This news story spoke to me because I have children close in age to Nichole Cevario, the 18-year-old whose parents turned her in for planning a violent attack on her high school.
My first thought wasn’t about the young woman, but about her parents. Who has the guts to turn their child in to the police? Would I be able to do that?
One day their daughter was an honor student, living a quiet life. The next day she was pulled from a classroom and sent directly to a psychiatric facility, after which she’ll face trial and potentially 25 years in prison. She’s 18, after all. And they confiscated a pile of weapons from her room.
A single phone call turned their lives upside down. Forever. With no relief. There will always be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ for them.
Yet there’s no doubt they did the right thing. They clearly saved a number of lives. Their daughter was smart and focused and intent on doing a lot of damage before destroying herself died in a fiery inferno. On April 5th, a date she’d set long before, which was about ten days away at the time her parents read her diary.
It seemed an act of wild courage for her parents to pick up that phone. Dial that number. Say those words.
But then, discussing it with my husband, wondering if we’d be able to do what they did, we had a little more insight.
Perhaps it wasn’t so much courage. Or, rather, it was a blend of courage and something else: a parents’ intense need to save their child. In this case, from herself.
Clearly their child is suffering in a bubble of psychological pain, from which she needs help to extricate herself. If they’d done nothing—or just confronted her themselves—she’d almost certainly have carried out her plans. If not sooner than later. And chances were strong she’d have died herself, taking others with her.
So the choice they faced was this:
A) Upend our lives and put our family through a horrific court case, mostly likely losing our daughter to prison.
or B) Do nothing and live with who knows how many deaths—including our daughter’s—on our conscience.
They must have believed she’d do it. In fact, despite the quiet surface, they must have known something was wrong. Something made them read her diary in the first place. I feel certain these poor people have been living with this a lot longer than the time between reading the diary and making that phone call.
I can’t imagine anything much harder than the choice they were forced to make. I wouldn’t wish it on the most evil enemy I know. (Not mentioning any names.) But I do understand it better, when I realize that it was the choice between hope and no hope. If their daughter lived to grow up—even in prison—there was still hope for her to get help and eventually get another chance.
To Nichole Cevario’s parents I say, bless you for the choice you made. Which was the right choice not only for the other people you saved, but for your daughter as well.
Though you will almost certainly crawl through hell to get there, I greatly wish you a return to the light.
