Preventable: A year after the shooting at CVPA High, little has changed
State legislation thwarted attempts by the family to prevent an attack at Central Visual Performing Arts High in St. Louis on Oct. 24, 2022.
Last October, a former student with a semi-auto rifle and 600 rounds of ammo loaded in magazines broke the window of a locked side door during first period classes at Central Visual Performing Arts (CVPA) High in downtown St. Louis, MO.
He walked up the stairway to the third floor and began shooting down the long hallway of the 120-year-old brick school building. He shot six students and staff members—killing two—before barricading inside a third-floor classroom where he was eventually killed by police.
The massacre inside a classroom in Uvalde, TX just 4 months earlier was still fresh in students’ memories. Instead of locking down and waiting for help, many jumped from the third-story windows to avoid being trapped inside with the shooter. Freshman Brian Collins recounts his harrowing tale of being shot twice before he dove without hesitation through a glass window.
Despite more than 200 rounds fired inside the school, a student and teacher killed, life changing injuries for the wounded, profound trauma to the entire school community, and a months-long closure of the campus, this attack barely made national news.
To prevent this attack from being forgotten, Kalie Strain, Rheanna Wachter, and the KMOV Staff produced a short documentary, ‘Preventable: A retrospective look at a St. Louis school shooting’. Their work aired exactly one year after the shooting.
Months before airing, Kalie Strain invited me to be part of this production. I’m deeply honored and humbled to be a voice who can both help this community heal and demand action to prevent the next attack from occurring.
CVPA sits amid a staggeringly long list of the worst school shootings that few know or care about. Without attention, there is little pressure for accountability.
This is a very difficult film to watch. Here are a couple of the key points from my interview:
Preventing this attack:
“What really sticks with me about the CVPA shooting is that this was one of the most preventable attacks out of all of them,” David Riedman, a school shooting researcher, said. “School shootings are not random. Somebody doesn’t wake up one day and decide that they’re going to commit an act like this. Weeks or months or years of trauma are accompanied by overt cries for help and noticeable warning signs and red flags.”
Institutions failed the shooter’s mother who asked for help:
Riedman said the Oct. 15, 2022, call to police was not a decision the gunman’s mother took lightly.
“For a mother to call police because of her son, and especially for a Black woman in a predominantly Black community to call officers who are likely white, to come because her 19-year-old Black son has a gun, that’s taking enormous trust that he’s not going to be locked up, or that he’s not going to be shot or killed in a confrontation.”
“For the system to then fail her to the point where she took this incredible leap and risk, and then there was no action,” Riedman said. “And a couple days later, he takes that same gun to a school and kills innocent people there. That, that is devastating. When there’s every opportunity to stop something, but short-sighted legislation ends up allowing exactly the person that you want to prevent from having a gun. It enables them to commit a school shooting.”
Riedman criticized the solution of handing the gun off to a third party, calling it a non-solution. “We have police, we have laws, we have institutions because they are there to take action, they are there to ensure public safety,” Riedman said. “And saying that we are going to hand off this critical task to another citizen or to a relative undermines the entire purpose of the institution.”
School shootings are public suicides:
Riedman said that he believes we should reform how we view school shootings and mass shootings, saying they are public suicides. During the attacks, he said, shooters don’t plan to live past the attack.
“It’s their final act,” Riedman said. “And either they’ll be killed during it, they’ll kill themselves during it, or there’s no other option afterwards. They’re going to spend the rest of their life in prison. There’s no escape plan after these shootings.”
This is where Riedman said people should look for warning signs.
“We always ask family members, friends, community members, to look out for red flags, to look out for the signs of somebody who’s in crisis, or somebody that’s suicidal, or somebody who’s making statements about committing violence,” he said.
Aftermath
Because of the quick actions by students and staff to save themselves, the CVPA shooting has been forgotten by a national audience.
“I think that the CVPA shooting is largely forgotten, or unknown to the national audience because only two people died,” Riedman said. “And only two people died as a terrible way to think about a problem, which is a 19-year-old with a semi-auto rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammo going into a school.”
One Year Later
More than a full year after the attack, an official report and timeline has not been released. Lessons learned and recommendations for preventing a future attack have not been shared with other school systems or police departments. State laws and local policies have not been changed to prevent another teen in obvious crisis from purchasing or possessing a semi-automatic rifle despite his family calling police and asking for help before the school shooting.
Very little has changed and we cannot continue to accept this status quo.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.