LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- The messages started coming in around 3 p.m. Wednesday as Judith Danovitch's friends asked her if she had heard the news.
"At the time, no one really knew what was going on," Danovitch said. "Really things were just starting to unfold there."
Over the next few hours, the story became more clear. A former student shot and killed at least 17 students and staff members and injured more than a dozen others at Marjory Stone Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida - Danovitch's alma mater.
"It's surreal in many ways to watch a place that you know and you love and that you're so familiar with and to see kids from my hometown walking out with their hands raised is just awful," she said.
Danovitch, now a professor in the University of Louisville's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, is a member of Stoneman Douglas High School's class of 1996, one of the school's earliest graduating classes.
"It's one of those high schools always in the news for good reasons, and to see it in the news on the front page of the national news today, for this reason, is just devastating," she said. "It's crushing."
For Danovitch, the tragedy may have been jarring, but she said it was not unexpected given the number of school shootings in recent years. She said she reached out to her high school friends and created a Facebook group with the goal of mobilizing alumni to help out where needed while also trying to enact change to make sure this kind of gun violence doesn't continue to happen in schools.
"They're watching their peers get shot at school," she said. "I really hope that this doesn't become a situation where they're so desensitized that they just give up."
Danovitch said she and several other classmates are also seeking stricter gun laws. She said she has already started crafting letters that she will send to elected officials.
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