Following the shooting at Santa Fe High School outside Houston, Texas, where 10 students and teachers were killed and 13 others were wounded, details are continuing to emerge about the victims who were tragically killed by their 17-year-old classmate Dimitrios Pagourtzis.
According to the mother of Shana Fisher, one student who lost her life on Friday, Fisher may have been targeted after she turned down Pagourtzis’s advances toward her over the last few months — something that is all too common and isn’t talked about enough.
In an account to the Los Angeles Times, Sadie Rodriguez, Fisher’s mother, said her daughter, “had 4 months of problems from this boy. He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.”
According to Rodriguez, this culminated in Fisher standing up to Pagourtzis in class the week prior to the shooting. While the Times is still waiting on corroboration for Rodriguez’s claims, so far, Fisher’s friends have been unable to offer a similar account.
Regardless, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen acts of mass violence targeted toward the perpetrator’s former significant other or love interest. In March, a 17-year-old in Maryland shot two students at his high school — and one of them was his ex-girlfriend, Jaelyn Willey, who later died from her injuries. After a man drove a van through a crowded sidewalk in Toronto and killed 10 people, it was later revealed that he identified with “incels,” a.k.a. an all-male hate group that believes they have wrongfully been denied of their right to have sex with women.
As Teen Vogue notes, dating violence and abuse is horrifyingly common among young people specifically. One in three people ages 16 to 24 experience verbal, emotional, sexual or physical abuse from an S.O. at some point, and young women are three times as likely to experience it as men.