Florida native reacts to school shooting
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- No matter how much you hear about it, you can never be prepared for tragedy to strike so close to home.
Dr. Jaclyn Schildkraut has dedicated her life to researching mass shootings. She's a South Florida native who's now a professor at SUNY Oswego.
The mass shooting at the Florida high school was just a few miles away from her childhood home, and even she is having a hard time coping.
"I never thought it could happen in my own community, just like everyone else doesn't think it could happen in theirs," Schildkrout said.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High is the school she would have attended, if she didn't get accepted into a magnet school, and Schildkrout knows one of the people who was shot and injured in the rampage.
"My stepmother, one of her former students was there and was injured in the attack, I'm not sure to what extent," she said.
Schildkrout says the student was found at a nearby hospital after family members tracked his phone. He's now stable, but she says everyone in her community is deeply troubled, so she's been trying to help.
"It was really about reaching out to people, seeing how I could help them, and how I could support them, and sort of working through my own grieving, and shock, and trauma," she explained.
Schildkraut adds she's had friends at other mass shootings in Orlando and Las Vegas. None of them were hurt, but now this is just more pain to carry.
"When something like this happens and you have connections, and multiple personal connections, it opens wounds and it reopens wounds," Schildkrout said.
Her biggest fear is that this will all be forgotten with time.
"If there's anything that I hope comes from this shooting, I hope that's it's that we take these threats seriously and we change our thinking," she said.
