Mother Breaks Down After Watching Her Toddler Practice a Lockdown Drill at Home
She thought her 3-year-old was playing, not practicing an active-shooter drill.
— -- Stacey Feeley thought her 3-year-old daughter was innocently playing a game as she snapped a photo of her toddler, whom she describes as "mischievous," standing on their toilet seat.
When Feeley found out her child was practicing a drill for what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building, she said it broke her heart.
"I said, 'What are you doing? Why are you standing on the toilet?'" Feeley told ABC News. When her daughter replied,"'Lockdown. You have to be really quiet,'" Feeley said, "It just broke me down."
"It is just heartbreaking when you think that in today's world, that's what they have to walk through and that is what a normal, everyday drill is like now," she said.
Feeley said she doesn't think her toddler understands exactly what she is practicing. "In the schools they are very good about telling them that this is a drill for if someone that is not supposed to be in the building is in there," she said. "They do not even bring up guns whatsoever, but the older kids understand."
As a mother, she said she felt the need to vent. She posted the picture on Facebook and expressed her outrage in a post, which has since garnered more than 7,000 likes and more than 11,000 shares.
"Politicians - take a look. This is your child, your children, your grandchildren, your great grand children and future generations to come. They will live their lives and grow up in this world based on your decisions. They are barely 3 and they will hide in bathroom stalls standing on top of toilet seats," Feeley wrote in the post, which she put up just days after the massacre in Orlando, where a shooter killed 49 people, and three years after a gunman killed 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
In the post, she said all the innocence she thought her 3-year-old possessed was gone.
Feeley told ABC News that she had no idea her post would have such an impact on so many people but that she is glad. "I hope it wakes people up," she said.