Patricia Mazzei

Hurchalla, 78, could spend her remaining years kayaking here, readily outpacing paddlers less than half her age. Or traveling the country, giving speeches about the legacy of her sister, Janet Reno, the first female attorney general of the United States.

But instead of reveling in her retirement, Hurchalla, who has devoted her life to protecting the untamed Florida wilderness that she loved, has been fighting a public battle with a rock-mining company — and losing.

A jury decided last year that Hurchalla should pay $4.4 million in damages to Lake Point Restoration, a company that has a limestone mining operation in Martin County, along Florida’s Treasure Coast.

Lake Point sued her for interfering with a contract after she emailed Martin County commissioners, urging them to back out of a water deal with the company that had initially been approved as a public-private partnership that could keep polluted water out of a nearby estuary. Hurchalla argued that she had merely exercised her First Amendment rights.

The legal saga involved secret emails, the ownership of Florida’s fresh water, and the constitutional rights to free speech and to petition the government.

Three months ago, a state appeals court upheld the verdict, alarming environmental and free speech organizations that had implored the three-judge panel to consider how profoundly such a precedent could chill citizens’ ability to question their leaders.

Hurchalla appealed again, this time asking for a hearing before the full 4th District Court of Appeal. On Friday, the court denied her request. She could still petition the Florida Supreme Court to consider her case.

She does not have the money to pay the judgment. But Hurchalla does not worry about that.

“What I worry about now,” she said, “is dying before we win.”

She is one of the few remaining voices of a generation that remembers hurricanes before they had names, the last surviving child of a mother who built the family homestead by hand. Her life has spanned much of the state’s modern history, a story of growth inextricable from development.

The sale of 650 acres on the southern tip of Hutchinson Island in 1972 first spurred Hurchalla into activism. She wanted the land protected for conservation. Instead, a developer bought it and built a gated residential community. Hurchalla became Martin County’s first female commissioner in 1974, a liberal Democrat in a town of Republicans.

The commission adopted strict protections for wetlands and a four-story height limit for buildings. Growth happened anyway, but slowly and “sanely,” Hurchalla said, keeping the county green and preserving an Old Florida way of life.

In 1994, she lost reelection to an opponent largely bankrolled by developers. Hurchalla returned to activism. Even now, she says, “I spend too much time at the computer, trying to save the world.”

That is how she got in trouble with Lake Point, which in 2008 bought 2,200 acres of former sugar cane fields in the western fringes of Martin County, near Lake Okeechobee.

Behind Lake Point was George Lindemann Jr., a billionaire real estate investor and heir to a cellphone and cable TV fortune. He served prison time after being convicted in 1995 of paying a man $25,000 to electrocute his horse so Lindemann could collect a $250,000 insurance payout.

Lindemann’s consortium wanted to mine for limestone and use the leftover pits to store lake water and clean its pollution, which would otherwise be flushed down the fragile St. Lucie Estuary, contributing to toxic algae blooms. The South Florida Water Management District and Martin County signed off on the project.

But a few years later, Lake Point partnered with another company to try to sell the water to the city of West Palm Beach, troubling Hurchalla and Martin County officials, who questioned whether the revised plan would really result in environmental benefits. (West Palm Beach ultimately did not buy Lake Point’s water.)

Hurchalla fired off emails to county commissioners encouraging them to get out of the agreement with Lake Point, arguing that it would destroy wetlands and noting that no peer-reviewed study had examined the effects on restoration plans for the downstream Florida Everglades, which are supposed to get water from Lake Okeechobee, near the mine site.

She sent some of the emails to commissioners’ private email addresses. She signed one of them “Deep Rock Pit” — a joke, she said later, alluding to Deep Throat, the secret Washington Post source during the Watergate scandal.

County staff members issued notices of violation against Lake Point.

In 2013, Lake Point sued the county, the water management district and Hurchalla, claiming she waged an unlawful campaign against the company that cost it its plans to make money off its cleaned lake water.

The court agreed: The litigation found that commissioners conducted public business using their private email and delayed production of those emails — or destroyed them altogether — in violation of public records laws. Three commissioners were charged in criminal court. A jury acquitted one of them in April, and the state attorney dropped the charges against the other two last month.

The county and water management district settled with Lake Point for millions of dollars, and the mine continues to operate. But Hurchalla fought on, even after Lake Point offered to drop the case if she publicly apologized.

She had nothing to apologize for, she said: She had engaged her elected leaders. But Lake Point accused her of improperly instructing commissioners through the private emails — and of falsely claiming that the wetlands would be harmed (they were not, the company said) and that no scientific studies had been done (a preliminary review had been conducted). That amounted to malice, the court ruled.

