NY street honors teacher killed in Florida school massacre
DIX HILLS, N.Y. (AP) — A street in New York's Long Island has been named for a teacher killed after helping shield students from the gunman in last winter's school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
The street where Scott Beigel grew up in Dix Hills, New York, was dedicated as "Scott J. Beigel Way" on Saturday. Its original name was Hart Place.
New York Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul says the new name speaks to "a powerful story to tell about a movement that started with his death" and those of 16 other people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14.
Beigel was a 35-year-old geography teacher and cross-country coach. He helped students enter a locked classroom to avoid the gunman.
Hochul, a Democrat, was among about 50 people who attended Saturday's ceremony, among them Beigel's relatives, friends and former students.
"Scott's memory lives in the fact that he was able to positively touch the lives of so many young people," Cameron Kasky, 17, a Parkland student and leader in the March for our Lives gun-control movement that formed in the attack's aftermath.
Kasky, who knew Beigel as his fifth-grade teacher and camp counselor before that, said students "were able to gather so many of our values and principles from the high standard that he set as a person."
Linda Beigel Shulman, the slain teacher's mother, was touched to see his name on the street where she still lives.
"He lived life and treated people the way he wanted to be treated, and that was really my son in a nutshell," she said.
Lawyers for the shooting suspect, expelled student Nikolas Cruz, have offered a guilty plea in return for a life sentence, but prosecutors are pursuing the death penalty.
