“Death by Numbers:” Parkland Shooting Survivor’s Journey to Empowerment

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, we turn now to a story of survival, strength, and activism. This week marks seven years since the Parkland School shooting, when 17 students and staff were killed by a former student. It ignited a wave of protests and bipartisan legislation. It’s the subject of a new documentary, “Death by Numbers,” and it’s nominated for an Oscar, which looks at the journey of one survivor, Sam Fuentes. For the last five years, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S. And school shootings have seen stark increases over that time. There have been four this year already. Sam Fuentes and the film’s director, Kim A. Snyder, joined Hari Sreenivasan against the reality of a Trump executive order which is aimed at rolling back gun control measures.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Sam Fuentes and Kim Snyder, thanks so much for joining us. Sam, you are a survivor of a horrific day in American history that unfortunately is too common, and it was the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And I wondered, you know, you in this film are somebody who is not just speaking as a survivor, but really almost as a voice of a generation here that has been impacted so devastatingly be by gun violence. And I’m wondering first, I guess, how are you doing now?

SAM FUENTES, PARKLAND SHOOTING SURVIVOR AND WRITER AND SUBJECT “DEATH BY NUMBERS”: What a thoughtful question. I think, especially as the anniversary approaches, it’s always tough, you know, I think, especially with the symptoms of PTSD, like, even in my everyday life, it still impacts me. There’s not really a day where I’m not sort of thinking about that day and all of my community and how tough it is for them. And — but overall, I think because I’m very much engaged with my own trauma and I’ve worked through it a lot through therapy and even through just like written word, that’s been very empowering for me overall.

SREENIVASAN: You know, your words are kind of a frame for this whole film. I mean, whether it’s your journal entries or however it is that you chose to express yourself, is that — was that part of this, I guess, trajectory of healing?

FUENTES: I think so. For my own personal experience, I think I’ve been writing my entire life and it’s always been something of a coping mechanism, it’s an outlet for escapism. And so, I think in terms of my own healing, writing has always been by my side, and for it to not be included in the story would be very odd, actually, because “Death by Numbers” was actually conceived through a larger piece of work that I wrote by the same name.

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FUENTES: I think being able to directly address him is just another form of justice, because he affected my life and not just a literal physical way, but in a psychological and mental and emotional way that will be everlasting. And I don’t — I didn’t get to choose that. So, if I get to choose anything, it will be this.

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SREENIVASAN: Kim, how did you figure out to tell this story at this time and then really, how did Sam’s work everything kind of integrate together into this film?

KIM A. SNYDER, DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER, “DEATH BY NUMBERS”: Sure. Well, it emanated in a sense. I’ve been in this space with a long-time producer, Maria Cuomo Cole, and I had done a film called “Newtown” back in — it got released in 2016 about that horrific day we all can’t forget of the kids at Sandy Hook. And we became immersed in that space and some happenstance landed us to tell the story of Sam and her classmates as the story of activism that grew up in response to her shooting. And then, there was this next story that we — I couldn’t let go of that really was about Sam moving through the trial of her shooter and trying to reclaim her power in confronting him. And that was a story I felt hadn’t been told and that was important both in terms of really raising awareness about youth trauma in our country and the fallout for our youth and also, in her bravery in just standing up to hate, that goes for me beyond guns or even are the borders of our own scourge of idiosyncratic, horrible gun violence in the United States.

SREENIVASAN: You know, if it’s not too difficult for you, and perhaps we can do a little bit of justice to not thinking about this shooting as just a set of numbers, can you tell me a little bit about maybe one of the friends that you lost and you still think about?

FUENTES: Of course. So, a friend of mine who I’d known since English of — English freshman year, which was Nick Dworet, who was unfortunately killed beside me in my Holocaust Studies class. He was excellent. I mean, he was smart, handsome, who is one of our best swimmers at our school, arguably in the state. You know, we always said that he was going to make it to the Olympics. And something about him always just made you laugh and made you feel comfortable. He was the kind of person where he was outgoing and charismatic, but didn’t have an ego about it. And I miss him all the time. And I know his parents miss him all the time. His family misses him all the time. And there’s not a day that goes by that we’re not thinking about, you know, the legacy of the 17 people that we lost.

