PARKLAND, FLA.—It was the final period of the day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High and Jonathan Blank was in history class, learning about the Holocaust. Across campus, five of his friends, pals since grade school, sat in different classrooms watching the clock. In 19 minutes, school would be out and the buddies had plans this Valentine’s Day: a little basketball and boys’ time.Inside classroom 1214, the clock hit 2:21 p.m. Then: POP! POP! POP!Instinctively, 16-year-old Jonathan hit the ground, taking cover under his desk. He smelled the chemical stench of gunpowder, noticed sawdust particles floating in the air: pieces of the classroom door that had been splintered by shots. Around the room, his schoolmates covered themselves with textbooks and took shelter behind filing cabinets.One girl’s face was covered in blood. Nearby, a boy wasn’t moving. It struck Jonathan that he was probably dead.Beyond the pockmarked door, gunfire sounded up and down the hallway, seesawing eerily between shots, then silence, shots, then silence. All that broke through the moments of quiet were horrifying shrieks — along with the groans of Jonathan’s wounded classmates.The teen thought about texting his parents and of course his best friends, but he’d left his phone atop his desk and was too frozen with fear to reach up and grab it. Joey, Noah, John, Sam, Ethan — his band of brothers that had bonded over soccer, basketball and bar mitzvahs — Jonathan had no way of knowing if they were OK or if they, too, lay dying somewhere amid yet another deadly rampage inside yet another U.S. school.They cheekily called themselves the “Jew Crew,” these six friends who met playing sports in elementary school and who, at 13, had planned back-to-back bar mitzvahs so the parties would stretch on for weeks. Along with Jonathan there was Joey Cordover, Noah Kaufman, John Greenberg, Sam Resnick and Ethan Rocha, who wasn’t Jewish ...
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