“The First Amendment’s very important, but it has its limits,” said Ethan J. Loeb, the lead lawyer for Lake Point. “You’re not allowed to tell falsehoods. You’re not allowed to lie. That’s not anything that’s new or exotic. And if, in fact, you do not tell the truth, and those falsehoods were designed to injure or harm a business, there’s a consequence for that.”

Any wages Hurchalla makes are subject to garnishment. One of her husband Jim’s retirement accounts was taken over. After the jury ruled against her last year, sheriff’s deputies seized what they could of Hurchalla’s property: two kayaks and a 2004 Toyota Camry — with a faded “Defend Maggy” bumper sticker — that had been owned by her sister.

Lake Point later returned the kayaks and the car. But first, Hurchalla’s neighbors dropped off other kayaks at her home in solidarity.

“Thank you for standing up for our First Amendment rights,” read a handwritten note they left behind.

Richard Grosso, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University who filed amicus briefs on behalf of advocacy groups as part of Hurchalla’s appeal, said he had already heard from other activists who feared that the ruling might hamper their ability to criticize the government.

“I’ve had several clients contact me with deep concern about whether and what they can say about environmental issues,” he said. “Florida is battling global warming and sea-level rise and the loss of biodiversity, so we cannot afford to be quiet.”

Hurchalla, as is her style, put it more bluntly: “I don’t think anybody could safely stand at a podium in the state of Florida.”

One evening in July, Hurchalla, barefoot, with a knife cut on her finger bandaged with duct tape, contemplated the recent events from the screened porch of the home she and Jim built in 1968 after buying a $5,000 lot on the banks of the Indian River. They raised four children there. Two adult grandchildren live nearby.

Her breast cancer is in remission, but she has suffered since 1992 from an autoimmune disorder that requires monthly intravenous transfusions of antibodies.

“I did not expect to be alive at 78,” said Hurchalla, whose sister died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at 78.

But Hurchalla did not dwell on what was to come. Instead, she looked around in wonder. Past the mangroves, mullet jumped in the river.

“Look at what the world has done for me,” she said.

She served crackers and smoked fish dip from barracuda that Jim had caught the night before. Then she planned the next day’s paddle, checking on the high tide.

This article originally appeared in

The Florida Activist Is 78. The Legal Judgment Against Her Is $4 Million.

STUART, Fla. — Maggy Hurchalla’s piece of Florida heaven is a patch of pristine Atlantic shore accessible only by boat in St. Lucie Inlet Preserve State Park. She and her husband nicknamed it the “End of the World” when they first came upon it half a century ago, after paddling south along the barrier island to the water’s end. She still likes to skinny-dip at the beach.

It was fitting that two blocks away, at a church founded by some of Miami’s first Bahamian settlers, Bethel led a frantic effort this week to aid storm victims in the country of his ancestors. Miami was spared the wrath of Hurricane Dorian but the Bahamas suffered a direct hit, one that left the islands in utter devastation.

The ties could not be stronger between Miami and the archipelago less than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled in South Florida decades before Miami was born, building bridges and railroads and raising children who would become some of the region’s most prominent leaders. This week, their descendants, many veterans of devastating hurricanes themselves, gathered across South Florida to lend a hand.

“When we were desperate, people came to our rescue,” said Bethel, 68, a retired state juvenile justice administrator who lost his home in south Miami-Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, another Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The community pulled together. There was no sense of division. Now, we are doing the same.”

Past disasters, both natural and political, have cemented Miami’s identity as a beacon for the region. The city took in Cuban exiles after Fidel Castro seized power. It mobilized to support Haiti after a crippling earthquake. It adopted the cause of Venezuelans after their country was plunged into crisis.

In the case of the Bahamas, Miami owes its very beginnings to residents from there. Bahamian laborers worked in construction and agriculture, creating the city’s infrastructure and teaching white settlers unfamiliar with the tropics how to build with coral rock, till the soil and plant tropical fruit, said Marvin Dunn, a retired college professor who chronicled local history in his book “Black Miami in the Twentieth Century.”

“It’s probably safe to say that Florida would not have evolved as it did without Bahamians in this community,” he said.

Some of the early settlers’ employers paid them with land, allowing black homeownership to flourish. In the 20th century, Bahamian Americans became among South Florida’s most influential civic leaders and civil rights activists.

Bahamians started to arrive in the 1880s, following an economic downturn on the islands, Dunn said. Many went to work in pineapple fields in Key West and then migrated north to Coconut Grove, which they called Kebo. Bahamians also settled in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown and in Carver Ranches, which is now part of the city of West Park, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.