SREENIVASAN: Kim, I want to ask your active choice to include so much of the trial in this film, including the decision to blur out the shooter’s face every time the audience might see him. Why did you do those things?

SNYDER: That was a collective decision between Sam and myself. We were definitely collaborators on all of these things. And we thought it was important to be in keeping with something a lot of survivor communities have called no notoriety, that we know there’s evidence of copycatting. We don’t want to glorify it these shooters, as Sam pointed out so boldly in her statement to him that he would never get the fame he was seeking, you know, rather than actually blurring, there is this idea of X-ing, you know, derived from the idea of Sam’s journal, her thoughts. And it was important that we not give him that notoriety, but we did make a choice at the very end when she finally takes the agency to finally look him at the — in the eye herself, that that is the one time that we decided she gets to decide when he should be stared down and called out.

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FUENTES: I assure you, you will not be famous for this. I assure you that our people will be accounted for, they’ll grow and heal despite you. You have no power anymore. You have no future. You have nothing. The people that you kill will have a legacy much more important than you. And the people who nearly killed will live their lives, though with much difficulty, with a compassion and a dignity in ways you will only dream.

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SREENIVASAN: I mean, it was an incredibly powerful statement and I wonder what it was like to prepare it, to deliver it, did it help get that out off your chest?

FUENTES: I think, overall, it’s one of those ultimatums that I’ll look back in my life, which is, do I confront the person who committed this terrible atrocity and speak my truth to power or do I live for the rest of my life knowing I didn’t do that? And so, I think with this one opportunity, the decision was really obvious to me. And I knew that people like him wanted fear, he wanted rage, he wanted you to completely lose control in his presence. He wanted to know that you still feared him. And I know, to a certain degree, and forgive me for phrasing it this way, but they get off on stuff like that. And even though I knew it would be frightening and I was frightened and just sort of mortified altogether, I knew that I had to approach it in a way that was with restraint and with respect and with dignity because he wanted to see me suffer, and he wanted to continue that sort of reign of terror. And I knew that confronting him was a lot larger than myself, it was a lot — it was for my community, it was for everything that we had lost, it was for even just a larger declaration of pointing him out for the person he was, and speaking truth about him, I think he represents sort of this larger issue at play. And that’s why I knew that despite the fear and despite the sort of anxiety that I had surrounding this day, I needed to do it, and I think that’s what sort of kept me calm was I knew I had my whole community behind me. And it’s one of those things that I think, when I look back in my life, I can say with great confidence that I did the right thing.

SREENIVASAN: The shooter did not get the death penalty. He was sentenced to life behind bars. And I wonder, did you have any initial response? How you felt about it then? Has that changed over time?

FUENTES: It’s still something that I feel very uncertain about. I knew that as far as a position in the film, the death sentence was sort of never really important to us because I understood and was also feeling that I don’t think that either sentence would have brought closure and complete and absolute justice for our community. Grief and trauma are incredibly divisive and everyone has a unique sort of experience and interpretation of their own loss. And I think the trial overall was very cruel and very unusual in the sense that it retraumatized our entire community and took up so much time and so many resources and was just also, in general, a lot of the conduct was a disgrace. So, the sentence wasn’t really so important to me at the end of the day.

SREENIVASAN: Kim, this is not your first film about school shootings. I mean, this is a topic that you talk about a lot. I mean, I did an interview four years ago about “Us Kids” also focused on the response after this horrible attack. I’m unfortunately one of the reporters that went and sat in the living room of some of the survivors of the Newtown shooting. And I thought — at that time, I thought, this is definitely a line too far. Something will happen in this country, right? And here I am, and there were 39 school shootings last year. And I don’t think they’re going to stop this year. And I wonder how — as you continue to work in this, as you continue to try to tell these painful stories, what does this background in America make you think?

