About 30 students who fled from the Colorado school during the armed attack ran to a nearby brewery where they were met by a bartender with ties to last year’s Parkland shooting in Florida.
Julie Finkelstein, who works at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, is a former teacher at the sister school of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and worked with many of the victims of that shooting, which claimed 17 lives.
She also had been through several lockdowns at the J.P. Taravella High School where she worked.
The Parkland shooting led her to quit her 12-year teaching career because she no longer felt safe in her job, according to the Denver Post.
“It’s happening again,” Finkelstein thought when her manager told the staff that a large group of students from the STEM School Highlands Ranch had just burst inside.
“It’s hard and it’s heartbreaking and it’s sad and it’s disturbing,” she told the Denver Post on Wednesday.
One of the students who sought refuge at the joint was Diego Palmer, 13, who said several fellow students warned him and others of the shooting and told them to get out of the school.
So they took off running until they reached Rock Bottom on Park Central Drive, less than a mile from the STEM School.
The former broadcast journalism teacher stepped outside briefly to take a deep breath as she felt a familiar sense of panic creeping in.
“Parkland was the final straw,” she said. “It’s hard to go back into a classroom.”
Finkelstein’s son, a high school senior, is finishing his studies online amid fears of setting foot inside a school.
“It was hard, hard, hard,” she said. “Even now, it’s still hard.”
During her first month in Colorado, Sol Pais, an 18-year-old woman from Florida who had made threats against schools in the Denver metro area, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Then the STEM School shooting happened.
“Is this happening again?” Finkelstein thought. “Is this following me?”
But she went into “teacher mode” on Tuesday, helping her general manager, Jimmy Gibson, and other workers organize the students and contact their parents.
The employees locked the doors, secured the building and provided food and drinks for the kids.
The manager also changed his big plans for the restaurant’s one-year anniversary celebration planned for later that day.
“To see those kids with the look of panic on their faces was tough,” said Gibson, who spoke to his own kids that night about school shootings and getting out of harm’s way.
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