Overflow Crowds Throng Funerals For Slain Florida Students
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Funerals for slain first-year high school students Jamie Guttenberg and Alex Schachter were moved Sunday to a Fort Lauderdale hotel to accommodate more than 1,000 mourners, according to reports.
The funeral for Alex Schachter, 14, who was a member of his school’s marching band, was closed to media. The Miami Herald reported that remembrances at the funeral “focused on his love for movies, his humor and his passion for the high school’s marching band, in which he played trombone,” as well as the secret ingredients in his special smoothie.
The teen’s family set up a GoFundMe page in his memory to fund a scholarship program to “help other students experience the joys of music” as well as fund increased security at schools.
Mourners who attended Jaime Guttenberg’s funeral on Sunday wore orange ribbons in her memory, which stood out against their black mourning clothes, according to the Miami Herald. Orange was her favorite color.
Rabbi Jonathan Kaplan in his eulogy tried to answer the question of where was God during the attack. He said: “God is in the teachers who protected them. God is in the first responders who went in that day. God is in the police who raced to the school, and God is in the families who waited. … God is in the people, all over the world, who sent condolences.”
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