Death by Numbers: Parkland Massacre Docu that Knows What’s More Important

Kim A. Snyder’s 37-minute Death by Numbers, written by and about Sam Fuentes, a Parkland survivor emphasises the trauma as well as its source without ever feeling like a true crime documentary. It is not interested in digging up the shooter’s profile as if there is some secret mystery to it all. Hatred is banal and flat, Fuentes recognises, but contending with its ripples begins volumes of stories with the process. 

This one, narrated through Fuentes’ diary, focuses on the death sentence trial in 2022 and the prospect of facing the shooter again. Besides PTSD and survivor’s guilt, there is now also the dreadful weight of having to be part of a process that decides whether your enemy gets to live or die. 

With incisiveness, she reflects on the futility of having a death sentence trial at all when much more could be accomplished for social purposes with those resources that are now directed towards a shooter with a god complex. The film makes the crucial visual connection out of the bitter irony that her classmates were killed during a Holocaust studies class: the swastikas scribbled on the mags with footage of KKK and Hitler, and most importantly, with flocks of vultures. Though rather unfair to vultures, it has emotional resonance, and efficiently reduces a mental health defense to just that: a flimsy argument. 

In line with the film’s refusal to behave like a true crime doc, it does not trouble itself with visual reconstruction. But when the events do need to be recounted, they are oral, focusing on the survivors while they talk of the victims. The shooter becomes merely a pair of arms with a gun. No god. No mystery. 

But determination alone would make for a disingenuous account. Woven through it like its other half is uncertainty. Fuentes grasps for meaning, and struggles with the process. A lot of it happens at home, in solitude, the trial confined to the TV screen. The past delved into is hers, but only as melancholic recollection; the face in the photographs changes between scarred and unscarred, between ordinary childhood and excruciating coming of age.  

Death by Numbers is insightful in its writing. To call Fuentes’ statement near the end of the film a triumphant moment would mean reducing everything to a dramatic narrative arc, because it is once again, as fierce as it is brimming with feeling. It is not a tearjerker, but it is vulnerable in its bareness. The shooter’s face is visible for the first time within the film. It is his position now to be at the receiving end.