A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student now shares a tragic experience with his father, who survived the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last October.
Braden Freidkes is a freshman at Stoneman Douglas High. He was in one of the locked down classrooms last Wednesday as former student Nikolas Cruz took 17 lives in the worst school shooting in Florida history.
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“I was praying for my friends and family to be okay,” Braden Freidkes told CNN. His father, John Freidkes, feels doubly blessed to have gotten his son home safe.
“We were one of the lucky ones. We were able to get him and he was safe,” John Freidkes said.
The elder Freikes recalled being in Las Vegas, not far from the festival grounds where Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concert-goers.
“There was a crowd of people running towards us yelling ‘there’s a shooter, there’s a shooter,’” said Freidkes. “We were lucky enough to jump in a taxi cab where there were two women in there already. One was hyperventilating, the other was seemingly in shock. We asked if they were coming from the venue and they were.”
The Freidkes family finds this statistical anomaly totally unacceptable. “My parents never had to talk to me about situations like this,” John Freidkes said. “You get up every morning and you’re afraid to turn on the news.”
After last week’s attack, Freidkes said he even considered putting his son in a home-schooling program permanently. However, he decided that’s not the solution.
“You can’t live in fear,” he said. “It’s got to stop. There’s got to be a way. Our political leaders that we vote for work for us, not for lobbyists, and they need to remember that.”
Braden Freikes was rushed into the classroom of Scott Beigel, one of the teachers killed in the massacre.
“I asked my teacher Mr. Beigel, saying ‘What’s going on,’ because we all ran back,” Braden remembered. He said that Beigel was his favorite teacher at the school. He died defending his classroom.
“What really hurt me is that I passed every test, but the last one I did bad on and that’s how it ended for me. I was super sad to kind of let him down on that,” Braden Freikes told reporters.
The Friedkes family is among those pleading with politicians, both federal and local, to make a change to the gun laws in the United States. Students travelled to Tallahassee on Tuesday to lobby Florida lawmakers for a ban on assault rifles. They were denied.
“I want to be safe wherever I go,” said Braden. “I want to go to school to learn, I want to get an education, I want to be safe, and I want to come home to see my parents every day.”
Marches, walk-outs and protests are being organized around the nation, with teenage survivors from Stoneman Douglas High spearheading the charge. On March 24, students will march on Washington D.C. in the March for Our Lives event, which has picked up a number of high-profile and celebrity supporters.
On April 20, many high schoolers will participate in a walk-out commemorating the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
