It Can Change in a Moment
On February 14, 2018, Annika and Mitch Dworet were waiting to pick up their two sons at their high school in Parkland, Florida, when they got a call from Alex, 15: He told his mother he was in the back of an ambulance—he had been shot.
Annika took off for the hospital where Alex was taken, with the immediate hope that since he had been able to call her, he wasn’t in dire straits; it turned out that a bullet had grazed his head. But as a crowd of parents quickly gathered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with word spreading that a number of students had been killed, Mitch, still at the high school, repeatedly called his older son: Nick wasn’t answering his cell. Where was he?
The Dworets wouldn’t get the news until 3 a.m., the last family taken into a private office by the FBI: Nick, captain of the swim team, with an athletic scholarship secured to the University of Indianapolis, who was so in love with his girlfriend he had exchanged homemade hearts with her on this Valentine’s Day—he was dead. Sixteen other students had also been murdered by a 19-year-old former Stoneman student in one of the worst mass shootings ever at a school in the United States.
In the days after Nick’s murder, the Dworets’ house was full of family, friends, and neighbors bringing them food. “Without that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of bed or taken a shower,” Mitch, 62, says.
Mitch was a longtime restaurant manager and a realtor; Annika, 52, a pediatric ER nurse. They had shared with both sons a passion for sports—running and biking—and Nick found a calling in swimming; he dreamed of representing Sweden, his mother’s native country, in the Olympics one day. It had been a close, active family, fractured in a way that was not only sudden but incomprehensible. And the trauma of their loss threatened to swallow them.
