Editor’s Note: When last week’s terror attack unfolded, Benjamin Shapiro, a junior at Stuyvesant High School had moved into the neighborhood just 12 days earlier. He provided the Broadsheet with this account:
‘We moved to one of those fancy-shmancy apartment houses across the street from Stuyvesant 12 days ago. Doesn’t feel that upscale yet, ’cause there’s boxes everywhere and we are using some of them as stand-ins for furniture that has yet to arrive.
It was my mother’s idea to live across from school. I didn’t like the feeling of looking out the window and seeing school on weekends-reminding me of the Spanish homework I had not yet finished. I do like the very quick exit home, though, and Tuesday the light at the end of a day’s tunnel was flickering.
I was taking an eighth-period physics test and partly thinking about what I was gonna do to mark Halloween in an hour.
While I was struggling through the formulas, I started to notice that one police siren kept repeating itself. The never-ending, high-pitched wail was knocking on my skull for attention. When I focused on that annoyance, it dawned on me that this was dozens of sirens and the sound wasn’t passing, ‘cuz they had reached their destination-our doorstep.
Then I heard a series of firecrackers. My brain translated that into gunfire-my emotions continued to register them as simple, harmless fireworks. When my friend Sam Ramos looked out the window of his classroom, he saw a cop racing down Chambers Street with his gun drawn. The head guidance counselor got on the loudspeaker system and announced many times that the entire school was sheltering in place.
You might think this would have produced panic, but this is Stuyvesant High School. Our overarching thought was that we wished the guidance counselor would stop talking cause she was distracting us from the test. And, we were happy that the lockdown netted an extra five minutes to finish up, ‘cuz we didn’t need to heed the end of school bell.
Rumors seeped in from the hallways-a gunman got in the school and shot a number of teachers. The freshman class was weeping. We shrugged these off. Since we were the junior class, who started life in 2001, and went to school in the literal shadow of the Freedom Tower, we calmly assumed that a terrorist act had happened outside. And somehow we knew we were safe.
I was also glad that the TV had not yet made it into our new apartment. I was the first to inform my mother what was happening when I texted her to let her know I was okay. Otherwise, she would have had the TV on a 24-hour news channel for company and found out what was happening outside ahead of knowing what happened to me. All around, hysterical text scenarios from parents were going down.
It took four hours for me to cross a few feet to our home. They evacuated us floor after floor, and my class is on the highest floor of that damned-high high school. It was a painfully slow process that the guidance head described over the loudspeaker as a play by play.
If I had to get stuck with a teacher for all that time, I did luck out. The physics teacher found a Simpson’s Halloween special online and that killed some time. I also rummaged through my hoarder’s backpack and unearthed a deck of playing cards. A game followed that might have been called Texas Hold ‘Em- if poker were allowed in a public school. We renamed it “Go Fish.”
Finally, we walked out of school, in plain sight of the terror truck-and the school van that it plowed into. The dirt on bike path on the corner that I had already used a few times was torn up from the vicious crash. My friend told me a Citibike that I recently rented was smashed to pieces-presumably along with its rider. Suddenly, it got real.
I walked home the long way around the block, so I could go to Duane Reade.
I bought some candy for the trick-or-treaters. I wanted to be sure that something normal, happy and expected took place when I got home.
Text and photo by Benjamin Shapiro