DC ExtraTime: A Personal Connection to Parkland

BY DC CUEVA                     

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Three months ago, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL outside Fort Lauderdale were enjoying Valentine's Day when everything began to change just before classes were dismissed for the day. A former student who had been expelled from the school months earlier and the focus of authorities over threats made there, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, began to treat his former stomping grounds as his own walk-in shooting gallery. Stoneman suddenly went into lockdown once Cruz was reported to have entered school grounds with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle in hand. The shooter began to fire away at students and teachers like real-life targets in a six-minute barrage, and those in the school began to flee as did Cruz.
   Police eventually found the perpetrator shortly after, and once the dust had settled, fourteen students and three faculty members were gunned down, while seventeen others were wounded. The Parkland massacre surpassed the events in Columbine nineteen years earlier as the deadliest high school shooting to have ever taken place in the United States. And that, along with the Las Vegas festival shooting of a few months earlier, the Pulse Nightclub tragedy in Orlando in 2016 and the Santa Fe High School shooting just last week only more than fueled the debate over gun control laws, as high-profile shootings such as this have unfortunately become everyday news in the past few years.
   And shortly after the shooting in their hometown, twenty Stoneman Douglas school students banded together to form the student-led gun control organization, Never Again. The group, and social media movement with its hashtags #NeverAgain and #EnoughIsEnough, helped to stage many protests, both in the streets and in schools, as a call for action to legislators and Congress to prevent mass shootings like the one at their school, and has put politicians on blast for supporting the NRA, while its members also took to the cover of Time Magazine a month after Parkland.

Celebrities from around the entertainment industry began to show their support behind survivors of this unfortunate tragedy, but only a handful have as deep a personal connection as anyone as a proud alum of a school whose slogan is, "Be Positive, Be Passionate, Be Proud to be an Eagle!" Jordan Pundik, Steve Klein and Ian Grushka of punk band New Found Glory went to high school here, as did Chicago Cubs World Series hero Anthony Rizzo.
   But perhaps the school's most notable alum is also a member of the MTV family: Karamo Brown, who we first saw on Real World Philadelphia in 2004 as a Houstonian and nonprofit worker who dropped a bombshell on the roommates' first night that he was gay - the first African-American gay man on reality television. That season saw him express strong views on race and had dealings with police that stemmed from references to the N-word in front of his roommates, and who then appeared on The Challenge: Inferno II a year later.
   It was afterwards that he was confronted with an unexpected challenge when a letter in the mail demanding overdue child support led him to the Texas AG who informed him that he had a son that was kept secret by a high school friend who became pregnant while being a sophomore. 10-year-old son Jason and half-brother Chris would join Karamo as he would become a regular on Dr. Drew, Oprah's OWN network, red carpets, TV One's The Fame 15, last year's Are You The One? spinoff - AYTO Second Chances, and ultimately to the coveted spot as part of the new Fab Five on Netflix's revival of Queer Eye.

The shootings that shook the entire country that February day touched Karamo very much that he went to Washington, D.C. to join the 800,000 people who participated in the March of Our Lives, and the largest of the many protests that took place in America on Saturday, March 24, where 2 million took part in one of the largest youth-led protests to take place since the Vietnam War. He was not alone: Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Common and Hamilton's Lin-Manuel Miranda were also part of the demonstrations.
   For Karamo, he used a Saturday morning session of the 2018 Equality Convention held by LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign - and held at the same time as March for Our Lives - to share publicly for the first time that he went to high school walking the same Parkland halls as those who endured those agonizing hours a month earlier. One of those who were killed in the attack was someone he personally knew: 37-year-old Aaron Feis was a football assistant coach and security guard who was one of the three faculty members who were killed when he acted as a shield to two students during the rampage, and sacrificed his life in preventing them from being killed by the gunman's bullets.
   Brown told Entertainment Tonight, "To see that school, my high school, on television, and students be running out of the same hallways that I used to walk around gleefully broke my heart. I can’t help but think about the parents who are grieving for their children that are lost, because no parent should ever outlive their child. It just shouldn’t happen. You know, not only as an alum, but also as a parent now, thinking about those precious lives that were lost, it means it’s time for change. Enough is enough."
   Below is the video and transcribed script of his impassioned speech to the HRC, which took place before the March of Our Lives two months ago tomorrow (as this is posted on Wed, May 23rd).