Florida people group grieves at vigil after mass school shooting

PARKLAND, Feb 16 From one end of this well-off Florida suburb to another, the inquiry Thursday on everyone's lips was the same: How could something like this occur here?

Until the point when a beset young person named Nikolas Cruz, according to police, got an AR-15 rifle and killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday, inhabitants thought mass murder was something that happened elsewhere.

"Don't tell me know there's no such thing as firearm savagery," Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jamie was killed, said at a special sunset service for the dead. "It occurred in Parkland. ... What is incomprehensible is that Jamie took a bullet and is dead."

Fourteen-year-old Ava DiGilio, tuning in the group, could just concur.

"People used to boast about how this was the most secure town in Florida," said the eighth-grader, who heard the shots from inside her middle-school classroom. "No place is protected any longer."

Flanking the lamenting Guttenberg on the stage at the town's amphitheater were 17 four-foot-tall ornamental angels — one for each victim.

They were loaned to the town by the city of Sunrise, Florida, which initially utilized them to respect the casualties of the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter.

"Shockingly, we need to use them once more," said Kevin Pickard, a Sunrise city specialist. "We didn't think we'd require them so near and dear."