Sydney Aiello, Parkland School Shooting Survivor Takes Her Life
These kids were severely traumatized but rather than being protected, cared for, and treated, many were exploited by our media and politicians for political gain.
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Sydney Aiello, a survivor of the Parkland School Shooting took her own life Sunday.
Burdened with severe PTSD and survivor’s guilt, Aiello struggled to attend college classes, her fear of being in a classroom so overwhelming.
From CBS News:
On the day a gunman opened fire at, Sydney Aiello escaped with her life. However, the grief of losing 17 of her classmates and teachers, as well as the long-lasting effects of enduring such a traumatic event, weighed heavily on her. And this weekend, at the age of 19, Aiello took her own life.
Now, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas community is mourning yet another loss.
Sydney’s mother, Cara Aiello, told CBS Miami that her daughter struggled with survivor’s guilt and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in the year following the tragedy. And while she reportedly never asked for help, she struggled to attend college classes because she was scared of being in a classroom.
Sydney was also a close friend of Meadow Pollack, one of the students who was shot and killed in the Parkland shooting. Meadow’s father, Andrew, became one of the most visible of the Parkland victims’ parents when he delivered a searing and emotional speech at the White House just a few days after the shooting, arguing for an increase in school safety rather than changes to America’s gun laws.
…While the nation’s attention turned to budding young activists like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, however, other Parkland survivors were suffering in silence. And the Aiello family’s tragedy is an all too painful reminder that trauma effects teens deeply, often quietly, and for years.
Ryan Petty, whose daughter Alaina died in the shooting, told CBS Miami he worries that more traumatized Parkland teens will take their own lives. So, he has focused his grief and his efforts into suicide prevention.
“It breaks my heart that we’ve lost yet another student from Stoneman Douglas,” Petty said. “My advice to parents is to ask questions, don’t wait.”
Family friends have set up a GoFundMe for the Aiellos.
These kids were severely traumatized but rather than being collectively protected, cared for, and treated, many were exploited by our media and politicians for political gain.
Objectification is nothing new, and certainly not novel in the political arena, but I’m gravely concerned by the extent to which our political arena (media included) is completely detached from humanity, how caring and protecting the weak and vulnerable has fallen off of priority lists in favor of “slamming” so and so, and how love, compassion, and empathy are virtually non-existent. This way lies destruction and heartache in abundance.
Tragedy involves real people who are suffering through real trauma and unimaginably deep hurt. All of which is overshadowed by the compulsion weaponize the worst acts of a few bad actors. The end result is not helpful, it creates more victims, unnecessarily.
At what point do we collectively decide that protecting our kids from vultures and exploitation, protecting our weak, our hurt, and our vulnerable must take precedence over everything else? When and where does the pushback begin?
My deepest sympathies are with the Aiello family. May you find grace, hope, healing, and peace.
[Featured Image from GoFundMe]
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Comments
Nearly a day has gone be where the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel has not had a front page story about Parkland. Most are geared to support the papers extreme anti-gun bias.
But there is a more chilling effect. It’s constant reminders do not let people heal.
“Nearly a day has gone be where the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel has not had a front page story about Parkland…”
The leftist media that exploited them couldn’t give a crap about those ‘hicks.’
On the other hand, the same malignant swine are probably shilling for Lori Laughlin’s PR firm to gain sympathy for her poor billionaire cheating daughter.
Literally just days after the media gave itself an award for best political exploitation of a human tragedy.
Will they learn? Nope….this will be yet another platform to grandstand on the topic of choice.
I’m inclined not to guess at why people commit suicide.
But rather than jump at blaming others, I’d first like to know if she was taking medication for depression, and whether she recently stopped.
Or recently started?
Someone in my family received a warning before starting Wellbutrin years ago that the energy provided by the drug kicked in before the depression-fighting effect kicked in. The result was, according to the psychiatrist, that someone severely depressed then had sufficient energy to harm themselves.
Unfortunately, not only are many antidepressants contradicted in teenagers, many of them are not suitable for the treatment of PTSD. Sadly, suicide is all too common among those suffering from PTSD. Take a look some time at the suicide rates among our veterans.
I have a niece who has depression. He father had it and her son.
She spent years on medications that rendered her incapable of social interaction. After her son killed himself, she was introduced to a self help group. She then acquired a doctor who did DNA testing to help find a suitable medication. Tragically, it took the death of her son to find a med that really helps.
There is no easy way to predict what works for an individual.
While there have been great strides in medical diagnostic equipment, the same cannot be said for brain disfunction. In the 1970s I worked on medical instrumentation designs, and I worked to a number of university researchers, designing EEG and biofeedback equipment. I even went to seminars and got to dissect two human brains with those researchers.
Brain chemistry and function is still poorly understood, and while there are new medications, they all have nasty side effects and their use is like throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks.
I agree with you on this point. However there can be little doubt that the parasite media will jump all over it for whatever it can be worth in advancing their agenda.
