Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Florida School Survivor’s Grandfather Lived Through America’s ‘First Mass Shooting’

A 17-year-old girl who survived this week’s massacre at a Florida high school is the granddaughter of a man who lived through an mass shooting often cited as America’s first such tragedy.

Carly Novell, who hid in a closet during the Florida shooting, said on Twitter that her grandfather had done the same during a massacre 70 years ago.

“These events shouldn’t be repetitive,” she said. “Something has to change.”

Novell’s grandfather, Charles Cohen, survived a shooting in 1949 when a neighbor in Camden, New Jersey named Howard Unruh killed 13 people, including his parents and his grandmother. The killer targeted Cohen’s family over imagined slights.

“I just want people to stop talking about it and then not doing anything,” Novell said on CNN. “People keep saying your thoughts and prayers and all of these things, but it doesn’t make a difference if nothing ever changes.”

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.