BATON ROUGE – A typical Wednesday night practice at Alex Box Stadium turned somber when a friend notified LSU Hitting Coach Sean Ochinko their Alma mater, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had been invaded by a school shooter.
Ochinko graduated from MSD in 2006 and says he was shocked when he heard the tragic news.
“I walked those halls and I was at that school and played baseball there and had such great experiences,” he said. “To see the stuff that was going on in that community that I know is just really upsetting.”
Ochinko received the call from Chicago Cubs star and former MSD alumnus Anthony Rizzo, who told him that their former coach, Aaron Feis, was among the 17 who had been killed.
“He was there the day I signed to come to LSU my senior year,” Ochinko said. “He was a really great guy, really selfless.”  
Add “heroic” to the list of traits. Feis saved several students by using his body as a shield during the chaos.
Ochinko says he and Feis built a relationship while he was a student at Douglas, and that Feis was there for all of his major accomplishments.
“He was always around at the baseball games. He’s a big sports guy. He was there pretty much every home high school baseball game,” Ochinko said. “He used to have a golf cart that he would drive my grandparents and my parents to down from the parking lot down to the field.”
Ochinko’s brother Tyler was also a student at the Parkland high school and knew Feis.
“If you had anything to do with Douglas and Douglas athletics you knew Coach Feis he was a standup guy,” Tyler Ochinko said. “That’s probably my biggest memory of him was just how outgoing of a guy he was.”
Even though Tyler now lives thousands of miles away in Baton Rouge, he says that he couldn’t help but think how he would’ve reacted if he was still a student at MSD.
“That could’ve been me. That could’ve been my friends or my teachers. I just couldn’t get the image of the school out of my head. While I was watching I was like ‘Man, this can’t be true this isn’t my school,’” he said. 
Both Tyler and Sean say they hope the Parkland community can move on from this tragedy.
“I think people in that community know how good of a place Parkland is and how good of a high school Douglas has been and this is just one random act of evil that was just by one person that doesn’t reflect on the entire community or the high school as a whole,” Ochinko said.
“I think people should try to come together and move past this, and not really put a scar on Douglas high overall.”
To bring awareness to this tragedy, Coach Ochinko wears a “MSD” on his hat for Marjory Stoneman Douglas and an “AF” for his former coach, Aaron Feis.