Among the survivors of Wednesday’s deadly shooting at a Florida high school is the son of a woman who survived another deadly shooting just a year ago.
Annika Dean, who survived the deadly shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport just a year ago, says that her son, Austin Dean, 14, was among the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a gunman opened fire, she told CNN.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“There’s a school shooting drill,” Dean says her son texted her. “It’s really scary, they fired a gun,” he continued, but the text messages became more terrifying when they realized that it was not a drill, with Dean’s son alerting his mom “IT’S NOT A DRILL.”
Over the course of the next several minutes and hours, the freshmen, who was hiding with 30 other people in a JROTC classroom as suspected gunman Nikolas Cruz continued is deadly rampage, continued to text his mother.
“He described that people had been running and screaming, and he told me he was on lockdown,” Dean said. “He said, ‘I love you, just in case.’”
Just a year earlier, Dean had also survived a mass shooting when an armed man entered the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, killing five and wounding several more. Dean says that she survived thanks to a man using his body to shield her from the bullets.
“It’s different when it happens to your kid,” Dean said, adding that she hung on to every text that her son sent her during the shooting.
“It’s incredibly rare,” she said. “My brother said you’re either one of the luckiest or the unluckiest, and I said it’s both. It’s both.”
As for the Parkland, Florida shooter, Cruz, 19, who had been a former student at the high school, confessed to the shooting. He has since been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Photo credit: Twitter / @GuardianDefens
