As victims lay dead, Parkland families were left in the dark. It felt like ‘torture.’

As Debbie Hixon sat isolated in a holding area for hours, still not officially notified that her husband had been shot to death at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, her phone dinged with condolences about MSD Athletic Director Chris Hixon’s death.

“I literally threw my phone across the room,” she told the state commission investigating the February 2018 school shooting that killed 17 students and employees. “It was not how I should have found out.”

Upon arriving at the reunification site, families were guided from a large ballroom to smaller and smaller rooms as Broward Sheriff’s Office staff repeatedly asked them to provide dates of births and photographs of their missing children and loved ones. Others tried visiting hospitals to check if their family members were there, but hospital staff either corralled them into holding rooms or directed them to the Marriott hotel where other families had been told to wait

The slow trickle of little to no information reaching affected families at an impromptu reunification center set up at a Marriott on the day of the shooting, coupled with the screams of families in separate rooms and a refusal to release critical information about the status of their children and loved ones, felt like torture to some of the families involved.

The parents and loved ones of four Parkland victims shared their experiences with the commission on Wednesday and urged its members to recommend changes to police and hospital protocol in order to create a more smooth process during the next shooting.

“It was like waiting to be slaughtered,” one family member said. Another called it a “seven-hour vacuum.” Another said it was an “emotional endurance test for hell.”

After a painstaking investigation at the shooting site itself and the Broward Sheriff’s Office response, committee chairman and Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said that a lack of adequate command structure appeared to be the common theme linking all aspects of the Parkland shooting.

“Nobody was in charge,” Gualtieri said. “It doesn’t seem like there was framework.”

The families said they would have preferred to receive even minimal information from police than to be left in virtual silence. But that appears to conflict with policing protocols about giving out information only when it is confirmed and ready for release.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, a member of the investigative commission, said he would be open to altering his department’s protocols about next-of-kin notification if the Parkland families understood that mistakes could be made if police erred on the side of transparency.

“I would much rather give you bad news and get you real angry [if the information turns out to be untrue],” he said. “I can reinforce that with my agency. I am willing as an agency head to say I’d rather err on [that] side.”

Gualtieri added: “It is so counter to all existing thought processes and protocols. The experts, whoever they are, have always told us the opposite. It is extremely important that we get it right. Frankly it seemed like torment. Because you’re hanging on to hope.”

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in the shooting, found out about his child’s condition from a detective friend. After arriving at the reunification site about 9:30 p.m., Guttenberg and his wife Jennifer did not receive official confirmation from BSO until about 1:30 a.m., he said.

He described one of the parents as having a “meltdown” due to a lack of information, and he said he was not approached by any victim advocates. BSO staff at the reunification center were overheard discussing the criminal investigation while huddled in hallways, as families pleaded for information from others.

“To me that is the ultimate disconnect and torture that was taking place,” Guttenberg said. “I think the lesson there is these tragedies are happening, and maybe what can come out of this commission is a template, a best practices, a what-to-do [guide]. And number one on that list needs to be the families and it needs to be a process where all the investigators continue doing all they need to do, but there’s also that team that’s focused on the families.”

Guttenberg and the other family members said they didn’t blame the rank-and-file employees on the ground during the reunification process, but their now-suspended leader, Sheriff Scott Israel. While the commission investigates the shooting, Israel is preparing a legal challenge before the Florida Supreme Court to get his job back after a lower court ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis was legally justified in suspending him earlier this year.

“Everything that could have gone wrong before, during and after did,” Guttenberg said. “At our most immediate time of need there were a lot of good people who were also struggling with what happened, and they had no bad intention. But there wasn’t command control.”

Tom Hoyer, whose 15-year-old son Luke died in the shooting, lied in order to make his way into Broward Hospital’s emergency room on the day of the shooting while his wife Gena tried at another hospital. They were told to go to the child reunification center, and waited for hours until hearing word about Luke. And once they did, a BSO deputy told them Luke had died alone on the third floor of the school’s 1200 building. They later learned he was with two other classmates on the first floor.

Waiting for information was like preparing for hell, Tom Hoyer said.

“Gena and I will always remember that as an emotional endurance test for hell,” he said. “I would have preferred that we had been told something earlier. Being told that your son or daughter might be dead [and] finding out later they’re not... I think it would have been better that way.”

Following the parents’ testimony, the commission heard from Jason Cook, a supervisor with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who handled the victim identification and reunification process after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

Even with 49 homicide victims, virtually every next-of-kin was notified within 24 hours, Cook told the commission. Hospital administrators provided the public with a list of injured victims, and victim advocates were assigned to specific families.

Max Schachter, a member of the commission whose 14-year-old son Alex died in the Parkland shooting, said he went to multiple hospitals trying to find his son. “If they had a list,” he said, the process would have been easier to manage.

He also noted that after Pulse, victim advocates notified families of their loved ones’ deaths in real time, as opposed to waiting for a wholesale notification.

“It was so upsetting that [the hospital] couldn’t give us information,” Schachter said. “It was just very, very upsetting.”

Tony Montalto lost his daughter Gina, 14, in Parkland.

He said providing families with written instructions about who to call and where to go would have given him more peace of mind after learning of his daughter’s death. He also urged an immediate deployment of victim advocates and counselors to act as liasons to the affected families.

He said simple empathy would have instructed BSO leadership to plan ahead and act with more professionalism.

“There’s a reason that [Israel] is now a suspended sheriff,” he said. “Times like this you may not know what to say but empathy goes a long way to making the victims feel better.”

This story was originally published April 10, 2019 at 2:32 PM.