IT WAS A cold, breezy morning in April 2019 when the club gathered for the first time. None of those present had asked to be part of this club, but they were the ones who answered its call, 12 men and five women, mostly strangers then.
They collected their coffees, took seats around the table in the conference room in Reston, Virginia, and looked at one another under the fluorescent lights.
Greg Johnson, the principal of a small Ohio high school called West Liberty-Salem, felt awkward. They all knew what they had in common. But do you ask about the awful thing right away, or wait?
Frank DeAngelis felt moved. Over the years, and with dread, the former principal of Columbine High School in Colorado had watched the ranks of his fellowship grow, had in fact called new members to tell them they’d joined what he dubbed the club where no one wants to join. Now here they were, so many in one room.
Ty Thompson felt guarded. A year after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, lawsuits and investigations loomed. He wasn’t sure what he could and couldn’t say.
One by one, the principals shared. When Johnson confessed that more than two years after the shooting at West Liberty-Salem he still wrestled with doubts about his ability to support his students and staff, he was relieved to see heads nodding. Thompson was struck by how immediately these strangers felt safe with one another, how some group members unloaded like it was therapy. They talked about the loss of young lives that haunted them, the guilt they felt as survivors, and how they questioned what they could have done differently. Someone asked: What are you doing for self-care? Silence. Then Johnson spoke up: “Who has time for self-care?” More heads nodded.
Andy McGill, Johnson’s assistant principal at West Liberty-Salem, remained quiet. As he listened to DeAngelis talk about Columbine and Thompson talk about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, what happened at his school began to seem trivial. No one had died during their shooting, thankfully. What was he doing in this room?
That night, McGill went to the hotel bar with a group that included DeAngelis. There, a former assistant principal from New York named Michael Bennett, who was shot confronting a gunman in 2004, began to express what McGill had been feeling—that there had been no fatalities at his school’s shooting and his presence here was a mistake. But DeAngelis cut him off with what would become one of the club’s party lines: You don’t compare tragedies. Trauma is trauma. At the next day’s meeting, McGill felt better. DeAngelis was right. The most important thing they could do was help others.
The club emerged from that 2019 meeting as the Principal Recovery Network (PRN), a support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence. Grimly, since the PRN was founded, both its workload and membership have grown—46 shootings occurred at K–12 schools in 2022, more than in any year since Columbine, according to Washington Post data. The PRN today is composed of 21 current and former leaders from schools including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; Marjory Stoneman Douglas; and Columbine. When gun violence strikes, the PRN reaches out to the principal, offering emotional support and advice on everything from how to reopen a school to how to commemorate the one-year mark. In 2022, the group released a handbook of its best practices: The NASSP Principal Recovery Network Guide to Recovery. But the most valuable resource the PRN offers may be its simplest: the opportunity to connect with others who have been through the same thing.
The principals realized at that first meeting in 2019 that while their shootings were different, many of their experiences were similar. As they led their communities forward, they faced common challenges, which unfolded in a similar sequence. Today, as the PRN, they offer their experiences as a guide, in hopes they might help others find smoother passage through. On the other side of the hardship, the principals promise, there can be healing.
But the story must begin with the horror. Because the horror, unfortunately, is how you join the club.
I CAN'T BELIEVE this is happening here, Greg Johnson thought as he walked into the boys’ bathroom at West Liberty-Salem on January 20, 2017, with his hands over his head. By his side was Andy McGill, whose hands were also in the air, and who did not feel afraid, though later he would realize he should have.
They had worked together for years—Johnson the tall, trim, and serious principal; McGill the witty assistant principal built like a brick wall—and as school administrators, this is what they did. Go places and fix problems. Still, Johnson felt an undercurrent to his disbelief: fear.
Three minutes earlier on that Friday morning, the two men had run from separate positions of the K–12 school toward the high school wing, where an active shooter was reported. The smell of gun smoke hung in the air. Voices floated out of the boys’ bathroom. As the men approached, the voices became clear. You don’t have to do this, someone said. You haven’t killed anyone yet.
Johnson and McGill exchanged no words. On instinct, both men raised their hands. Guys, Johnson said as they walked in, we’re just going to talk.