My husband took his own life in 1993. Our children were 9, 11, and 13. In all of the intervening years, all I’ve been able to determine is that my beloved husband lost HOPE. Some days, HOPE is all any of us have, when the vicissitudes of life overwhelm us. Never, ever give up on HOPE- it may save someone’s life.
Amanda, I didn’t know about this and am so sorry. Hope is all we really have at the end of the day, and that’s a great message! 🙂
I’m so sorry Amanda. I can’t fathom having to raise three children as a single mother after such a tragedy. I’ve given up trying to imagine what my sister was going through. She never told us she’d been having suicidal thoughts for years.
Near the end her behavior started to concern us and we planned a family intervention to force her to get help. She found out about it and told our older sister that she’d found out about it … and that everything was okay and not to worry. She was gone the next day.
I saw a quote somewhere that really hit home. It was something to the effect of: Everyone has a battle or battles in life with which they’re struggling. Be nice to people because you never know what they’re going through.
A voice of reason. Suicides are unfortunately so common, and in many cases so seemingly irrational, that one should not jump to conclusions.
The attack itself is one obvious cause of lingering stress.
The feeling of abject helplessness, after the failure of the official guards, followed by the realization that everyone remaining has been rendered defenseless by official fiat and the perverse concept of the “gun-free zone”, is another.
Which of the two is worse, the deadly attack or the despair of mandated victimhood? I can only speculate. Obviously, the first is temporary . . . but the second isn’t.
May God bless and protect her soul on its journey home, and may He comfort her family and friends.
Heartbreaking. Often those who need help the most fail to ask for it.
Sometimes persons have asked, verbally and non-verbally, and it becomes an exercise in futility. They may move to an existential position of utter hopelessness. Barring some sort of intervention there may come about a point of no return.
May she have come into a peace which she could not have in this life. Prayers for her family relatives, and friends.
This is true. My little sister took her own life almost three years ago. In the letter she left behind she apologized and said she had been battling suicidal thoughts for over five years.
So sorry to hear that.
I am sorry for your loss.
I’m so sorry, LukeHandCool.
Thank you, ladies.
Where was she during the shooting? In one of the classrooms, in the hall, in the same building or like Hogg, a quarter of a mile away in another building? Is this a PTSD from direct experience or vicarious PTSD? The word “survivor” has been blurred when the real definition and meaning is diluted to a communal thing.
You may not like Hogg’s politics or his approach to the issue of school violence but let’s not denigrate the young man because he happened not to be in a classroom when he is classmates were being slaughtered.
Whether a direct witness or not, losing so many of your classmates and friends is a deeply traumatic event.
However he’s certainly made every effort to capitalize on his not being in the building where the murders took place. If you want to defend his efforts to use his position to eliminate my rights under the Constitution, that’s his and your right under the Constitution – but that doesn’t mean I can’t denigrate the little sh!t.
The key word is “survivor”. This should include “being at risk”. Real risk. I would argue that the word was too loosely applied to garner more sympathy. I watched a plane crash and people die… was I a survivor? Traumatic yes in a general sense.
Obviously for what level of interaction happened she was severely affected. If not actually a real survivor was her angst, fear, and guilt generated more by the events after the shooting. Was her death from needless over reaction by others?
let’s not denigrate the young man because he happened not to be in a classroom
The statement isn’t about Hogg or his anti-American ideas, it’s about imprecise or misleading use of the word “survivor”.
No matter where she was survivor guilt is a terrible burden. Life is hard when you hate yourself for being alive.
Indeed. A grandfather of mine survived the Somme Offensive, the Second Battle of Ypres, and Passchendaele, eventually finding himself just about the only man of military age left alive in his small town. Shortly after, he fled the country.
The misuse of the word survivor was covered extremely well by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5erQW0i5Ps
He took advantage of the situation for his own agenda or for whomever he sold himself to. David Hogg is an attention wh0re and nothing more.
You may want to read again the quote from the CBS News reporting of her death. It clearly explains how personal the tragedy was for her regardless of her proximity to the shooter you are asking about.
Survivor’s guilt – often a huge part of PTSD – is not necessarily dependent on where you are. I know a man who was present at the Khobar Towers Bombing. He was not in the building but the rest of his platoon was. He still suffers, from both the guilt of being the only one of his buddies to survive and PTSD from hauling their dead bodies out of the rubble.
Interesting that the cited article mentions Andrew Pollack whose daughter Meadow was murdered at Parkland. Mr Pollack is far more than an advocate for “increase in school safety,” he is among the most vocal critics of Obama era policies designed to reduce or eliminate suspensions, expulsions and even basic discipline of “students of color” in public schools. Read his extraordinary interview with the WSJ back in January. Nikolas Cruz never should have been in that school in the first place given his track record.
It’s sad that someone died, but …
a soldier in World War II encountered more stgress in five minutes.
Hell many civilians did too. Except in the America’s, where fighting was minimal.
Somehow all those 100 millions of people went on.
There is something you don’t understand about WWII and PTSD. It wasn’t until my generation started coming home from Vietnam suffering from PTSD that it became recognized as a syndrome of its own, something abnormal to the rest of the population.
