Fort Lauderdale - Thursday January 19, 2023: A nonprofit organization in Florida is planning a public memorial dedicated to the 17 people who died during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The Parkland 17 Memorial Foundation said the memorial will be built on a nature preserve on the edge of Florida's Everglades. Seventeen people were also injured in the shooting that occurred just before the school day ended on Valentine's Day in 2018.
“It is a way to memorialize those that were taken from us that terrible day almost five years ago," said Tony Montalto, whose 14-year-old daughter Gina was killed. Montalto is vice-chairman of the Parkland 17 Memorial Foundation, and a liaison to the families of the other victims.
He said fundraising is underway for the public memorial, which will offer a public place to reflect on the students and teachers who were taken from their families and the community. The preserve is located on the border of Parkland and Coral Springs in suburban Fort Lauderdale.
“This foundation was established to build the official public memorial to the victims of the Parkland massacre to ensure they are forever remembered as the people they were, as innocent children with vibrant, bright futures ahead of them – educators and coaches who gave so much of themselves to their students,” Montalto said.
The project is being overseen by the foundation, and proposals for its design will be reviewed by the victims' families.
Montalto said they've put out a national call to artists for ideas for the project. “We're not putting a budget on it because we want people to dream big," Montalto said.
In November, Nikolas Cruz was sentenced to life in prison without parole following a three-month trial in Fort Lauderdale. The jury voted 9-3 on Oct. 13 to sentence Cruz to death, but Florida law requires unanimity for that sentence to be imposed.
Before the judge formally sentenced Cruz in November, victims' families spent two days berating him as evil, a coward, a monster and a subhuman who deserves a painful death.
Cruz, now 24, had attended Stoneman Douglas. He had been been housed in the Broward County Jail since his arrest hours after the shooting, and is now an inmate in Florida's prison system.