McGill processed the scene in two stages. A skinny, curly-haired junior named Logan Cole lay slumped on the floor. Someone stood hidden in one of the gray bathroom stalls. Then Cole said, “He shot me,” and suddenly McGill could see the blood, the pieces of fabric and flesh flecking the eggshell-colored walls, the barrel of the shotgun peeking from behind the stall door. The person inside spoke, and McGill recognized the voice: a senior named Ely Serna, whom he’d coached on the football and wrestling teams.
“Serna,” McGill recalls saying, shocked.
“I’m sorry, Coach,” said the shooter. He put the gun down.
Slide the gun toward me, McGill said, and the boy did.
POLICE AND SWAT teams had swarmed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by the time Ty Thompson arrived in the late afternoon of February 14, 2018. He had been sitting on a plane on a runway, bound for a Valentine’s Day vacation with his girlfriend, when he got the text: You’re going to need to come back. While waiting for his bags in the airport, he saw the news on CNN.
Outside the building where the world would learn a shooter had slaughtered 17 people and wounded 17 others with an AR-15-style rifle, he saw two bodies on the ground. Both were covered, but one was unmistakably big and tall. He recognized it immediately: his friend, assistant football coach Aaron Feis.
There was no time to break down. Thompson switched off his emotions and went into task mode like a train conductor. What did he need to do next? He provided yearbooks to help reunite parents and kids. Had staff lock down the building. Had facilities turn on air-conditioning, per police instructions—to preserve evidence.
AFTER HE LEFT Columbine High School the night of April 20, 1999, Frank DeAngelis questioned his faith. That morning, he had hurried toward the sound of gunfire, wondering how it would feel when a bullet pierced his body. The principal known for saying, “I love you” to his students had come face-to-face with one of those students, who was wearing a white T-shirt and heavy boots and firing a gun. DeAngelis had rushed a group of girls away from the shooters and toward the gym, which was locked. Somehow, the first key in the jumble of keys worked. Somehow, the gunmen did not fire again. Later, DeAngelis would learn that his friend, teacher Dave Sanders, had also encountered the two killers in the hallway, and one had blasted him fatally with a shotgun.
When he was sure it was safe for the girls to exit the building, DeAngelis escorted them outside, then tried to go back into the building. He was stopped by police. No one was going back in. He waited outside in agony. His kids, whom he was supposed to protect, were crying. His kids, whom he was supposed to protect, were dying. Thirteen would be killed in the 46-minute rampage. That night, he lay awake. How could God have let this happen?
The following evening, at a vigil, a priest called DeAngelis to the altar. He whispered in his ear that he was spared for a reason—to rebuild his own community. And, as DeAngelis now recalls, to help others when tragedy struck again.
ON THE 16TH of February, 2018, two days after Thompson was pulled off a plane into a nightmare, the community of Parkland began to bury its children. Thompson attended two funerals that day, one the next, three the following, and so on. School would not resume, he decided, until all the services were held, and he went to a viewing or funeral for every victim except one, because there were two services at the same time.
It was an immense amount of grief to witness. Thompson and his girlfriend had children around the same age. What did you say to these parents? Somehow, each time he found the words. Or the six-foot-one principal just wrapped his arms around the parents and hugged them.
A day or two after the tragedy, Thompson got a call from DeAngelis, the former principal of Columbine. DeAngelis asked him, “What are you doing to take care of yourself? Your family?” Thompson doesn’t remember much of that first conversation. His head was spinning. But DeAngelis would check in on him again and again.
Another call came from Kathy Gombos, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were slain in 2012. Gombos warned Thompson to get ahead of the mail; Sandy Hook had reportedly received 65,000 teddy bears. In Parkland, several carts arrived daily bearing letters, banners, and donations. Thompson organized teams to sort through the deluge. But some donations he dealt with personally, like the 30,000 cupcakes sent by a bakery.
The principals are grateful for the swell of support after a shooting, but its volume can be dizzying, its energy sometimes misdirected. After a shooter killed two teens at Aztec High School in New Mexico in 2017, a parent stood guard in front of the school, unnerving other parents, until principal Warman Hall finally asked him to stop. I know you think this is helping, Hall told the man, but it’s not. Much of a principal’s time in the wake of a shooting can be spent like this—absorbing, deflecting, or directing our collective reaction to it.