One of the early figures in Coconut Grove was Bethel’s great-grandmother Mariah Brown, a laundress in Key West who became a Grove innkeeper and built her two-story home on what is now Charles Street.

Brown helped establish the Greater St. Paul AME Church on Thomas Avenue, Bethel said. One of her daughters, Lulu Reddick, Bethel’s grandmother, was a founding member of the nearby Christ Episcopal, on Hibiscus Street, where Bethel is now senior warden, the congregation’s lead layperson.

On Wednesday, volunteers gathered in both houses of worship, dripping with sweat as they sorted through heavy boxes and bags.

Stacks of water bottles. Heaps of diapers. Baby formula. A chain saw. So many donations came in that Christ Episcopal ran out of pallets.

“None of my normal church work is getting done,” the Rev. Jonathan Archer, the church’s rector, said with a chuckle. Archer is from Nassau, the Bahamian capital, and had learned that his relatives there were safe.

“This is in our denominational DNA — we provide relief in times of crisis,” said the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson III, the senior pastor at Greater St. Paul, which was founded in 1896. “While this hurricane in particular affects our parishioners directly, when it was the Haiti earthquake, or the hurricane in Puerto Rico, we did the same thing. Our members do feel this one a bit more personally, but it’s the same effort.”

“It’s too close to home not to react,” said Ligia Crystal, a Colombian-born retired florist who was unloading blankets and pillows from her van at the door of the church. “If someone isn’t helping, what rock are they hiding under?”

Robinson said seven seaplanes lent free of charge by Tropic Ocean Airways in Fort Lauderdale had been pressed into service for the relief effort by the city of Miami and various churches and institutions.

“We do have clearance from the Bahamian government to take medical supplies in today,” he said. “They’ve told us they need to know what’s in each box, so we’ve been filling out a lot of forms.”

In a large hall outside the pastor’s office, a Nassau-born volunteer named Elvern Ross — everyone calls her Mel — said she had heard from her brother in Nassau that their cousins in Marsh Harbour had survived but lost everything in the storm.

“The house is gone,” Ross said. “They were surrounded by water and couldn’t get help. There were six or seven people in the house. It’s a sad thing, you know what I mean?”

Gordon Eric Knowles, president of the Miami-Dade Chamber of Commerce, which promotes black-owned businesses, said he still had not heard from a cousin who is a doctor in the Abaco Islands. He saw a photograph of the clinic where she works on CNN but could not manage to get a glimpse of her.

“We’re just praying that she’s OK,” said Knowles, whose great-grandparents first migrated to Fort Pierce, Florida.

The plight of the Bahamas has drawn the attention of public officials, including the state’s Republican senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who asked President Donald Trump to waive or suspend certain visa requirements for Bahamians with relatives in the United States who can take them in temporarily.

Local officials were frustrated that the federal government had not dispatched search-and-rescue teams from Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami to the Bahamas, apparently because they might be needed in Georgia or the Carolinas. The Coast Guard has sent helicopters and boats to perform evacuations on the islands.

Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Democrat representing Miami Gardens, whose mother’s family hailed from Abaco, said she would like to establish a Bahamian heritage museum in Coconut Grove and obtain a formal designation for the area to be called “Little Bahamas.” Commissioner Ken Russell of Miami, who represents the neighborhood, said he won some protection last year for the last remaining wood-frame shotgun houses built by Bahamian settlers in the West Grove.

“There have been more evictions, demolitions and nonrenewals of month-to-month rentals in that part of town than any other part of town because it’s in between fancy Coconut Grove and fancy Coral Gables,” he lamented.

Back at Christ Episcopal, Bethel said he hoped the community’s efforts to help the islands would draw attention to the need for affordable housing in the West Grove, to maintain the neighborhood’s important history.

“If you don’t keep telling your history,” he said, “you lose it.”

Strong Ties to Mainland Sustain Islands Reeling From Storm's Devastation

MIAMI — The home that Charles Bethel’s great-grandmother built in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood in 1890 still stands, with a historical marker commemorating it as one of the first dwellings in the area owned by a settler from the Bahamas.

“It all depends on this dance of the pressure systems around the storm,” said Hugh Willoughby, a meteorologist at Florida International University in Miami.

If the forecast for its strength holds, Dorian would be the first hurricane of Category 4 or higher to make landfall on Florida’s east coast since 1992, when Andrew ripped through the Miami area as a Category 5 storm, causing widespread damage.

