My daughter survived a school shooting

Even if survivors of gun violence don’t have physical wounds, the trauma of the day can change them for years, if not forever. I know this from personal experience. Three years ago, my daughter survived a school shooting. She was in the third grade. It happened in Highlands Ranch, Colo., an affluent suburb of Denver.

I know what it’s like to stand outside of a police perimeter, squad car lights strobing, sirens screaming, hearing the active shooter alert blaring through the school speakers on a loop. An officer told me that there were multiple shooters inside the school — inside with my 9-year-old little girl.

I waited for hours outside, not knowing if she was alive or dead. I couldn’t do anything to help her.

Eventually, the officers told us to go to a nearby building, to wait for the children to be evacuated. I remember being crammed in a room, desperate for any scraps of information, clinging to other sobbing moms. I opened texts from one of my best friends, a doctor working in the ER, who promised to let me know if my daughter was brought in with the rest of the wounded.

I was one of the lucky ones. My child came home alive.

She told me that she was in music class when the active shooter alert began to sound. “Lockdown! Locks, lights, out of sight!” Her teacher locked the door, turned out the lights, and the children scrambled to hide.

My daughter was worried because the only good place to hide was behind the piano, but there was no more room. She squatted behind a drum, knowing it would offer no protection, with her eyes trained on the door, waiting for a gunman to burst through.

She told me that she and her friends were paralyzed with fear for what felt like an eternity, silent tears rolling down their little faces. When she finally evacuated the classroom, she walked through broken glass from the windows the police had entered through. She noticed blood in the hallway from the students who hadn’t been as lucky as she was.

She was alive, but she and the other survivors were mentally scarred from the experience.

I wondered if my daughter would ever be the same. This was a rough and tumble child with perpetual skinned knees who loved hiking and exploring and never shied away from an adventure. She would pick a superhero costume over a princess any day, and most of her friends were boys.

After the shooting, her personality changed. She didn’t want to leave our house and begged me to homeschool her. Any loud, unexpected noises would cause her to burst into tears and duck and cover. At night, she was plagued with nightmares where the shooters found her or killed me when I came to pick her up from school.

On those nights, I would hear the pitter-patter of her little feet running down the hall toward my bedroom. I would hold her, wipe her tears, and tell her that she’s safe — the lie bitter in my mouth — until the pounding in her chest quieted and she fell asleep in my arms.

I now know that she will never be the same. Neither will I.

» READ MORE: Don’t be ‘horrified and heartbroken’ at Uvalde. Get mad as hell and do something.

When my husband was considering a new job that would take us across the country to Pennsylvania, I thought a change would do us good. Was I trying to run away from the painful memories? Maybe.

When we were looking at schools, my daughter decided that she wanted an all-girls school because girls are less likely to be shooters. That she even thought about that broke my heart.

The school warns us before every fire drill because each alarm or siren still takes her back to that day. She has only cried at school a few times this year, which is a drastic improvement.

Initially, after the shooting, I thought that I shouldn’t speak up. It’s not about me or my daughter, it’s about those parents whose child never came home. But I now realize that I should speak up. We all should. We should shout, we should rage, we should be unrelenting in our pleas. The silent majority has been silent for too long.

More than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence since Columbine. The next shooting is never a matter of if, just when. These children need to know that the adults in their lives and our elected officials care about protecting their mental and physical well-being. Thoughts and prayers need to be followed with immediate action.

We can’t keep waiting for someone else to solve this problem.

Susan Patterson resides in Villanova. She has a degree in psychology and is currently a stay-at-home mom.