Between funerals, Thompson soothed worried parents, thanked strangers for their prayers, deleted emails from the occasional wacko calling it a hoax, all while making decisions related to reopening the school. When he reaches out to new principals today, he tells them he knows how they feel: overwhelmed.
There isn’t much time for principals to process their own emotions. “They’re almost forced into adopting a first-responder mentality,” Jaclyn Schildkraut, Ph.D., the executive director of the regional gun-violence research consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, tells me. “Only after everyone else is okay can you deal with your own stuff.” As the leader of the school community, Thompson felt it was his responsibility to be strong. During funerals, he counted ceiling tiles to keep from breaking down.
Sometimes he wondered what he could have done if he had been on campus that day. Could he have tackled the shooter? Called the code red faster? But more often he thought about what he could do now for the students and the staff. What would be best for the kids? In those whirling early days, leading through still felt very much possible.
AT FIRST IT seemed as if West Liberty-Salem High School might rally back quickly. The student who had been shot in the bathroom survived. McGill, the assistant principal, had persuaded the shooter to lie on his stomach, then used his heft to restrain him until police arrived. This happened on a Friday; students returned to class on Tuesday.
Later, principal Johnson wondered if they had been brought back too soon. After the initial outpouring of love and support—the cookies, the banners, the rival high schools wearing their colors and tweeting #TigerStrong—Johnson began to realize the full impact of the incident. While he and McGill had been running toward the bathroom, students had been forcing open windows and fleeing across muddy cornfields. School counselors were inundated by kids who feared they’d never be safe again. Teachers felt paranoid; one told Johnson that any student could be a shooter to her now.
Immediately after a shooting, the principals tell me, a school community tends to band together, bolstered by outside support—one PRN member compares it to the rush of patriotism after 9/11. But once the initial reaction wears off, the harder part begins. Johnson was a worrier by nature, and now he worried constantly. When a student got suicidal, he wondered what they could have done to help more. When a teacher told him a colleague was struggling, he wondered if he was supporting the staff enough. Some staff wanted to talk; others just wanted to move on. It was hard to know what approach was right for each person.
It felt like everyone needed him. Teachers would say, Can you check in on this person? and of course he would say yes. But he wasn’t a trained counselor. He was a high school principal. Sometimes he felt powerless and inadequate. People told him he looked exhausted, and he thought, I am exhausted. He spent more and more time in his office with the door closed.
One of the many regrets Johnson has is leaving McGill in the bathroom that morning, even though McGill told him to get help. McGill waited alone with the victim and the shooter. He had pressed a wad of paper towels into the chest of the wounded student, who he thought was going to die.
It took a toll. McGill is an affable teddy bear of a man who jokes constantly. But during our Zoom interview, he cries several times, hardest when he tells me about the moment he saw one of his own daughters the day of the shooting. (All of his children and Johnson’s attended the K–12 school.) When she ran to him crying, he told her everything would be okay, just keep being strong. Much later, he’d learn she heard she had to be strong. “You talk about guilt,” he says, shoulders shaking. “That was guilt.” Just recounting details of the incident can evoke intense emotion, too—weeks after our interview, I watch him cry again while he presents at a school-safety conference in California.
Many of the lessons in the PRN handbook are drawn from things the principals wish they’d done differently. “While it is great to praise students for being strong and resilient,” page 10 reads, for example, “care must be taken to not accidentally communicate that any student who is struggling is ‘weak.’ ” But even PRN members who seem to have done everything right feel guilt or regret.
A former Baltimore County principal named George Roberts told me that in 2012, as he entered the cafeteria of Perry Hall High School, where a student had wounded another with a shotgun, he thought of his family: I’m about to widow my wife and leave my three daughters. Roberts was on the scene 29 seconds after shots rang out. He helped teachers subdue the shooter. But he still feels guilty about the fleeting moment when he thought about himself.
YEARS BEFORE THE PRN officially formed, the first phone rang. It was April 1999, days after Columbine, and DeAngelis got a call from a man named Bill Bond, who was the principal at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, where a shooter killed three girls in 1997. He told DeAngelis, You don’t even know what you need right now, but here’s my number—call anytime.
In the following months, DeAngelis would dial that number to ask questions no one else could answer. What did Bond do at the first graduation, for example—did he memorialize the dead? Did it retraumatize the living? But Bond was more than just a Phone-a-Friend. He was proof DeAngelis wasn’t alone.
