SANTA FE, Texas – As dusk settled on a hot, humid October evening, dozens of families lined up along a darkening country road, waiting for the Santa Fe High School homecoming parade to pass. They camped on folding chairs and the backs of pickup trucks, in the parking lots of dollar stores and auto repair shops.

The floats arrived awash in glitter, garland and the school colors of green and gold. Kids tossed candy and beads from flatbeds. Spectators hooted and hollered at the Santa Fe Indians football team and the high-stepping Tribal Belle dance squad.

But many also thought back to May 18, when a 17-year-old gunman opened fire in the high school. They thought of the art rooms and hallways where 10 people were killed and 13 injured. Of the window shattered by bullets, repaired just the day before. Of the victims whose names were inscribed on T-shirts.

Rosie Stone, who marched the 3-mile route handing out crayons and markers, thought of her son, Chris, whose photo was in the center of a mum corsage pinned close to her heart. He was one of two football players who died in the shooting – and this should have been his senior homecoming.

Like so much of what happens these days in this rural Texas town, this year’s parade

was suffused with sorrow – reminders that the pain is still raw, the losses still fresh and life is not as it once was.

The phrase “Santa Fe Strong” was everywhere. On banners in front of businesses. On the windows of the high school. On the scoreboard at the school stadium, where the procession ended with a community pep rally.

Inside the stadium, above a row of posters featuring the varsity roster, a picture of Chris Stone, smiling in his #54 jersey, was framed against the ebony backdrop of the night sky.

A few feet away, as the pep rally kicked off, an onlooker leaned on a chain-link fence to watch the high school cheerleaders on the brightly-lit stadium field. On her “Santa Fe Strong” shirt were the words to the 23rd Psalm:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

‘Divided’ community

With the May 18 shooting, Santa Fe became part of a grim roll call: Parkland. Sutherland Springs. Las Vegas. Orlando. Sandy Hook. Aurora. Columbine.

Each community thrown into the national consciousness by unspeakable tragedy, then left to grapple with grief and anger long after the public attention has dimmed.

In Santa Fe, a close-knit town of 13,000 that tumbles over 17 square miles of fast-food joints, former pasture and marshland, everyone was touched, in some way, by the shooting – and everyone seemed moved to help.

In the days immediately after, there were public vigils and prayer services, human barricades to shield the families and students from the media onslaught, barbecue dinners and bake sales to raise money for victims.

Then, just as with a family in mourning, schisms began to emerge. School board meetings grew heated as parents and board members lobbed criticism at each other. Facebook groups were created, then disbanded as residents argued about metal detectors and school safety. A few voices called for gun control, but many more maintained that guns were not to blame.

It was as Christine Hunschofsky, the mayor of Parkland, Florida, had warned Santa Fe Mayor Jason Tabor.

At first, the entire community will come together, she said, repeating what the mother of a boy killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had told her. "Then a tsunami will hit your city, and people will become divided over everything.”

From anguish to activism

On bad days – rainy days and Fridays are always bad – Rosie Stone doesn’t come out of her room. She shuts herself off from the world and burrows into her memories.

Her last words to her son, Chris, just after a pizza dinner, when she tousled the 17-year-old’s hair, wished him good night and said “I love you.” His footsteps the next morning, as he walked to the front door and off to Santa Fe High School.

The call from Chris’ friend a short while later. “Mama Stone,” he said. “You better get to the school. They’re saying Chris has been shot.”

It would be 10 hours before Rosie Stone was told what happened to her son.

Just as first period was starting, a teenager armed with a shotgun and .38 revolver had burst into the art rooms of the town’s only high school. He fired into two supply closets where several students, including Isabelle Laymance and Chris, were hiding, according to police and witness accounts.

Isabelle, then a freshman, survived. Chris, who held the closet door shut to keep the shooter from entering, and four others did not.

Three girls, among them Kimberly Vaughan, died in the classrooms. Two teachers were killed as they ushered children to safety. Thirteen people, including substitute teacher Flo Rice, were wounded. Dozens of others escaped the gunfire but witnessed the carnage.

Two months after the shooting, Rosie Stone visited the spot where her son was killed. She stood there for a long time, thinking about Chris’ last moments, about the friend who held his hand as he took his last breath.

That Chris, who would have turned 18 on Oct. 19, died a hero was not a surprise. He was the boy who stood up to bullies, who flashed a welcoming smile at classmates other students overlooked. “An awesome kid,” his mother says through tears.

She holds on to that. Just as she clasps tight to a palm-sized blue urn containing some of his ashes, which she carries in her purse. (A larger one is at home). Just as she cherishes a present from his girlfriend – a silver locket with pictures from junior prom. Just as she keeps his room intact, down to the dirty plate and cup he left there.

