It was barely two weeks into Ella Seaver’s freshman year of college when her phone buzzed with an alert that made the 19-year-old’s heart sink. A school shooting in Winder, Ga., several people already dead.
In an instant, Seaver understood how the shooting survivors’ future was about to shift: They might no longer walk into a classroom carefree and toss down their backpack at any seat they wish. Instead, every new room will be scanned for the nearest exit and the best place to hide. The innocuous sounds of life — a sharp clap of hands or a water bottle clattering to the floor — will make them jump.
“Every time I see a school shooting, my first and second thought is: ‘Now there are more kids like me,'” Seaver told The Washington Post.
Seaver was 7 years old when she survived the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman wielding an AR-style rifle killed 20 children and six adults.
In the years since Sandy Hook, there have been a lot more kids like Seaver. More than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at their schools since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, according to a Washington Post analysis.
For the majority of their lives, the Sandy Hook survivors have grown up with the frustrating reality that little around gun control has changed, even as the death toll from gun violence, particularly among children, rises apace.
Six survivors from Sandy Hook, now ages 18 and 19, spoke to The Washington Post about how the shooting still influences the trajectory of their lives as they enter adulthood and gear up to become leaders in the next generation of gun violence prevention efforts. First up: voting in their first-ever presidential election.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump diverge sharply in their approach to gun control, a high-stakes dynamic for an election that will shape leadership around gun violence prevention for the next four years, or more.
“There is one candidate who is clearly pro-gun control, and one candidate who is not,” said survivor Matt Holden, now 18 and a freshman at George Washington University. “I can guarantee that somebody out there — somebody’s child, brother or sister or mother or father — somebody is going to lose a loved one that they shouldn’t have lost, all because the wrong person came into office.”
Energized over casting their first presidential ballots, the students are supporting Harris in November; several of those who spoke to The Post met Harris earlier this year before she became the Democratic nominee to discuss their experiences. And while their political views are hardly monolithic, they agree that a goal of the next iteration of the gun-control movement should be to extricate what they define as a safety issue from the realm of partisan politics.
According to a Pew Research poll from July, 61% of Americans believe it’s too easy to legally obtain a gun; the poll found that nearly the same share, 58%, want stricter gun laws.
“The country is so caught up in seeing guns as this political debate, when this isn’t a political problem — it’s a human problem,” Seaver said. The issue has become so politically polarized that seeing eye to eye “doesn’t even look like an option.”
‘Riled up’ on Capitol Hill
No one expects overnight change from a single election, but the prospect of voting has given Grace Fischer a fresh sense of hope.
“It’s so different because I feel like now that I’m 18, I’m involved,” Fischer said. “Obviously, when I was 16, 17, I was doing, like, the most I could. But really being able to vote is just a different level of opportunity.”
Six- and 7-year-olds during the shooting, the students have spent most of their lives in what they call the protective bubble of Newtown. Their parents urged them to grasp what threads of normalcy they could from a childhood shredded by unspeakable violence. For years, they kept a low profile, outside a few interviews and charity events to honor their slain classmates.
In their final semesters of high school, the survivors joined the Junior Newtown Action Alliance, a student club focused on activism and education around gun violence prevention. Their experiences as survivors whose classmates and teachers were killed led to their first major interview in June, a sit-down with “Good Morning America” ahead of their high school graduation, set with 20 empty chairs.
That same week, several students went to Washington where they met with members of Congress and were invited to the White House to meet with Harris, who oversees the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
While the students said ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos and Harris were eager to hear their stories and described the vice president as genuine, knowledgeable and comforting, some talks on Capitol Hill left them frustrated.
Fischer in particular recalls staff for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, being resistant to the students’ message — “like they didn’t want anything to do with it and were kind of sitting there, almost waiting for us to be done talking.”
“That got me riled up,” Fischer said. “It brought out a whole different character in me. It made me want to get on this issue because, how can people sit here and listen to our stories and not acknowledge anything from it?”