“The biggest concern will be Dorian’s slow motion when it is near Florida, placing some areas of the state at an increasing risk of a prolonged, drawn-out event of strong winds, dangerous storm surge, and heavy rainfall,” the National Hurricane Center said in its 5 a.m. Friday briefing.

The Florida National Guard has activated 2,500 members, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday night. The governor had previously extended an emergency declaration to all of the state’s 67 counties.

A strike by Dorian in a densely populated region could be especially dangerous, said W. Craig Fugate, a former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He rattled off a list of Florida cities — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Jacksonville — where, he said, storm surge could be deadly “once you start measuring in feet, not inches.”

“That’s not saying it won’t be devastating wherever it hits the shore,” said Fugate.

Orlando is inland in Central Florida, but if the storm dumps rain for many hours, the city’s lakes could overflow. In North Florida, the St. Johns and Matanzas Rivers have flooded Jacksonville and St. Augustine even when storms have not directly hit the cities, Fugate noted.

Expensive installations around Cape Canaveral could be affected. Fuel shipments could be delayed by any disruptions at major hubs for cargo in Jacksonville or Fort Lauderdale. Powerful waves in Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s largest inland lake, could test its aging dike.

“What we’ve always encouraged in Florida is catastrophic disaster planning,” Fugate said.

Hurricane Dorian Menaces Florida's East Coast

Forecasters expect Hurricane Dorian to arrive somewhere along the east coast of Florida on Monday afternoon. But exactly where is still a mystery, with some prediction models suggesting a direct blow to Central Florida and others projecting the storm to veer north or south.

“I have to admit that that could happen,” Pierluisi said with a chuckle. “But that’s the situation.”

That was on Friday. By Sunday afternoon, Pierluisi had appeared to reverse himself, arguing that the Senate had no say and that the courts would settle the issue. Then a few hours later, he was sued.

Puerto Rico remained Monday where it has been for weeks: in a state of protracted political paralysis that appears not to have been resolved by the installation of Pierluisi, who took over after former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló’s resignation became effective Friday. The territory’s Supreme Court agreed to take up a legal action filed against Pierluisi’s appointment.

Public furor fueled huge demonstrations against Rosselló after leaked private messages showed him and his closest aides insulting Puerto Ricans. Questions over Pierluisi’s legitimacy as governor left open the possibility that protesters would again take to the streets, if they see his installation as evidence of the unpopular political establishment unconstitutionally attempting to perpetuate itself in power.

“This isn’t about whether Mr. Pierluisi is a good candidate, as some people have argued,” said Julio E. Fontanet Maldonado, a constitutional scholar and the dean of the law school at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. “It’s about defending the rule of law.”

Late Sunday, the Senate president, Thomas Rivera Schatz, asked a lower court in San Juan, the capital, to grant a preliminary injunction ordering Pierluisi to cease functions as governor because he had not previously been confirmed as secretary of state by both chambers of the Legislative Assembly.

The secretary of state is next in line to succeed the governor. The House of Representatives confirmed Pierluisi as secretary of state Friday, but the Senate did not hold a hearing. Even in the case of the House vote, new questions arose Monday as to whether Pierluisi had submitted all the required paperwork before the vote.

“Puerto Rico is living a situation without historical precedent,” wrote Rivera Schatz, who leads the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which Pierluisi and Rosselló also represent.

The Supreme Court said it would take up the Senate’s complaint and asked for written arguments by Tuesday afternoon.

Originally, the Senate had scheduled a confirmation hearing for Pierluisi for Monday morning. But Pierluisi said that as governor, he could no longer be subject to confirmation as secretary of state. The hearing was canceled.

Pierluisi had argued during a news conference Friday that the Senate could “ratify” him as governor. But no legal framework for such a vote appears to exist in Puerto Rican law.

Still, the Senate planned to meet in special session Monday afternoon and possibly vote anyway. Despite his earlier waffling, Pierluisi said Monday that he would abide by the Senate’s decision.

“If the Puerto Rico Senate decides to hold any sort of vote over my incumbency, I will respect the result,” Pierluisi said in a statement. “All I ask of senators before they make their decision is that they listen to the people, to whom we are all indebted.”

A campaign to ask legislators to back Pierluisi has been carried out by his supporters for several days. One local television station sent a crew to interview Puerto Ricans on the street about Pierluisi; the host of the program seemed surprised that most people seemed content with his installation.

A second lawsuit against Pierluisi was filed early Monday by Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, who asked the Supreme Court to declare Pierluisi’s swearing-in illegitimate. Cruz is a 2020 candidate for governor for the opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports keeping Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth.

