That’s when Iįirst started to cry.” She called a few of her closest friends to find Started taking over and I realized how real this was. “As we were evacuating, I see everyone on their phones on the grass,Ĭalling their parents,” Stephanie recalled. She didn’t knowĪnything about who had died, or what would come next. By then, Coach Feis, who’d been directing kids to safety and shielding others from bullets, had been killed. A SWAT team finallyīroke into the classroom around four o’clock and let the students and Got worried when her brother, Matthew, a senior, didn’t pick up his Of whose parents are police officers who shared what little they knew.

In the closet, Stephanie texted with her parents and with friends, some “There was one can of soup, too, but no one wanted to eat it.”

Paper plates to fan ourselves.” They shared two small bottles of water. Got very hot in there,” Stephanie recalled on Tuesday. They remained locked, in the dark, for more than an hour and a half. Webster, who directed the group to get inside a large closet, where SomeĬlassmates ran to another room, but twenty-eight of them stayed with Mrs. They both yelled for her to return to class. Aaron Feis, a football coach whoĪlso worked as a security guard, was nearby, as was Stephanie’s teacher Wednesday, shortly after 2 P.M., she had just stepped out of financeĬlass to use the bathroom when the fire alarm went off for a second time that day. Stoneman Douglas High School, had been to one funeral in her life, for aįriend’s grandfather, who died when she was in the fifth grade. Prior to the past week, Stephanie Horowitz, a freshman at Marjory

Room Twenty-Eight by Stephanie Brother