wouldn’t eat, she felt the same worry and sense of responsibility she’d felt when her nursing babies occasionally turned away from the nipple. She tried to find foods to tempt her. She gave her Carnation breakfast drinks to get the bare minimum of nutrients into her body.
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Casie talked about her longtime boyfriend, whom she met during a high school theater production when they were both fifteen. He was the only kid who noticed that she was barely eating, and this touched her. He suggested that she eat some pizza, and when she said no, he didn’t push the matter but sat beside her while she picked at her granola bar. She liked him for that.
Trauma plays out differently for people. Jim Adams, who heads the Geauga County Board of Mental Health and Recovery Services, told me that many factors play into how resilient people are in the face of trauma, including how close they were to the triggering event and what difficult and stressful experiences affected them in the past. After the Chardon shooting, some of the first calls into Adams's crisis line were from Vietnam veterans, for whom the shooting brought back terrible memories.
Recovery from something like this doesn’t travel in a straight line, Adams said: It’s cyclical. For instance, “I’m in rehab for my hamstring right now. I’ll have two weeks where it feels stronger and stronger. Then I’ll have a week and it just hurts," he said. This is a common pattern in communities that have experienced a mass school shooting, he said. What clinicians strive for “is to make those good moments longer and longer, and to make bad moments shorter.”
For years, Casie told me, she denied needing help. Then, in college, she began to see counselors. Her boyfriend worried about her. Bad things kept happening around her—there was a drive-by shooting not far from her during freshman year—and she could not help feeling it was her fault, that she was cursed “in some cosmic way.” There were times she pulled her hair out, smacked her head against walls. She also tried EMDR, after Brandon—“Mr. L,” as she calls him—told her how much it helped him. It seemed to have an effect, CoCo told me, even if "it was not the whole solution for her." There was one session after which Casie couldn't stop coughing; it was as if the fear and desperation were caught in her throat. As she methodically ripped a piece of cardboard into tinier and tinier shreds at her mother's table, she told me how angry she was that shootings kept happening. She was angry at people who offered their “thoughts and prayers” instead of working to change things.
The three of us and Rain got into CoCo's car, and we drove to a quaint little town called Chagrin Falls, where we had lunch and looked at a waterfall. Over ice cream, Casie talked about her plans for her wedding in a few years. It would be whimsical and Peter Pan-themed. Her world-weariness dropped away as she described the table decorations. She was all enthusiasm and wonder, and she suddenly seemed very young.
Lately, Danny has noticed that his bad days are worse, but his good days are better. It isn’t quite the balance Jim Adams said clinicians strive for, the shrinking of pain and the lengthening of good periods. Rather, it is as if Danny's emotions are magnified. When he's down, he's really down. When he's up, he's profoundly up.
Sometimes Danny feels inspired by the idea that he is living for Russell. Or he’ll see a sign that seems like indisputable proof that the three boys are still here. He’ll be out hunting and find himself thinking about them, or praying, and along will come three deer, walking together, staring at him, yet too far away for him to make the shot. It has happened too often, and at too-perfect moments, he said, to be a coincidence.
Other times, he turns the anger around in his mind like a fidget spinner. Sadness begets anger, frustration begets anger. One day he was finishing drywall and another worker shot a nail gun without warning. The sound, so much like the .22-caliber handgun T.J used, set off something in Danny's body; suddenly, he was furious, shaking, teeth clenched, stalking out of the building, consumed with a heat he couldn’t smother. Sometimes he calls his boss, the friend of his former principal, and says, “I’m losing it.” His boss will tell him that whatever is slowing the work, it isn’t that bad, and not to worry if he didn’t finish something, because don't they always figure it out?
He never sought out therapy in a concerted way. Just a few sessions. Instead, he finds peace in his daily routine: the work, which often keeps him too busy to think, and his downtime. He bought an off-road vehicle to take himself rambling with friends in the hills of West Virginia, where he feels happy and free. He goes hunting, trapping, and fishing; gigging frogs, shooting squirrels and deer. He has a few guns and is thinking about getting a pistol and a concealed-carry license, just in case he’s in a Walmart someday and someone comes in with a weapon and a wish to kill. Guns have been part of his life since he was a kid; hunting was one of the few things his father taught him when he was around, which was almost never.
I don’t think Danny ever used the word gratitude, but that’s what our conversations kept circling back to. Gratitude for the people who saved him, the people who came into his life just when he needed them, and, most of all, for his boss. When he started the job, he was struck by the man’s goodness, his seriousness, his empathy.
The longer Danny stayed on, the more his boss taught him: the art and speed of drywall, but also other things, like patience and kindness. Opening doors for old folks, making chitchat with strangers in line at the gas station. “He's just the constant reassurance every day that if you work hard and you're a good person, good will come to you,” Danny said. Danny began to feel that while he couldn’t control what happened when he was a junior in high school, he could control what kind of person that event made him into.
His boss also talked about Jesus. After the shooting, Danny could not imagine how a loving God could allow such terrible things to happen. But in time, he began to see that faith was what set his boss apart. Danny’s burgeoning belief in God was reinforced by signs from the three boys, signs that seemed to come along when he needed them most. When he met his boss’s pastor, he felt chills as he listened to the man talk. “I’m not going to say I’m no Joel Osteen or anything,” Danny told me. “But I do know there’s something, or someone, up there.”
We left the park and got into Danny’s truck. He wanted to go back to his house to check on his chickens. One of his housemates had already gathered their eggs, so we headed into his shed, where he picked mud off his UTV and talked about his fantasy of building a cabin in the woods. He’d live there alone, right off the land.
He told me he’d been giving a lot of thought to how he could help all of the other people who will survive school shootings across America this year, and next year, and in the years that follow. If there was one thing he could tell them, he said, it’s this: “You have to stay busy with something,” he said. “Your head has to consume something other than what happened to you. That’s got to be from very soon after, till you die.”
One Monday morning not too long ago, Danny woke up thinking of Russell. He was still thinking about him as he drove to work. He was playing country music, and whatever the song was, he can’t remember, but it struck him a certain way, and the bad thoughts came and washed over him like a wave, and he found himself crying. He realized it had been some time since he’d seen a sign from the boys, his lost friends. Right as he thought that, three geese began to fly just above his truck, as if they were going where he was going. Two small ones on the sides. And in the middle, a big one, built like an ox.
The two smaller ones flew off, but the big one stayed for a moment, hovering above his truck. Danny smiled. When the big one flew off, as if to emphasize the point, it left behind the only thing a goose can leave on a windshield. It was so like Russell to do that.
And Danny cried again, tears of gratitude and joy.
Photography by Maddie McGarvey • Edited by Whitney Joiner • Research by Madeline Scheier • Copyedited by Sarah Probst
Libby Copeland is a journalist in New York who writes about culture. See more of her work at www.libbycopeland.com.
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