And as she strives to live up to one of his favorite sayings: “God’s plan.” It was Chris’s response when anything happened – good or bad.

“I’m not the same person I was five months ago,” Rosie Stone said. “I will never be the same person I was.”

She is trying to funnel her anguish into activism. She started a service organization called CCC – Chris Courage Change – in her son’s memory. The mom who had never before been to a Santa Fe school board meeting has become a fiery presence there, pushing for answers: Why have school officials discounted reports of bullying? Why was the shooter allowed to wear a trench coat that was against dress code? How can the superintendent claim that the nine metal detectors, bullet-resistant glass and panic buttons added after the shooting make the high school the “safest school in the nation”?

Her questions have brought criticism and even accusations of bullying from board members, but she persists. In two years, she plans to run for a seat on the board.

Still, Rosie Stone is not the fighter she once was. She is tired – not yet able to go back to work as a medical assistant in an OB-GYN office and leaning on her 19-year-old daughter, Mercedez, who barely leaves her side. Someday, she just sits in her car and screams “Why?”

Comfort comes in small doses – in the embraces of the varsity football players that felt like “Chris sent hugs,” in monthly dinners with the families of other Santa Fe victims, and in getting to know families from Parkland and other mass shootings, with whom they exchange messages on social media, gather at conferences about trauma, and plan to spend holidays.

“They are our family now,” Mercedez said, “because they are the only ones who understand.”

Feeling ostracized

About 8 miles outside Santa Fe, Rhonda Hart sat at her kitchen table with her son. As Tyler finished a home-school lesson, Hart wrote messages in bright marker on a pile of postcards, urging voters to turn out for Democratic candidates in the Nov. 6 election.

Since her 14-year-old daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, became the youngest victim of the Santa Fe shooting, Hart’s life has centered on her son and her political advocacy – her way of wrangling the sadness.



Hart, then working as a Santa Fe school bus driver, had just dropped students off at the high school when she saw her daughter for the last time. As Kim walked by, her mother called out “I love you!” and flashed the word “love” in sign language – long their family’s shorthand.

It was 6:45 a.m. – about 45 minutes before the shooting began, and long hours before the Santa Fe police chaplain informed her that Kim, a Girl Scout and Harry Potter fan, had been “the victim of gun violence.”

A month later, Hart moved out of Santa Fe. She couldn’t bear walking past her daughter’s empty room or seeing banners meant to honor the victims. She has not been able to sort through Kim’s belongings, which were stored in boxes by a moving company that specializes in clients in the throes of grief.

She has cut herself off from Santa Fe, a conservative community where guns and hunting are part of the culture. Here, her vocal calls for gun control and opposition to the NRA have been met with hostility and, at times, open insults. She no longer works as a school bus driver and pulled her sixth-grade son out of the school district.

On the night of the homecoming parade, Hart attended a rally for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, where she held up a sign calling for gun control – not the first time she has confronted him or the first time her actions stirred a storm of social media criticism. One Santa Fe school board member tried to dismiss Hart, a U.S. Army veteran, by questioning her military status.

But she has found solidarity.

She checks in regularly with three of the other mothers who lost children in Santa Fe. No politics, just concern: “Did you cry in the closet last night? How’s your other kid?”

“Nobody asked to be in this thing and it's got a lifetime membership,” said Hart, who wears Kim’s charm bracelet and a pendant with the sign language symbol for love. “It’s the shittiest fan club I’ve ever been in.”

She discovered a kinship with families from Parkland who share her determination to pass gun reform legislation. At a recent meeting, one father recited the rituals that now accompany school shootings: the gathering of families into cramped rooms as they wait, the delivery of pizza, the white crosses sprouting up as memorials, the foundations started by disconsolate parents. (The one in Kim’s name will be called “Always Choose Love.”)

“Tick, tick, tick,” Hart said, as if marking off a checklist. “It’s an obscene thing.”

Remembering the heroes

Flo Rice once loved the homecoming parade, the kind of small-town tradition that binds a community together. She loved strolling alongside her two daughters as they rode in floats.

That was before. Before five bullets tore into both of her legs. Before she saw her friend and fellow substitute teacher, Ann Perkins, gunned down next to her as they rushed through a high school hallway.

Now, she has an 18-inch titanium rod doctors used to repair her broken left leg. Splintered nerve endings, which send bolts of pain at the slightest touch, in her right leg. PTSD that makes her jump at the sound of rattling dishes and steer away from public spaces.

The 2018 Santa Fe substitute of the year says she will never go back to teaching. The once 20-mile-a-week runner, who spent months in a hospital and in a wheelchair, now leans on a cane to walk.