Among the more upsetting things people sometimes said to DeAngelis after the tragedy were the words I know what you’re going through. He knew people meant well. But they hadn’t walked through a school building after a massacre and seen their friend’s bloody knuckle prints on the ground. They hadn’t buried 13 students and staff, then read articles holding them responsible for their deaths. When Bond said, I know what you’re going through, DeAngelis thought, You do.
He hoped he would never have to initiate that same phone call. But in March 2001, a 15-year-old killed two people and wounded 13 at a high school in Santee, California, and DeAngelis made his first call. He’s been making calls since, each time saying the words Bond said to him—You don’t even know what you need right now, but here’s my number—and hoping to cast the lifeline Bond threw to him. Sometimes he visited in person, as he did at Sandy Hook after 2012. Some of the principals he called began making phone calls themselves.
After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 2018, a man named Greg Waples, who worked for the National Association for Secondary School Principals (NASSP), contacted DeAngelis. Waples wanted to convene a group of principals who had navigated the aftermath of a school shooting. Could he put out a bat signal in Frank’s name? An email eventually went out to more than 100 principals: “Like you,” it began, “I wished the shooting at my school would be the last to ever happen. . . .” That was the genesis of the PRN.
In April 2019, in Reston, Virginia, the club met in person for the first time. By then, DeAngelis had been talking to Thompson for more than a year. Stoneman Douglas reminded DeAngelis of Columbine, not just in the fatalities but in the 24/7 media coverage. DeAngelis told the younger principal about the morning he walked out onto his driveway and saw the headline of the paper, COLUMBINE PRINCIPAL SUED. Hard times, he warned Thompson, were coming.
IN THE EARLY days after the tragedy, strangers picked up Thompson’s tab at restaurants and praised his leadership on Twitter, reminding him of the good in the world. But by spring, criticism of the district was rolling in; in July, when Thompson tweeted photos of a new school gym, someone snarled, “I see you’re spending money on useless shit instead of on securing your school.” In January 2019, the initial report by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas public-safety commission alleged that Thompson had been disengaged from the school’s threat-assessment process for identifying potentially violent students. While most anger was reserved for the district—critics claimed that a culture of disciplinary leniency enabled the shooter—and the school’s armed resource officer, who stood outside during the rampage, some parents targeted Thompson personally.
Thompson is diplomatic when he discusses the criticisms. He maintains that he followed district policies at the time, which have now been updated, and that both the district and the Florida Department of Education declined to pursue any further disciplinary action after an independent investigation. Scrutiny of the administration is typical after school shootings, he points out. “I knew they’d be coming after us,” he says. “It still hurts, you know?” Thompson, who in 2017 had been a finalist for the district’s Principal of the Year award, tells me repeatedly that he is a positive person, and that what enabled him to cope was his ability to compartmentalize. Even before the tragedy, when angry parents yelled in his office, he told himself they weren’t yelling at Ty Thompson; they were yelling at the principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
DeAngelis had prepared him, too. The now lionized principal of Columbine was once accused of fostering a school culture that encouraged bullying and motivated the killers to revenge. (School-shooting experts have disputed this theory.) Like Thompson, DeAngelis had told himself, They’re coming after the position, not the person. DeAngelis famously vowed to stay until every child affected by the shooting graduated, and led for 15 more years. But between the politicization of school shootings around gun rights, the amplifying effects of social media, and what he says is increased pressure on districts to replace principals after shootings, he’s not sure he could do that today. This is why the PRN does not take a stance on gun control, so as to avoid alienating any school communities. Instead, it advocates for measures like school mental-health services and trauma-recovery training.
Removing trusted leaders after a shooting doesn’t often help a school’s healing, David Schonfeld, M.D., the director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, tells me. But blame is still a common reaction, he says, because it’s a way of assuming control: “Someone had to be at fault, and that person has to be changed or it’s not safe for my kid to go to school.”
Whether a principal is supported or criticized, the pressures placed on them after a shooting can feel untenable. Most of the principals I spoke to eventually left their posts, including George Roberts, the Baltimore County principal who felt guilty for thinking of his family. “Those years as a principal were really my best years,” he still says. “I know it’ll be the best job I ever have.”