SNYDER: Well, as you said, it’s, on one hand, incredibly demoralizing. My relationships with some of those same families have endured for over a decade now, and they’re very close. And I think once you become close, you can’t relent. You just sort of can’t turn your back on joining forces because they don’t relent and they’re so courageous. The communities that I have observed, like those in Newtown, in Sam’s community, the youth that rose up, are — you know, we now see it in Uvalde, they’re so determined not to relent in the honor of — in honor of those slain. And sadly, that club that no one wants to belong to just grows bigger and bigger. So, on one hand, it’s incredibly demoralizing, especially in these last weeks. We just came back from Sundance and, you know, it’s a time where a lot of the work of Sam and her colleagues, the age has now — the work that they did to get, the age raised to 21 has now been revoked. We see some real disappointing movements in that way. But at the other — on the other hand, since that time of Newtown I always say that the voices of new messengers have gotten stronger. I have a teacher friend in Newtown who survived that, who started a whole new group, Teachers United Against Gun Violence. We’ve seen law enforcement step up, we’ve seen doctors who felt they would have been fired back then, who — younger doctors who are not keeping quiet, we see clergy, that gives me some heart, and it’s mostly the youth, because they are not — one of Sam’s colleagues, David Hogg, was just voted — just elected as a vice chair of the DNC. I have faith that they will not relent and they have a lot of years. So, my pessimism and optimism is like any movement, I have faith in them that something will take hold. And I think, right now, the biggest hope short-term is behavioral changes and stories like this and voices like Sam. The best I can do is to continue to believe that they pierce through the numbness. We can’t stop reminding people, we can’t just accept it, and we can’t become a society just that accepts that this is the number one killer of youth. We — I would to them to do better.

SREENIVASAN: Sam, just the other day online, I saw someone that essentially used what happened at your school as, in his own brain, justification for why there should be more guns in schools in the hands of teachers and everyone else. And I know that you have now engaged in this topic for quite some time. What do you see as any sort of a solution? What are steps that this country can take to try to decrease the volume of these tragedies?

FUENTES: It’s a great question. I absolutely believe that a lot of preventative action, you know, in the most obvious sense can be seen through legislation. But I know that in the next coming years, we’re going to see a lot of these gun laws on mostly state levels, but also, on federal levels, sort of be rolled back on. I think bills and legislation are also — are obviously what everyone thinks is the first sort of action that we can take. This looks like universal background checks. This looks like raising the age from 18 to 21, which was something we actually saw in the State of Florida and we’re rolling back on. Red flag laws, safe storage laws, things of that sort of nature saves lives. But what I — need to make very clear is that gun violence sort of is an umbrella and impacts America in so many different ways. 60 percent of it is suicide, which is to say that because it is a multifaceted issue, we have to sort of approach it in sort of various different strategies and angles. And so, in addition to, you know, like, laws are important, but having like safe reporting systems, you know, in schools and such is also important for kids to see an issue and can report children is huge. Having, you know, resources like mental health services and counselors and afterschool programs to sort of keep violence and out of schools and the visibility of the health and the wellbeing of our communities is also huge. That’s — we see this through a lot of grassroots roots efforts with, you know, cities that have programs that sort of invest in de-escalations of violence as well as providing, you know, resources to communities that more — are more prone or targeted to gun violence. We have to advocate for laws on, you know, the big front, the federal — on federal hill on our state laws, but we also have to be mindful of our own communities and engage in conversations with our neighbors as well as, you know, support programs that, you know, keep the visibility of our people up and the wellbeing of them up so that there’s less reasons to turn to violence in the first place.

SREENIVASAN: Filmmaker Kim Snyder and writer and survivor Sam Fuentes, the film is called “Death by Numbers,” thank you both for joining us.

SNYDER: Thank you so much for having us.