And this year, while her husband, Scot, marched with Rosie Stone in the parade, Flo Rice stayed home – far from the tumult that could set off her anxiety.

For a long time, Rice said, she was reluctant to tell her story, concerned about the families whose heartache seems to cut so much sharper. Her survivor’s guilt amplified by the random nature of the gunfire. Why, she asked herself, had she lived while Perkins died?

Other questions gnawed at her, too. Did parents know that substitute teachers didn’t have the tools to save lives in an emergency? That they were not allowed to carry keys or badges? That they did not receive the same active shooter training as full-time teachers?

If God’s grace saved her that day, as Rice wholly believes, it had to be for a purpose. Changing the protocols for substitute teacher training, she has decided, is that mission.

Like Rosie Stone, Rice and her husband have taken their crusade to the school board. In late July, speaking haltingly for the first time in public, she asked for equal training for substitutes. Two months later, her voice strong, clear and full of indignation, Rice demanded acknowledgment of the students whom school board officials had never officially thanked.

The survivors who, she told the board, fought just to stay alive. “They pried open locked doors to gain an escape route and ran like hell for help. … Some pushed others out of the line of fire. Friends helped each other, shot and bleeding, scale a brick wall, while others used their clothes to cover and conceal the injured.”

“These are not the victims of May 18,” she said. “These are our heroes.”

Rice called on the board to shake the hands of some of the survivors, just as they greet students presented for school achievements and extracurricular awards.

The board demurred. “Your time is up, ma’am.”

“You can’t shake their hands?” Rice asked, shaking and incredulous. “You shook all the other children’s hands and you can’t shake theirs?”

“They’ve never been recognized,” snapped Scot Rice, who hovered by his wife. “That’s the problem.”

Choosing grace

Isabelle Laymance’s mom understands that everyone impacted by the shooting must process what happened in their own time, their own way. She understands the frustration with the school board, the search for someone to blame, the calls for accountability, the drive for change.

She knows the shooting left many ripples: The 10 families who lost a loved one. The 13 injured. The 60 students who were in the two art rooms. The 373 students and 15 adults who have received counseling services at the school since August. The kids who wrestle with late-night panic attacks. Isabelle's dad, who still can't talk about that day without crying. The entire Santa Fe community.

But Deedra Van Ness says there is only one path through the darkness. For Isabelle’s sake, she said, she must “choose grace.”

She trusts that the school will keep her child safe. She promotes counseling sessions at the Santa Fe Resiliency Center. She applauds efforts to help the community heal: the therapeutic garden behind City Hall, the volunteers who furnished art and music therapy rooms at the high school, the strangers around the country who sent anxiety blankets and stress-relief dolls, the Snapchat support group Isabelle started just after the shooting.

The recently dedicated memorial at Maranatha Christian Center where, planted in a semicircle, are 10 white crosses. Each one bears the name of a victim.

Van Ness and Isabelle also distribute toys in parks and playgrounds as part of #Honor10, an campaign to remember the victims by doing random acts of kindness.

It’s not easy to stay positive.

“My daughter says she died that day,” Van Ness said. “It just guts me.”

On May 18, Isabelle called her mother from the art room closet as she and other students hid from the shooter, listening to the gunfire and hearing his taunts. Then the 15-year-old hung up.

She called police three times and passed her phone to classmates, so they could contact their families. The whole time, she later told her mother, the gunman was shooting into the closet.

It took more than 40 minutes for police to reach the art rooms and lead the survivors to safety. There was blood and bodies everywhere, she later told her mom. One of the dead was her cousin, Angelique Ramirez.

Five months later, Isabelle relives the day in flashbacks and bad dreams. She flinches at the sound of the doorbell, at water pelting against the shower tile, at ringing cellphones. She could not face the homecoming parade, with its crowds and clamor. She struggles to get through an entire school day.

In the first few weeks of this school year, Van Ness would get regular, frantic texts from her daughter: “I can't catch my breath.” First period, when the shooting took place, was agony.

The school adjusted Isabelle’s schedule, allowing the 10th-grader to come in later, which seems to have helped.

On the day of the homecoming game, Van Ness posted a photo on Facebook of a grinning Isabelle dressed in green and gold, a mum corsage around her thigh. The caption read, “Baby girl showing some school spirit this morning.”

Down the road, after Isabelle has worked through the fears and the trauma, her mother hopes she will be able to forgive.

Not the actions, not the monster who was indicted on capital murder and assault charges and is being held in Galveston County Jail while awaiting trial. But the teenage shooter Van Ness calls a “broken boy.”

Her daughter is not ready yet. But perhaps, some day.

Follow Monica Rhor on Twitter: @monicarhor