Yes, those who fought in WWII experienced huge amounts of stress but that was also true of civilians. Virtually everyone in the world had lost someone or experienced hardship. If you were in an active theater of war then even if you were a civilian you had friends and family killed in front of your eyes, virtually all women had been raped. Houses had been bombed – probably yours. Everyone subsisted on starvation rations – or less. PTSD was not “abnormal” because literally everyone in much of the world suffered from it. It was “normal.”
Very good points. The GI’s coming back from WW2 had WON a great victory against evil which a grateful nation acknowledged. Not Vietnam vets who fought communist expansion.
Being a victim and having the damage done to you with no chance of fighting back… We see Japan playing the victim of the bomb.
About 1/3 of people recover from emotional trauma, a 1/3 float in and out and a 1/3 never get better. My concern is that at a critical time of grief the gun control people disrupt the process to amp the anger and bargaining portions of the Kubler-Ross path. Yu hear the victims saying so and so’s life means nothing unless this or that law (ban) is passed. For this girl, did the chicken littles of doom and despair, the fear-mongers saturate her environment? Was she led to believe there is only sadness and no hope.. that life is not worth living even to honor those that couldn’t go on?
This is terrible. But we really don’t know why she did this, or how much of a role the shooting played. It may be as the newspapers allege, PTSD regarding the shooting.
Then again, it may not.
We really know nothing about her.
Tragedy involves real people who are suffering through real trauma and unimaginably deep hurt. All of which is overshadowed by the compulsion weaponize the worst acts of a few bad actors. The end result is not helpful, it creates more victims, unnecessarily.
I’ll just note that one side of the aisle denigrates and ridicules the other for first offering thoughts, prayers, and help — real help — to the victims and their families…
… and that that help is far too often cut short, as the former turns the tragedy into a political weapon the latter must defend against.
One side gets so locked into “doing something” that they neglect the very people they claim they’re “doing something” for, while the other puts the people first and hesitates to “do something” until the facts are known; doing the wrong “something” is counter-productive, after all.
Whenever these tragedies happen, my first response is, “I’ll pray for you and your loved ones. Let me know what else I can do to help.”
The Left tells me to give up my rights because they think that will prevent future tragedies. To which I respond, “No, I said to let me know what I can do to help.”
May God show His grace and perfect love to young Sydney on her way Home. May He give comfort and healing to her family and friends until they meet her again. And may He show mercy and guidance to the rest of us. Amen.
CBS missed the mark. The nation’s attention turned in response to the MEDIA choosing to elevate Hogg and the other “activists” who were on the right side of the debate in the media’s judgement. Hogg has gotten significantly more coverage than, say, Kyle Kashuv or the father of Meadow Pollack. Think pieces, in depth articles, TV air time, interviews, etc., are so plentiful for the gun control side of the student activists. THAT is why the attention was focused.
“It’s sad that someone died, but …
a soldier in World War II encountered more stgress in five minutes.
Hell many civilians did too. Except in the America’s, where fighting was minimal.
Somehow all those 100 millions of people went on.”
There is a difference between a soldier in combat and a high school student in school. The soldier knows people are trying to kill him; the student thinks he is experiencing a routine day at school. The soldier is somewhat braced for the situation. The student doesn’t see there is anything to brace for.
It’s going to come out (not in the democrat media, however) that she was suffering from another problem that caused her to go so far as to kill herself.
The ‘survivor guilt’ story doesn’t wash. The VAST majority of the school ‘survivived,’ and some went on to be faked into admission to Harvard (Camera Hogg.)
The stench of scum that is the democrat media and the GOPe media is nearly indescrible.
how sad. I’m so sorry for the family. She is a beautiful girl.
As a daddy, I’m heart broken.
My daughter was at VA Tech when the shooting there took place, losing a friend in the process. It took so long for her to get back to normal. She melted down in tears a lot during her senior year, requiring long sessions on the phone with me, many late at night. It was heartbreaking. She said the worst part was the way the press acted, chasing survivors down the street, even after the students asked to be left alone in their grief. The Aiellos’ grief is even greater. I can’t imagine how much I would have grieved had my daughter not been able to survive the aftermath. There are no words…
Amen, Fuzzy Slippers. I was going to post the same sentiment, but I was glad to see that you did it much better than I would have.
There seems to be a modern need to out-emote one another, and it appears to be generational. We are churning out ostensibly educated young adults who cannot express their thoughts without weighing down their prose with psychobabble. A tragedy such as this deserves a better, more thoughtful response, in my opinion (should one feel the need to weigh in.)
As the parent of a 16-year-old girl, this hits painfully close to home. I cannot imagine her parents’ agony. May God grant them, and Sydney’s soul, peace.
Touche Fuzzy Touche!!!!!!!!
The Germans use “collective” solutions and look what that has gotten them.
I called it in public forums a year ago.
The focus on immediately exploiting these kids into the spotlight instead of protecting them and getting them counseling was sure to lead to a spike in suicides among the affected students.