No lawmakers were outright rude, the students said, but some felt that Republicans regarded the survivors as little more than gun-grabbing activists. Regular people being allowed to have handguns and hunting rifles isn’t the problem, they said; it’s civilian possession of military-style weapons like the Bushmaster AR-style rifle used to killed their classmates.
The congressional meetings left Holden with the sense that lawmakers beholden to the money and influence of the gun lobby benefit by keeping the true toll of gun violence an arm’s-length abstraction.
“These lawmakers do so much to alienate themselves from the actual violence, the actual loss. They take money from the NRA and vote down every law that could actually make a difference,” Holden said. “It’s easier to say ‘thoughts and prayers’ and then shut us out and move on.”
At the White House, the survivors found Harris to be an open and engaged listener, asking them questions and discussing solutions — with a dash of life advice.
“We told her our stories and she listened to us — really listened,” Holden said. “After that, she talked to us not as if we were kids. Some lawmakers talked to us like we were kids just (at the Capitol) for show.”
His Sandy Hook classmate Henry Terifay, 18, has generally hung back from rallies and marches but continues to look for ways he can share his story to honor the memory of Chase Kowalski, his 7-year-old best friend who was killed at Sandy Hook and whose name he has tattooed on his shoulder. He joined the June cohort and left Washington impressed by Harris.
The Harris meeting “gave me more confidence than I’m used to when people just say, ‘Oh, we’re going to fix it,'” Terifay said. Harris “gave more than, ‘I’ll try, guys.’
“If you at all care about gun control and keeping kids safe in school, it shouldn’t even be a question of who would give us the better chance to fix this,” Terifay added. “Trump had a full term of being president, and I didn’t see anything happen. I didn’t get any emails from him.”
Life beyond the ‘Newtown bubble’
Going off to college marked the first time the survivors are living outside Newtown and entering the world of students whose hometowns are not synonymous with a school shooting that made even the president weep.
Holden’s mother gave him a pillow emblazoned with “From Sandy Hook to George Washington,” a piece of dorm room decor that caught stares by his second day on campus. Visitors to his room would see the pillow and gawk, Holden said. He asked if they had questions, already knowing what his answers would be: “Yes, I’m from Sandy Hook. Yes, I was there.”
The students don’t shy away from discussing their experiences at Sandy Hook, but first-time revelations can be awkward. When Terifay shared a People magazine issue featuring the Sandy Hook survivors for part of a class project, “the whole mood kind of changed,” he said. “No one asked questions after that.”
For all the external curiosity and awkwardness when classmates realize who they are, among themselves, the survivors are understanding in new ways how their experiences have made them different from their peers.
Fischer went through a mental checklist to steel herself to join friends at an outdoor concert to see Pitbull. She mapped in her head where she would run if there was a commotion. She had to tamp down anxieties that she was taking a risk by being in a large outdoor crowd, like the victims of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting in Las Vegas.
“I’m 18, and I just went to my first concert ever in my life,” Fischer said. “It was a big step for me.”
The triggers and survivor’s guilt have been a part of their lives for years now. But choosing a major in college has brought reminders of the ambitions they had before the shooting.
“Knowing 7-year-old Ella, she would have been a marine biologist, or maybe something in art,” Seaver said. By the time she was 8, Seaver shifted to wanting to be a therapist, to help trauma survivors like herself.
Holden and his Sandy Hook classmate Emma Ehrens, 18, both wanted to be teachers. Holden is now interested in politics, Ehrens in legal affairs.
“I really, really wanted to be a teacher because of my second-grade teacher after Sandy Hook, who basically made sure that every one of her students was okay,” said Ehrens, one of 11 children from Classroom 10 who survived after the gunman killed five of their classmates and two teachers.
The year after the shooting, Ehrens said her teacher Abbey Clements “let me cling to her” and despite dealing with her own trauma, answered Ehrens’s questions: Where are my teachers? Where are my friends? Why did this happen?
But as Ehrens grew older, the march of school shootings seemed “never ending.” She had wanted to teach first grade and envisioned her future students when she struggled to contemplate an impossible set of what-ifs.
