UNCC shooting survivor posts account of deadly day to leave people ‘feelings of hope’
Drew Pescaro, one of the survivors of last year’s deadly mass shooting at UNC Charlotte, posted a first-hand account Wednesday of the “horrors” he witnessed in the classroom that late afternoon.
Pescaro posted the account on the Medium.com blog about the events of April 30, 2019. He hopes his story of ongoing recovery will provide people “with some feelings of hope,” he told The Charlotte Observer.
“I am going to continue writing about the different experiences that I went through and all of the things that followed, both good and bad,” the 21-year-old Pescaro said in a text to the Observer.
Students Reed Parlier, 19, of Midland, and Riley Howell, 21, of Waynesville, were killed by a gunman who barged into the room and began firing. Pescaro and three classmates were seriously hurt.
Police credited Howell with possibly preventing even more deaths by charging the shooter and knocking him down.
The gunman, former student Trystan Andrew Terrell, 24, pleaded guilty to murder and other crimes last September. His plea deal with prosecutors will keep him behind bars without the possibility of parole for life, but he won’t face the death penalty.
Pesacro, who is from Apex, called his lengthy account on Medium.com “Through My Eyes: Surviving a School Shooting.”
On Medium.com, Pescaro recounted how his ears “began ringing, the flashes from the shots were bright in the dark classroom and all of a sudden it was like being in a war zone. They tell you to run, hide, or fight in these situations but what they forget to mention is that sometimes the body takes over and you freeze in place.”
Pescaro lay in pain so debilitating that he couldn’t get up to flee with his classmates, who tried urging him on, he wrote, and when the shooting suddenly stopped, Pescaro realized he and the shooter were the only two alive in the Kennedy Building room.
“We all die eventually,” Pescaro recalled the shooter whispering to him at one point. “I didn’t respond to him — this was by far the most horrifying experience of my life.”
‘My reality’
Pescaro told the Observer he wrote the account on the one-year anniversary of the shooting and posted it on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram..
Pescaro is a communications major who intends to graduate in the spring. He also is a student assistant for recruitment for the UNCC football team and host of the Coaching from the Couch podcast.
It took him just an hour to write, he said. “Once I got started, I couldn’t stop,” he said.
“It was very cathartic,” Pescaro said. “It was something my therapist had suggested doing, and I was skeptical as to how it could help.”
He soon realized “this truly was my reality. And that it was something I overcame and am still dealing with to this day.”
This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 9:55 AM.