The Heartbreak and Frustration of Covering One Mass Shooting After Another

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This week’s attack at a high school in Parkland, Florida, was the third mass shooting that the twenty-three-year-old reporter Lulu Ramadan has covered.Photograph by John McCall / South Florida Sun-Sentinel / AP

Lulu Ramadan, a twenty-three-year-old from Palm Beach County, has been a breaking-news reporter at the Palm Beach Post since graduating from Florida Atlantic University, three years ago. On Wednesday, she was sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Boca Raton, waiting to interview a source for a story about the building of a new school, when she saw a flash on the news: someone had opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida. Then her editor called: “Stop what you’re doing and go to Broward,” he said. “There’s an active shooter.”

“We hear false alarms a lot,” Ramadan told me this morning. “Someone brings a gun to school, or a photo of someone with a gun circulates. So you give it a second and gather details.” On her drive to Parkland, she stayed on the phone with her editors, and learned that she was headed to the scene of a horrendous tragedy. She first went to a park across from a middle school, where staffers were sending parents to reunite with their kids, and spoke with parents. Then she went to a Marriott where parents were asked to pick up their children. A little after 5 P.M., she tweeted, “I envy reporters who only covered an out-of-the-blue mass shooting once upon a time. I’m 23, at a community paper & #Stoneman is my third.” Eventually, she learned that the nineteen-year-old Nikolas Cruz had allegedly killed seventeen people and injured more than a dozen others.

Ramadan spoke by phone this morning about her reporting yesterday and the shootings that she’s covered in her short career. Her account has been edited and condensed.

“Over the past two years, I’ve covered three mass shootings in southern Florida. The first was the Pulse night-club shooting, in Orlando, in June of 2016. I was twenty-one. I was pretty new at the paper. I was a crime reporter, so I got one of the first calls, just before 5 A.M. on a Sunday. The editor was frantic: ‘You’ve gotta get to Orlando, there was a terrorist attack.’ I hit the road. I was listening to NPR, whatever news I could get on the two-hour drive. When I got there, it was total chaos. I had no clue what to do. I’d never been in a situation like that. But I started talking to anyone I could find, clinging to the most interesting information and following it.

“The shooter was from the Treasure Coast, closer to our area, so I headed down south. I interviewed the shooter’s father multiple times, sitting in his home with him, talking about his son’s upbringing. I went to the mosque [the shooter had] attended, and talked to friends and neighbors who knew him. And the gun shop where he bought the weapons. It took a full twenty-four hours—once the dust settled and I was actually sitting in a hotel room, done reporting—to realize I’d covered what was at the time the most massive shooting in U.S. history. And then it just kept happening. I knew I’d have to cover tragedy. I’d like to think I’m pretty comfortable and almost good at it. But I never expected to do it this often.

“Next came the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting, in January of 2017: a gunman flew from Minneapolis to Fort Lauderdale, deplaned, then opened fire on a busy terminal. Another scene of chaos. History repeating itself. I show up, people are frantic, all over the place. I grab whoever I can. I did a story that stuck with me after that, where I talked to a family that flew with the shooter. I was expecting from them, ‘We knew, we had a sense, there was something eerie in the air.’ But what they described was almost more tragic: a completely ordinary flight.

“You get the same responses every time from everyone. The victims say, ‘We never thought it could happen to us.’ The politicians say, ‘We’re offering our prayers, and this was an act of evil, and we do not tolerate this.’ From the police, ‘We’re going to increase our patrols.’ It’s an echo chamber every time. I tweeted about Rick Scott’s response yesterday. I tweeted his quotes from different stories about all the shootings I’ve covered, because I recognized the similarity of the speech. Not to discredit the unique experiences each time, but it feels so familiar. You could almost auto-populate these stories: just fill in the where-it-happened and how-many-killed. You just add the color and the details. But you realize it’s the same: the gunshot blasts through the school hallway or the airport terminal or the night club.

Further Reading

New Yorker writers respond to the Parkland school shooting.

“I got home around ten last night. I couldn’t sleep. I was on Twitter until one in the morning, looking at things and gathering information for today. I woke up at six and drove back down to the area of the shooting. I went to the Marriott, where droves of police were getting a briefing that the media would get an hour later. I chatted some up, then headed to where I am now, next to where they’ll be releasing the names of victims to the media shortly.

“The hardest part is forcing myself not to get used to this. I see the pattern. I’ve described it. I know what people will say, what the response is. This is the second time I’ve heard the Broward County sheriff speak in front of the media about a tragic mass shooting. This is the third time I’ve heard Governor Rick Scott describe a tragic mass shooting. And I haven’t been a reporter very long. So I force myself to constantly confront these realities.

“I don’t know if I could handle decades of this: being a fly on the wall to this kind of thing, for the public, but also writing stories that are supposed to force the people in charge to confront flaws and mistakes. Working long and hard on a story that results in zero change . . . to work on multiple of these mass-shooting stories, and nothing happens? I don’t know how long I can take that.”