The man who was the principal of Columbine High School during the 1999 school shooting has some brutally honest words for Stoneman Douglas High School: “Unfortunately, getting back to normal is not going to happen.”
“They'll ask, 'When is it going to get back to normal?'” Frank DeAngelis said in an interview with CNN. “Unfortunately, getting back to normal is not going to happen. They have to redefine what normal is.”
He went on to say that the Parkland, Fla., school, currently grieving from the deadly mass shooting on Wednesday that left 17 people dead and several injured, is “now a member of a club that no one wants to join.”
“They’re now a member of a club that no one wants to join, but we're all out there to help” said DeAngelis. "What they're feeling right now is what we felt 19 years ago."
“Its going to be tough,” he went on to say. “And the wounds that they experienced yesterday, they say time will heal, but those scars are going to be around.”
As to advice for the Florida high school, “It’s a marathon and not a sprint. Take it day by day,” DeAngelis said.
Ironically, the former Columbine principal was in the middle of a TV interview as details unfolded about Wednesday's mass shooting. He broke down during the interview upon learning the death toll.
DeAngelis stressed that America cannot get used to this violence.
“We can never get to the point where we’re immune," he said.
After the shooting on Wednesday at Stoneman Douglas High School, the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., that killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others, no longer stands as the worst school shooting in U.S. history.
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