3 Parkland Students on How Their Lives Have Changed Since the Shooting

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One year ago, on Valentine’s Day, 17 students died when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The incident remains one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history, among other recent massacres like the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, where 27 students were killed, and the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Florida, where 49 people were gunned down.

Parkland students Isabel Chequer, Samantha Fuentes, and Ashley Baez were all injured on the day of the Parkland shooting. In the months since the incident, they’ve marched, they’ve rallied, and they’ve lobbied for better gun-control policies. But they’ve also struggled — bravely — to recover from the trauma of that day.

“When I enter a place, I sort of look where I can go in case of an emergency, or sometimes I just see someone with a backpack and I think, Do you think they can have a gun in there?” said Chequer. “And it doesn’t seem like it would be that big of a change, but it’s a huge change in my life.”

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3 Parkland Survivors Reflect One Year Later