In May 2019, Thompson announced that he was stepping down as principal, broadly citing health reasons. Every decision from how to run a fire drill to how to resolve a fistfight was now belabored. The daily stress became overwhelming. Thompson’s mind raced constantly. Sleep eluded him. He wanted to stay and be there for everyone. But he didn’t know if he could keep up the pace.
Thompson prepared a farewell speech for his final staff meeting. He attempted to close with the Stoneman Douglas school motto. “Be positive,” he began before he broke down. His mouth kept moving, but no words came out. Seeing him struggle, his staff helped him finish. “Be positive,” they repeated in unison. “Be passionate. Be proud to be an Eagle.”
IN FEBRUARY, I meet Thompson, DeAngelis, and Warman Hall, the former principal from Aztec, New Mexico, at an education conference in Colorado, where the three are presenting about the PRN.
Since that first 2019 meeting, when the principals shared cautiously and then cathartically, the group has dialed in a reaction protocol. When the NASSP members get news alerts of a school shooting, they tap the group’s co-facilitators, who delegate someone in the PRN to reach out. Many initial calls still come from DeAngelis, due to the lasting power of the Columbine name.
The meetings, which take place virtually once a quarter and in person once a year, are no longer the emotional sessions of yore. Now the principals talk less about their shootings and more about the various schools they’re helping. They visit Capitol Hill annually to advocate for school-safety measures like the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Act, which would allocate federal funds to staff school mental-health-care providers. They’ve become close friends—checking in on one another and sending messages on one another’s shooting dates.
DeAngelis, they all agree, is their “godfather,” and it’s easy to see why he’s beloved. Wearing a sharp suit and a stylish pink tie, he cracks jokes, claiming he’s the short, old one of the trio. When I say I’m here to observe their dynamic, he quips, “You need to get a life, lady.” As we settle in over breakfast at the hotel, the guys segue into their experiences, sometimes finishing one another’s sentences.
The group has been instrumental in helping members heal, though the principals say that the concept of healing is complicated. There is no erasure of the shooting or its impact. “February 14 will have a different meaning for the rest of my life,” says Thompson, “and all those families’ lives.” Nonetheless, many PRN members agree, healing is possible.
“I’d say where I am now, I have healed,” Andy McGill tells me this past summer. “Does that mean that I don’t still think about it and there are things that upset me? No.” Like a wildfire in a forest, he says, “it’ll destroy some things. And it’ll certainly leave scars. But eventually healthy, strong plants and trees grow back.”
The specifics of each incident impact the timeline of healing. Both McGill and Johnson generally see the outcome of West Liberty-Salem’s incident as positive. The victim survived—and he’s now Johnson’s son-in-law. In 2022, the boy in the bathroom with the curly hair married Johnson’s daughter. Johnson has also been to counseling, and as part of a doctorate program, he’s studied post-traumatic growth, the idea that people who endure psychological hardship can experience positive transformation. Now he tells people that admitting you need help doesn’t mean you’re weak—it’s a sign of strength and resilience.
In Parkland, meanwhile, legal procedures drag on. Only in the past year did criminal trials for the killer and the school resource officer, Scot Peterson, conclude; this summer, a civil trial against Peterson resulted in a live reenactment of the shooting. “It just continues to open up the wound for not only the families but everyone involved,” Thompson says. “We’re never going to forget the victims. It’s not about that. But it’s like, when can we move forward with the healing piece?”
Helping other principals through the PRN continues to give Thompson a sense of purpose, as it does the other members. For survivors of trauma, Dr. Schonfeld says, serving others can make an experience feel more meaningful. Connecting with people who have been through similar traumas can be one of the most powerful forms of support, says Schildkraut, as survivors validate one another’s feelings and “role-model potential paths forward” for one another.
McGill told me about rewarding milestones, like watching their victim’s class graduate. Do those moments remind him that life goes on? He thinks. “It’s not just that it does go on,” he corrects me, “it’s that it needs to.” You can’t sit around waiting to feel better, which he admits he did at first. You have to actively pursue healing. For McGill that’s meant, through the PRN, engaging with other principals. “That is being an active participant in my own healing,” he says. “The group has allowed a lot of opportunities to do that.”