She told reporters over the weekend that while she does not support the next New Progressive official in line to be governor — Wanda Vázquez, the secretary of justice — the court must clarify existing law over the constitutional succession.

Outside the Supreme Court on Monday, Frank Torres Viada, a lawyer for the city of San Juan, described the island as being in the middle of a “judicial vacuum.”

“Right now, Puerto Ricans are in a state of uncertainty, unrest and restlessness of spirit,” he said, “because we don’t really know who is governor of Puerto Rico.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/puerto-rico-governor.html" id="a81ca505-006b-338b-a136-f704877b9efc">The New York Times</a>.

Puerto Rico Got a New Governor 3 Days Ago. But His Future Is Already in Doubt.

Moments after being sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor, Pedro R. Pierluisi pledged in no uncertain terms that he would willingly step down in the coming days if the island’s Senate voted against confirming him — even if that made him one of the shortest-serving governors ever to take office.

But Pierluisi’s path to the governor’s seat is hardly an easy one. He faces serious opposition from some lawmakers, especially in Puerto Rico’s Senate, which could block his confirmation. That would leave the next in line — Wanda Vázquez, secretary of justice — to become governor.

With the vote still uncertain, here is a look at the man who could take charge of the island’s troubled government.

Who is Pedro Pierluisi?

Pierluisi, a 60-year-old lawyer, served as secretary of justice for three years under Rosselló’s father, former Gov. Pedro J. Rosselló. He was elected to represent Puerto Rico in Congress as its nonvoting resident commissioner and served there from 2009 to 2017.

Pierluisi was reelected after his first term even though the governor at the time, Luis G. Fortuño, who was also on the ballot for the New Progressive Party, was not. That popularity made Pierluisi, who comes from a political family, an attractive candidate for governor in 2016.

But he lost the primary that year to the younger Rosselló by about 2 percentage points, or about 10,000 votes. Pierluisi then backed Rosselló, who like him is a Democrat when it comes to national politics, though Puerto Rico’s political parties do not neatly match up with those on the mainland. The New Progressive Party supports statehood for Puerto Rico.

In 1994, while Pierluisi was secretary of justice, his younger brother, José Jaime Pierluisi, a 28-year-old aide to the governor, was fatally shot in a carjacking in San Juan, the capital.

What is Pierluisi’s political standing in Puerto Rico?

Pierluisi is seen as competent and experienced. As resident commissioner, he ensured that Puerto Rico received federal stimulus funds and was covered by the Affordable Care Act. Both were considered important achievements.

But he also faces a serious potential conflict of interest: After leaving office, Pierluisi went to work for O’Neill &amp; Borges, a law firm that does external legal consulting for the federal oversight board appointed by Congress to oversee Puerto Rico’s troubled finances.

Pierluisi took a leave of absence from the firm Tuesday. Yet any connection to the unpopular board — which is led by Pierluisi’s brother-in-law, José B. Carrión III — is problematic in the minds of some lawmakers who will decide whether to confirm him.

In a statement accepting his nomination Wednesday, Pierluisi cast his Washington connections as an advantage.

“It is also crucial to restore the trust of federal authorities and Congress, where I have earned respect,” he said, “and to reestablish a productive relationship with the oversight board, based only on what is good for Puerto Rico and facilitates the end of its mandate.”

Has there been any other controversy?

In 2016, The New York Times found that Pierluisi introduced legislation as resident commissioner that would benefit at least two Wall Street companies that had hired his wife, María Elena Carrión, to advise them. The family’s net worth rose in part thanks to Carrión’s work helping the firms find bargains on distressed financial assets in Puerto Rico.

Both Pierluisi and Carrión, an experienced investment banker, said at the time that nothing he had done was intended to help her financial advisory firm, which she set up 20 days after he was elected in 2008.

Pierluisi and Carrión are now in the process of divorcing, according to the Puerto Rican news media.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/puerto-rico-governor-pedro-pierluisi.html" id="d9ac386e-154a-3a8c-a5f3-cbcc95f1a605">The New York Times</a>.

Who Is Pedro Pierluisi, Who Could Be Puerto Rico's Next Governor?

A week after announcing his imminent resignation, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico nominated a new secretary of state who could succeed him. Pedro R. Pierluisi faces a confirmation hearing in the Legislative Assembly.

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, it was Riley Howell, 21. At the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, it was Kendrick Castillo, 18. The two young men were hailed as heroes for assuming the unimaginable role of emergency responder to a school shooting.

