‘Not Afraid’: Five years later, survivor reflects on mass shooting at UNC Charlotte
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) – Some 60 months and more than 1,800 days have passed since gunfire rang out at UNC Charlotte.
Drew Pescaro frequently thinks back to those frightening minutes.
“When that happened, I was no longer the same person,” Pescaro said.
The former student was inside the Kennedy Building on April 30, 2019, when a shooter took the lives of two students and injured four, including him.
The benefit of time hasn’t made the mass shooting at UNC Charlotte any easier to grasp.
“Survivor’s guilt, it sucks,” he said.
Five years after he recalls briefly seeing a stranger in class right before the mayhem, Pescaro has a lot to reflect on.
“But I couldn’t process like, ‘Oh my God, that’s a guy with a gun.’ I looked when he came in, looked back to the way I was facing, and just froze,” he tells Queen City News.
The gunman killed students Ellis Parlier and Riley Howell. Many fondly remember Parlier for his kindness and compassion, while Howell’s heroic actions in tackling the gunman to protect others turned fatal. Pescaro, Sean DeHart, Rami Al-Ramadhan, and Emily Houpt were wounded.
On that dark day, Pescaro had a feeling.
“No one said it explicitly, but I could tell by the way they were tending to the other two, like, ‘I’m the only one coming alive out of this room,'” he remembers.
Sometimes, he wonders why it’s he who lives to tell about it.
“Just a lot of anger in the form of, ‘Why did this happen at all? Why did these two students pass away and I live?’ Like survivor’s guilt,” he explained.
Bullets hit Drew in the lower back, an inch from his spine. The bullet exited his lower abdomen.
“I’m thankful for still being alive,” he said. “But that doesn’t come with not realizing that that’s two people where five years of whatever their future had in store for them, it just disappeared like that.”
After less than two weeks in the hospital, he posted a video of his first steps on a walker in the hospital.
That was one of many steps showing his remarkable reserve of resolve.
“The ability to move on from something so tragic and completely out of my control,” Pescaro said.
Not long after the shooting, he got a tattoo that sums up his determination. With it, there have been struggles with struggles with PTSD and depression. It says “Not Afraid,” inspired by an Eminem song.
“Not afraid to get help, not afraid to talk about it, not afraid to speak up and own that this is a part of who I am,” he said.
“And being very vulnerable and open about all the different ways it’s affected me,” says Pescaro. “I’m never going to say, ‘I’ve moved past it, or ‘I’ve moved on from it’ but being able to live with it is the way to put it.”
Beyond trauma, he found triumph.
Pescaro graduated from UNC Charlotte two years later. He and his high school sweetheart got engaged and eventually married. He’s also a gaming content creator. Pescaro works with the Carolina Hurricanes in the front office and now lives in Raleigh.
“Every day, year, hour — however you want to put it — since [the shooting] happened was not guaranteed. Because it’s just as likely that I could have been the third student that was deceased on the scene,” Pescaro says.
He’s participated in the annual “Mighty Four Miler,” a race that benefits the Riley Howell Foundation Fund for victims of gun violence. This is part of a healing process that’s very much a work in progress.
“There was so much transformation that took place from a life perspective,” said Pescaro.
Every day, his mind goes back to UNC Charlotte.
UNC Charlotte students say they didn’t get an alert about two recent gun incidents on campus
“That’s a day and a moment in my life that I’m going to carry with me forever,” he said.
That 2019 experience left Drew scarred but not scared.
He’s “Not afraid” to look back as he pushes forward.
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