Parkland student Kyle Kashuv is asking others to sign a petition he started to encourage President Donald Trump to give a student who died in the Parkland Shooting while helping others the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Peter Wang, 15, was a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) cadet who was killed while holding the door to let others out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February last year during an active shooter situation where a total of 17 students and staffers were killed.
Wang and two other JROTC members who were killed, Alaina Petty, 14, and Martin Duque, 14, were honored by the Florida National Guard.
Wang was posthumously accepted to the U.S Military Academy at West Point — where he dreamed of going to school — “for his heroic actions,” the academy said in a statement.
“It was an appropriate way for USMA to honor this brave young man,” the statement said. “West Point has given posthumous offers of admission in very rare instances for those candidates or potential candidates whose actions exemplified the tenets of Duty, Honor, and Country.”
The petition claims Wang was buried in his JROTC uniform.
In an interview with The Daily Wire, Kashuv said that his initiative is “a great way to unify all Americans around something we can all agree on.”
“Peter is the very definition of a hero,” Kashuv said. “If you go through the past honorees, they’re all American heroes. Whether it’s sporting heroes, military heroes, musical heroes, etc. there’s no doubt in my mind that Peter belongs among those names and exulted even higher, to be honest.”
“It’s also incredibly important that the president, on behalf of a very grateful nation, is given the opportunity to thank Mr. and Mrs. Wang for raising a hero,” Kashuv added.
The petition has been shared or retweeted by the Founder and CEO of the Young Turks, Ceny Uygur; former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, and The Daily Wire’s Editor-in-Chief, Ben Shapiro, among others.
“This is an easy nonpartisan issue all Americans can agree with,” Uygur tweeted. “Let’s honor Peter Wang!”
Yale economics professor Howard Forman shared the petition and thanked Kashuv for “reminding us one of the many things we have to be thankful for. And the many people who have sacrificed to keep us all safer.”
So far, the petition has garnered more than 3,200 signatures of its 100,000 signature goal.
Kashuv said that in the wake of the shooting, he and other student activists entered the national spotlight causing Wang and others to be “overshadowed.”
“It’s an utter shame that people like myself and other activists took the spotlight,” Kashuv said. “We messed up. We should’ve kept saying in every media situation that we must honor and remember those we lost, especially Peter and Coach Feis who are heroes.”
“The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor possible,” Kashuv added. “There’s literally nobody who deserves this more than Peter.”