Their actions, credited by the authorities with saving the lives of classmates, suggest that some members of America’s mass-shooting generation have learned — by instinct or intention — to act as professionals would in the face of deadly tragedy.

“I think everybody has this idea, ‘What if somebody comes in with a gun? What do I do?’” said Brendan Bialy, 18, who said he helped disarm the Colorado shooting suspect, a fellow student, after Castillo charged him. “I didn’t think consciously, ‘I’d do this and then this.’ It just happened.”

Drills for what to do during a shooting have become routine in schools across the nation, in some cases for children as young as in kindergarten. Most students have not been taught to directly confront shooting suspects, but rather to focus on what they must do to remain safe. Some young people, however, appear to have closely followed past massacres and concluded that they cannot wait for a teacher or security officer to protect them.

“The idea of ‘run, hide, fight’ is what they teach,” said Don Gilmore, whose son Spencer escaped unharmed from the shooting at STEM School on Tuesday and was friends with some of the students who tried to subdue one of the attackers. “Run if you can. Hide if you need to. And fight if you must. Some people are just wired to react to that situation.”

Spencer’s mother, Sarah, said she had spent part of the evening after the shooting thinking about how, had her son been in a different classroom that afternoon, Spencer might have been one of the students charging into gunfire. “They saved it from being much worse,” she said.

Even younger children were prepared to take action. Nate Holley, a sixth grader at the school, recounted to CNN how his teacher moved the class into a closet during the shooting. Standing in the corner, Nate got ready.

“I had my hand on a metal baseball bat, just in case,” said Nate, 12. “Cause I was going to go down fighting if I was going to go down.”

The thought of a child formulating a plan to attack a gunman with nothing more than a baseball bat may seem horrifying. But people like Greg Crane, whose company trains law enforcement on how to handle active shooters, say that when escape is not an option, confrontation might make sense.

“We do conduct training about taking back control,” said Crane, who created a training program called “Alice,” or Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. “Often it gets called ‘fighting back.’ There’s no fighting strategies taught; it’s ‘How do you control this out-of-control person?’”

He frequently cites as inspiration Jacob Ryker, who tackled a gunman at his Oregon high school in 1998, despite getting shot himself.

“It’s never been a question of whether kids can do it,” Crane said. “It’s just I think with predominantly more training on responses to violent events going on all over, yes, we would expect to see hopefully more of this.”

But not all training methods promote similar action — some endorse more running and hiding than fighting — and drills vary widely among school districts. What academics who study school violence have learned from their research is that what matters most is that the drills do not traumatize children, said Beverly Kingston, the director of the Center for the Study and the Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It matters the way the training is done and how it’s done,” Kingston said. “It can either add to the trauma or reduce the trauma. We always want to do it in ways that reduce the trauma.”

Even more important is focusing on ways to prevent violence, she added, deploying threat assessment teams with multiple approaches to help people who are troubled. One way to identify those potential threats is to give communities — especially students, parents and teachers — the ability to anonymously report concerns that do not rise to the level of, say, calling 911.

“It’s not only this mass violence — it’s also increases in suicide,” Kingston said. “How are we working together as a nation to put into place programs that we know are proven to work when someone is suffering? That’s the harder question, but we really have to ask ourselves that hard question.”

Susan Payne, who after the Columbine shooting founded Safe2Tell, a youth violence prevention initiative in Colorado, lamented that, 20 years later, schools have still not adopted a consistent approach to try to prevent mass shootings.

“We can do a better job in this country, and I think we’ve seen a lot of movement in the aftermath of the Parkland tragedy,” said Payne, who worked in law enforcement for 28 years. “We need to get in earlier, and we need to realize that the culture and climate in a school is so important.”

She attributed some students’ instinct to confront an armed attacker to depictions of heroism in popular culture.

“Young people today are more informed than we even realize, and it’s through their own social norms and information they see in television, movies and online,” she said. “And I think kids are having that conversation at lunchroom tables, talking of what they might do.”

Bialy, the STEM School senior, described the takedown of the gunman as an effort among Castillo, himself and a third boy he declined to name, citing the boy’s wishes. Castillo was closest to the shooting suspect, about a foot away, when the suspect walked into their English class.

Once Castillo got up, so did Bialy and the other boy. They slammed the gunman against the wall. He fired his pistol once or twice in the skirmish, hitting Castillo. Students tried to tend to him, but he was unresponsive, Bialy said.

“Kendrick refused to be a victim,” Bialy said.

Castillo’s father, John Castillo, told The Denver Post through tears that he was not surprised by his son’s decision to go after the gunman, though he wished he had acted differently and perhaps survived.