“What happens if someone comes into my first-grade classroom? As a teacher, what do I do? Do I protect them? Like my teacher tried to protect us?” Ehrens said.
The chilling prospect of having to risk her life to save her students eventually outweighed the pros of teaching. Letting go of that dream, Ehrens said, was painful. The day she told her mother she no longer wanted to be a teacher, Ehrens said, she cried.
A lifetime of activism
For all the ways the survivors’ lives have been touched by the Sandy Hook shooting, they have a striking lack of self-pity over its long-lasting effects. They also understand the degree to which they remain associated with Sandy Hook as adults is a choice.
No one would blame them for sidestepping activism and diving head first into a new life on a college campus where no one knows their story. But the survivors who spoke to The Post feel a sense of duty to honor the memories of the victims. The bonds of love and friendship with their slain classmates have proved stronger than the pull of apathy and frustration.
Ehrens considers herself lucky to be in college, studying what she wishes, having fun with her friends. Meanwhile, her fallen classmates are frozen in time, “forever 6, 7, 8” years old, she said.
As time has worn on, Ehrens said one of the hardest parts of surviving has also been the forgetting. She doesn’t remember a lot of what happened in Classroom 10, other than leaving — something she sees as her brain protecting her from the horror of the moment. But gone, too, are the sharper memories of her friends who died, like Avielle Richman, Jesse Lewis or James Mattioli. She keeps a framed photo of her and Avielle from childhood, but she now struggles to remember the sound of her friend’s voice.
Most of all, the survivors are driven to be the generation that can curb American gun violence to spare other people from experiences like their own, something they said they would never wish on anyone.
Trying to move on without creating change would be impossible — like her best friend died in vain, said survivor Lilly Wasilnak, 18.
“Honestly, I’m doing it for the safety of my own kids, because there’s no way I could raise children with a sound mind in this country, knowing that I could send them to school and never get them back,” Wasilnak said.
The survivors are now old enough to where their worry about school shootings has transferred from them and their siblings to the children they might have in the future. But to make the country safer by the time they become parents, they acknowledge some strategies in the gun violence prevention movement must change.
Holden notes that despite the intense activism since such major shootings in Newtown; Parkland, Florida; and Oxford, Michigan, there have been no new federal laws.
“There’s been so little change that it’s hard to deny that there is something we’re just not doing right here,” Holden said.
The path to change will be hands on, hard work. As for their role, the survivors know the power of their stories, having seen the way person-to-person appeals can change minds. They have accepted that lawmakers can more easily ignore petitions and protests than they can a human survivor with a story to share.
They also accept the reality that they may well be sharing their stories, and revisiting their worst day ever, for the rest of their lives. And while dismissive lawmakers can stoke a fire of defiance, the survivors readily admit they are as motivated as they are desperate. In separate conversations, several used the same word to describe what they would do with a captive policymaker:
Beg.
“There’s a large part of me that, at this point, I would get down on my knees and beg,” Seaver said. “We’re so desperate. Plain and simple: I’m begging for my life.”
A photo on the desk in Grace Fischer’s dorm room serves as a reminder that she survived the shooting. MUST CREDIT: Heather Ainsworth for The Washington Post
Henry Terifay got a tattoo in 2022 to honor his best friend, Chase Kowalski, who was killed in the shooting. Terifay said the artist refused payment and said it was “an honor” to help preserve Kowalski’s memory. MUST CREDIT: Lisa Terifay
Lilly Wasilnak, left, and Ella Seaver attend their high school graduation in June. For the ceremony, 20 empty chairs commemorated the children who would have graduated with them. MUST CREDIT: Courtesy of Ella Seaver
Shooting survivor Emma Ehrens attends Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. Ehrens at first wanted to become a teacher but is now interested in legal affairs. MUST CREDIT: Jesse Burke for The Washington Post
Matt Holden, 18, is a survivor of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and will be a first-time voter in this election. He is a freshman at George Washington University. MUST CREDIT: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post