florida shooting

‘Our kids should be safe,’ father says at funeral

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More than 1,000 mourners gathered at a Parkland, Florida synagogue for the funeral of Meadow Pollack, one of the 17 students and staff killed in Wednesday’s school shooting.

“You killed my kid. ‘My kid is dead’ goes through my head all day and all night. I keep hearing it over and over,” her father Andrew Pollack said at Friday’s funeral that also was attended by Florida Gov. Rick Scott and U.S. Reps. Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. “I have always been able to protect my family. Our kids should be safe but my princess wasn’t safe.”

Meadow Pollack was 18, and a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 19-year-old gunman Nikolas Cruz opened fire last Wednesday on his former classmates.

Pollack’s funeral came shortly after the first service for a victim, Alyssa Alhadeff.

At Jamie Guttenberg’s funeral on Sunday, mourners wore orange ribbons in her memory, which stood out against their black mourning clothes. Orange was her favorite color.

Rabbi Jonathan Kaplan in his eulogy tried to answer the question of where was G-d during the attack. He said: “G-d is in the teachers who protected them. G-d is in the first responders who went in that day. G-d is in the police who raced to the school. … G-d is in the people, all over the world, who sent condolences.”

A funeral on Sunday for Alex Schachter, 14, focused on his love for movies, his humor and his passion for the high school’s marching band, in which he played trombone, as well as the secret ingredients in his special smoothie.

A third funeral on Sunday was held for teacher Scott Beigel, 35, who saved students’ lives by opening his classroom door and ushering the students in. He was shot while closing the door behind them.

He reportedly told his fiance, who he met at Pennsylvania’s Camp Starlight when they both worked as counselors, that if he ever was the victim of a school shooting that she would not talk about the “hero stuff.” They had been watching news coverage of a similar school shooting on television at the time, she said during the funeral.