“I wish he had gone and hid,” Castillo said, “but that’s not his character. His character is about protecting people, helping people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/school-shooting-student-safety.html" id="2b07115d-3978-38df-a1d8-cfc9cd80678b">The New York Times</a>.

The two shootings were separated by seven days and more than 1,500 miles, but the details seemed eerily familiar: When a gunman charged into a classroom, a student went barreling toward him, preventing more bloodshed while sacrificing his life.

'Fight if You Must': Students Take a Front-Line Role in School Shootings

The local ballot measure did not quite legalize the mushrooms that contain psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. State and federal regulations would have to change to accomplish that.

But the measure made the possession, use or cultivation of the mushrooms by people aged 21 or older the lowest-priority crime for law enforcement in the city of Denver and Denver County. Arrests and prosecutions, already fairly rare, would all but disappear.

Results posted by the city as a “final unofficial” tally late Wednesday showed the “Yes” vote won by less than 2,000 ballots. The “No” vote had led throughout the day, until the last updated count by elections officials. Alton P. Dillard, the elections spokesman, said the passage appeared safe, but the final results would not be certified until May 16.

“We won!!!!” the group called Decriminalize Denver that had been pushing the measure, said in a jubilant post on Facebook.

Adoption of the measure, by a margin so close that the measure was initially thought to have been rejected, signaled fledgling public acceptance of a mind-altering drug — outlawed nationally for nearly 50 years — that recent research suggests could have beneficial medical uses. A similar effort failed to get on the ballot in California last year, but it could come up again in 2020; Oregon voters may also vote on a comparable measure next year.

“It’s surreal,” said Travis Tyler Fluck, a field organizer for the campaign to pass the measure, suggesting that Denver had a sizable population of “psychedelic constituents.”

“People just don’t see it as a threat,” he added. “Compared to the ‘sinister’ LSD, magic mushrooms are tame.”

Proponents of more lenient criminal enforcement of psilocybin cite studies indicating that the drug can be beneficial for treating depression and anxiety among cancer patients. Other studies have identified potential uses in therapy for alcoholics and people trying to quit smoking, and in treating depression in people who do not have cancer.

“Because psilocybin has such tremendous medical potential, there’s no reason individuals should be criminalized for using something that grows naturally,” said Kevin Matthews, the director of the pro-mushrooms campaign.

Matthews, 33, credits psilocybin mushrooms with helping pull him out of a major depression that forced him to withdraw from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was a cadet for three years in his 20s.

Dr. Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was one of the authors of a study last year recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reclassify the drug to acknowledge its potential medical uses and relatively low potential for abuse.

Psilocybin is not addictive, and “there’s no direct lethal overdose” of the drug on record, Johnson said.

Researchers who study psilocybin’s effects use a synthetic version of the drug in carefully controlled environments, he said, which is different from someone growing mushrooms and ingesting them at home.

The ballot measure, Initiated Ordinance 301, would also establish a panel to review the law’s impact on public health and safety.

In advance of the vote, Art Way, the Colorado state director for a pro-legalization advocacy group, the Drug Policy Alliance, praised the local effort in Denver to move psilocybin enforcement off the police’s radar. But he cautioned against tackling the issue piecemeal.

“Separating some drugs as good and some as bad will only stand to perpetuate the drug war,” he said.

Arrests in Denver for incidents involving psilocybin have not numbered more than 59 in any of the last three years, and only 11 cases were prosecuted in that time.

Beth McCann, the district attorney in Denver, opposed the ballot measure, according to a spokeswoman, Carolyn A. Tyler.

“We’re still in the very early stages of marijuana legalization, and we are still learning the impact of that substance on our city,” Tyler said. “And she is not in favor of Denver being the only city that doesn’t enforce the law.”

Mayor Michael Hancock was also against the proposal, his office said, without elaborating on his reasoning. The Denver Police Department declined to take a position.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/denver-mushrooms-psychedelic-vote.html" id="151750c5-a884-351b-abe0-8eaea21c85d9">The New York Times</a>.

Voters in Denver, a city at the forefront of the widening national debate over legalizing marijuana, have become the first in the nation to effectively decriminalize another recreational drug: hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Hallucinogenic Mushrooms Win Support From Denver Voters

The local ballot measure would not quite legalize “magic” mushrooms, the ones that contain psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. State and federal regulations would have to change to accomplish that.

But if it passes, the measure would make the possession, use or cultivation of the mushrooms by people 21 or older the lowest-priority crime for law enforcement in the city of Denver and Denver County. Arrests and prosecutions, already fairly rare, could all but disappear.

