10 years after Marysville Pilchuck ‘heaviness in your heart’ remains

MARYSVILLE — Lakota Phillips remembered her niece Shaylee Chuckulnaskit on Thursday as “the perfect little girl.”

“She was so loving, she was so friendly, she was a forgiving person,” Phillips said.

Thursday marked the 10th anniversary of the shooting in the Marysville Pilchuck High School cafeteria that claimed the lives of Chuckulnaskit, 14, and three of her classmates — Andrew Fryberg, 15, Zoe Galasso, 14, and Gia Soriano, 14. The sole survivor, Nate Hatch, 14, was shot in the jaw. The shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, 15, killed himself after the attack.

Families carried photos of their loved ones and dozens of supporters held candles at the high school Thursday night. They walked the campus to remember the lives lost in the shooting on Oct. 24, 2014.

“No matter how much time goes by, that heaviness in your heart stays the same,” said Joby Williams, a member of the Tulalip Tribes.

Teresa Iyall-Williams, then a principal at Tulalip Elementary, remembered Andrew Fryberg as a young child. She recalled his pride in becoming a “self-manager” in her class. A member of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, she shared a song to honor the affected families.

Dave Carpentier, a teacher and coach at Marysville Pilchuck for more than three decades, said the shooting was “the toughest time” in the district’s history.

Austin Ha and Kona Farry were students at Marysville Getchell High School at the time. They remembered the chaos and uncertainty of that morning a decade ago.

That day, other students seeking information came to Farry, who was part of student leadership. He had a lunch tray in one hand and a phone in the other, he said, trying to find out what was going on at the high school just a few miles away. He remembered the week after, when new tokens of support kept being added to the fence along 108th Street NE, and when everyone at Getchell wore red for the week.

“It took everyone by surprise and shattered our concepts of what life was, what school was, what it meant to be safe somewhere,” Farry said. “It’s changed Marysville forever.”

After the shooting, the Marysville Tulalip United Recovery coalition provided grant-funded workshops for families and first responders on youth mental health and suicide prevention, Mayor Jon Nehring said. Link Northwest, which runs the Marysville Family Resource Center, also has mental health classes for children and teens.

School counselor Randy Vendiola felt the Marysville Pilchuck campus Thursday night was more like church.

“I know this is a football field,” he said. “But when we gather like this, us Native American people, it becomes sacred ground.”

Uniting Stories, a Marysville-Tulalip Community Coalition, put on the event Thursday.

Still, Andrew Fryberg’s mother, Lahneen Fasthorse, is devastated the school has no permanent memorial to honor her son and the other victims. She said she helped design several spaces on campus for Tulalip youth and other students to dance, pray and heal. But those plans have stalled, she said.

“Ten years later, this is the only school in the country where a shooting happened and they didn’t create a permanent memorial,” Fasthorse said. “These kids deserve to be remembered.”

The district declined to comment earlier this month on plans for a permanent memorial.

The city doesn’t want to take the lead, Nehring said in an interview earlier this month. Marysville would support a memorial, he said, but hadn’t heard about one yet.

“There’s a fine line between continually reminding students and people of a tragedy that happened that might cause them renewed trauma,” he said. “But by the same token, we don’t want our community to become so unaware that we lose our ability to remember what we learned through this.”

Herald writer Sydney Jackson contributed to this report.

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.