In Colorado, the PRN members present to a conference room filled with school leaders. At the end, Thompson addresses the audience. This is not a fraternity you want to be a part of, he acknowledges. But he wants them to know the support is there. “If, God forbid, something were to happen on your campus,” he says, “we will reach out.”
ON THE MORNING of March 27, 2023, a 28-year-old wielding three guns, two of which were assault-style weapons, shot through a set of locked doors at a private Christian school in Nashville, then murdered three children and three adults. By early afternoon, the PRN had activated. Johnson emailed the head of the school, Katherine Koonce, writing, “I know your world is completely spinning right now. . . .”
Later that evening, he saw the news: Koonce was one of the three adults killed. This rattled him. He had looked at her photo on the website, had left her a voice mail. Reports suggested that she may have confronted the shooter, as he himself had done years ago in that bathroom. “I do sometimes think about what if my shooting had turned out differently,” he says when I call two days later. He’s contemplated how his family’s lives would be without their husband and father. He feels a deep empathy now for a family who lost their wife and mother. But, he adds, he also feels a deep respect—for a principal who put the lives of her students ahead of her own. He’s proud of his profession, he tells me. He’s proud of the people in it.
A WEEK LATER, I visit DeAngelis at his home outside Denver. Gone is the jokey energy that brimmed when we last met. The godfather is tired. Last week, after Nashville, he was inundated by texts and calls. He was already busy with a family emergency and a local school shooting, and felt overwhelmed.
When the phone keeps buzzing, when the past and present are reverberating, DeAngelis reaches for his touchstones, a trio of silver pendants he wears around his neck; or a pair of medallions he keeps in his pocket, worn smooth through the years. He clasps them and reminds himself, This is not April 20, 1999. This is March 27, 2023. Doing this work keeps the trauma always close, circling back again and again.
But the hardest part of the cycle is not the déjà vu. It’s the threat of despair. “You see all the things that always happen after these events,” Roberts, from Baltimore County, tells me when I call the day after Nashville. “You see the same mouthpieces saying the same things.” The same failure to achieve change. For the principals fighting this fight, he says, “it’s like screaming in a soundproof room.”
In DeAngelis’s office, I ask: Do you still believe there’s hope?
“Yeah,” he says immediately, nodding. We don’t know how many shootings have been prevented, he points out, because of corrections we’ve made. He tells me his motto: “I refuse to be helpless, I refuse to be hopeless, and I refuse to give in.”
These are resolute words, but the man saying them will be 70 in a few years. While he tells everyone they need to take care of themselves in order to take care of others, he admits he’s still trying to figure it out himself. How to rest when our kids are still dying. “Right now,” he says, shaking his head, “my mind is just frazzled.”
The PRN members sense DeAngelis needs their support. They’ve been checking in on him, as he once did for them. Thompson called the other day. So did Johnson, who, ever the worrier, tells me he’s worried about Frank: “In the last six years, seeing shootings happen over and over, it weighs on me,” he says. “I can’t imagine living in Frank’s world.” Even interviewing DeAngelis evokes a sense of déjà vu—he’s talked to so many reporters, he often repeats the same stories. Then again, 24 years later, we’re still asking Frank DeAngelis the same questions.
This is not April 20, 1999. This is March 27, 2023.
Now, in his office, he’s telling me one of those stories again, about the night the priest told him God spared him so that he could lead his community and help others when tragedy struck again. This, DeAngelis tells me, is why he continues to do the work he does. And indeed, the next day he visits a Denver high school in the aftermath of another shooting.
When he wakes up the following morning, however, he has a hard time breathing. He lands in the hospital for three days. It’s time for DeAngelis to do what he’s always told everyone else to do—take care of himself. Since then, he’s taken a step back from the PRN. He’ll return, he assures me, once he’s rested. For now, the other principals make the phone calls. They introduce new members to the club.
One day, in preparation for writing this story, I review DeAngelis’s memoir, They Call Me Mr. De, once more. This time, I notice a new detail about the message from the priest, which DeAngelis had never mentioned in his multiple tellings of the story to me.
As the book recounts, the priest told DeAngelis that he had been spared for a reason, that God had a plan for him, a calling. But then he could see that this message burdened the principal. So he told him one more thing, or perhaps he promised it: You’re not going to have to walk this journey alone.
This story originally appears in the October/November 2023 issue of Men's Health.
