‘I blame the murderer for 50% of what happened,’ Andrew Pollack says. ‘There were so many people who didn’t care, who didn’t do their job.’
[SUNDAY FEAURE] By Tunku Varadarajan | The Wall Street Journal
(Editor’s note: Opinion pieces are published for discussions purposes only.)
n a campground near Lake Kissimmee, Andrew Pollack and I sit in the shadow of a white RV, his spartan home. He broods by my side in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He’s just sold his large house in Coral Springs, Fla., because he feels “physically sick to be in Broward County,” where his 18-year-old daughter was shot dead last Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas School in Parkland. He’s lived in his RV for nearly three weeks with his wife and their Belgian Malinois puppy, who isn’t yet at ease with life in a mobile home. A campfire burns skittishly in the lakeside wind, its blaze nothing compared with Mr. Pollack’s burning rage
A lean and rugged 52, he is a man of adamant words: He always says that his daughter, Meadow, was “murdered.” He scolds me—then swiftly apologizes—when I once say she “died.” I ask him about her name, and he tells me he and her mother (from whom Mr. Pollack is divorced) got it from “The Sopranos”: “I thought it was a pretty name. All my kids have unique names. Huck is my oldest, from Huck Finn. My other son’s called Hunter.”
There is a lull for a moment, as Mr. Pollack struggles to compose himself. He tells me he cannot bear to utter the name of Nikolas Cruz, the former student at Meadow’s school who is charged with killing 17 people—14 students and three adult staff members—in 11 minutes of unchecked carnage, making Parkland the worst high-school shooting in U.S. history. “I call him by his prison ID number,” Mr. Pollack says. “It’s 18-1958.”