Adoption of the measure could signal fledgling public acceptance of a mind-altering drug, outlawed nationally for nearly 50 years, that recent research suggests could have beneficial medical uses. A similar effort failed to get on the ballot in California last year but could come up again in 2020. Oregon voters may also vote on a comparable measure next year.

“Because psilocybin has such tremendous medical potential, there’s no reason individuals should be criminalized for using something that grows naturally,” said Kevin Matthews, director of the “Decriminalize Denver” campaign.

“It really helped me see outside the box of my own life,” Matthews said of the drug. “It brought me out of the depths of my own internal struggles and despair.”

Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was one of the authors of a study last year recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reclassify the drug to acknowledge its potential medical uses and relatively low potential for abuse.

“But someone can have a dose that’s psychologically challenging,” he warned. “They panic and they wander into traffic and they die. It’s an admittedly low scale, but if that’s your son or daughter who has gotten into a fatal accident, as rare as that it is, that’s very real.”

“Decriminalization in general is supported by public health science,” Johnson said about Denver’s psilocybin ballot measure. “But if this happens, I would hope that the city would be very clear that it’s not endorsing use and that there are very clear risks.”

The ballot measure, Initiated Ordinance 301, would also establish a panel to review the law’s impact on public health and safety. The polls are scheduled to close at 7 p.m. Mountain time.

Art Way, the Colorado state director for a pro-legalization advocacy group, the Drug Policy Alliance, praised the local effort in Denver to move psilocybin enforcement off the police’s radar. But he cautioned against tackling the issue piecemeal.

Arrests in Denver for incidents involving psilocybin have not numbered more than 59 in any of the past three years and only 11 cases were prosecuted in that time.

Beth McCann, district attorney in Denver, opposes the ballot measure, according to a spokeswoman, Carolyn A. Tyler.

“We’re still in the very early stages of marijuana legalization and we are still learning the impact of that substance on our city,” Tyler said. “And she is not in favor of Denver being the only city that doesn’t enforce the law.”

Mayor Michael Hancock, who is up for re-election in the municipal election Tuesday, is also against the proposal, his office said, without elaborating on his reasoning. The Denver Police Department declined to take a position.

Matthews, the leader of the decriminalization campaign, said the initiative had not met with any organized public opposition. His group collected the necessary signatures to get the proposal on Tuesday’s ballot and raised about $45,000, mostly for social media advertising. No polling has been conducted on the measure.

Jeff Hunt, director of the Centennial Institute, a policy research group at Colorado Christian University, said he thought the measure could pass, since no one systematically campaigned against it — but people might also be wary of deregulating too many drugs at the same time.

He noted that decriminalization was the first step toward legalizing marijuana and said that proponents of the psilocybin measure, which he opposes, might be trying to travel the same road.

“What we’re seeing is a kind of social libertarianism that is reacting against the war on drugs, and that’s led us to a position where people feel like drugs like marijuana and even psilocybin could be harmless,” Hunt said. “And that’s deeply harmful.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/denver-mushroom-psilocybin-vote.html" id="f02132eb-c3e6-308c-addf-9a3a9cefbf1b">The New York Times</a>.

Voters in Denver, a city at the forefront of the widening national debate over legalizing marijuana, will decide Tuesday whether to be the first in the nation to effectively decriminalize another recreational drug: hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Denver Votes on Whether to Decriminalize 'Magic Mushrooms'

Lights zoomed by the window. Then came the jolt.

“It was just the biggest impact I’ve ever felt in my life,” Silva said Saturday. “Like an explosion, almost.”

Seconds later, Silva felt water. “Up to my ankles,” he said. “And there was water coming in from above the roof of the plane.”

The Boeing 737 had slid off the runway of the naval air station in Jacksonville and into the shallow waters of the St. Johns River. All 136 passengers and seven crew members would be rescued, 21 of them with non-life-threatening injuries. But all Silva knew at the time was that the flight, which had taken off from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had landed in water — and that someone was yelling something about smelling jet fuel.

Silva, 35, a civilian safety manager for a roofing company, grabbed his backpack, which was hanging from an overhead bin that had popped open. He opened the exit door and found himself on a wing of the plane.

Others began filing onto the wing, amid the darkness, rain and lightning. Eventually, the passengers made it onto an evacuation raft, children and women first, and emergency workers used a cable to guide them ashore.

MIAMI — For Darwing Silva, the first sign that something was amiss when his flight landed in Jacksonville, Florida, during a thunderstorm late Friday was that it seemed the jet did not brake after hitting the runway.

Patricia Mazzei

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