I love you.

They become the last words a mother hears as she sends her child to school on a random Tuesday. She preps his breakfast and reminds him of the schoolwork he has left on top of the couch.

She watches as he pulls out of the driveway and disappears down the street. She continues as if this is any normal day and begins to get ready for work, and heads out while dressed in a business pant-suit with her glasses resting above her forehead. She takes off in her Mercedes and arrives at the brick office building where she spends her 9-to-5 work day, every day.

As she takes her mug from under the workroom coffee machine, her phone vibrates once, but she does not feel it, as the low rumble of the coffee machine masks the vitality screaming at her from her device. As she blows the steam rising from the coffee, her phone vibrates seven more times, each a text from her son, the one she just sent off for school. She opens the notifications, reminding herself of his forgetfulness, thinking he is just asking her to drop off his lunch like last week’s ordeal.

This time, however, is different.

Her heart begins pounding as the mug escapes her hand and shatters on impact with the carpeted floor below. She studies each text message as if she is preparing for a last-minute pop quiz.

Her lips mutely read the words “Mom we’re in lockdown… I’m scared… I hear shots… I love you.”

She rushes down the staircase, running to the ground three floors below where she once stood motionless, passing the elevators and clomping in heels. She rushes out the door and back into her Mercedes, the one she began her 9-to-5 in on this once-mundane day. She speeds past every stop sign and red light and notices that every car on the highway has pulled to the side, as if they understand the feelings of a mother who received the most chilling texts of her life.

But this is not the case.

The Mercedes was only 30 feet ahead of a line of ambulances rushing as fast as they could with their sirens wailing and their lights strobing. As a flock of geese follows their leader, the Mercedes led the trucks down the road to the intersection where police had blocked the entire road.

It is sheer chaos.

After realizing that her Mercedes was not of the same importance as the ambulances, she stopped her vehicle right where she was and sprinted as if her life depended on it, because to her it did.

As she jumps past the barricades, she is met with the chill of screaming children and relieved parents.

She waits anxiously as more students trickle out of the building until what seems like a decade of inactivity and dead silence, except the atmosphere is full of screams and sirens.

But her son never leaves the building.

The building has become a house of terror and a final resting place for countless students, including her son.

While hypothetical, this scenario is all too familiar to countless parents across the United States. The story of the families of 13 at Columbine High School, 32 at Virginia Tech University, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 10 at Santa Fe High School, the heartbreaking 21 at Robb Elementary School, and more recently, the 4 at Apalachee High School. These are only a few of the hundreds of students who have been murdered on a school campus since 1999.

The common denominator across many of these shootings is that the shooter is a younger individual who is labeled as shy, quiet, and overall an outcast.

What is even more shocking is the prior investigation and reported concerns of the individuals who are now school shooters.

The most recent at the time of writing being Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student who took the lives of two students and two faculty members at Apalachee High School in Georgia. It was revealed that he had been under prior investigation for threatening to commit a school shooting over a discord server, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have enough probable cause to continue with prosecution. What happened next, being the murder of four, shows the lack of policy our country has. How could threatening to murder students and teachers who are teaching and learning not be a probable cause?

The simple solution is to keep suspicious students under a closer radar. Had investigators been able to take more action when discovering Gray’s threats, four individuals could still be with us today. The world may never have had to endure seeing the heartbreaking images of young students praying in a circle after being in the center of a mass shooting.

We need change and we need it fast.