Ten lives were cut short Monday afternoon, stolen by a man with a gun at a King Soopers in south Boulder, and community members are now wading through grief that is both unimaginable and too familiar.
Longtime resident Roy Perry’s grandson, a student at Fairview High School, visits that King Soopers every day during the school year. Thank God, Perry said, it was spring break. Thank God he wasn’t in school this week, that Perry’s stepdaughter wasn’t at the store she so often frequents.
“It’s hard to put into words, how you can be so horribly sad and angry at the same time and not know what to do with that,” he said.
Perry was among the crowds of people who visited the memorial at 3600 Table Mesa Drive this week, a steady stream of mourners placing bouquets and candles, photographs and messages in front of the fenced-off grocery store, its windows broken out.
Crying, holding each other, watching in silence. Bearing witness.
Perry remembers visiting a similar memorial outside Columbine High School in 1999, when two gunmen killed 13 people. The flowers, the signs, the photos.
“It’s the same damn thing again,” Perry said, speaking through tears. “It feels so out of control.”
Rachel Shearer often visited the shopping complex when she was working as a seasonal employee for Boulder County, stopping in for a Starbucks drink at King Soopers after teaching lessons about local history at nearby schools. She went to physical therapy at a medical office next door.
Shearer lives in Arvada, a mile from where the shooter lived.
“It’s that feeling of helplessness, of anger turned to disbelief,” she said. “My family moved here in ’97 for a better life, and a year and a half later the shooting at Columbine High School happened … it’s like you don’t know what’s normal.”
There is no quick fix for the trauma that Boulder community members are now processing, said Beverly Kingston, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder. Kingston’s work focuses on violence prevention, but she’s also worked side-by-side with survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook Elementary School and Arapahoe High School shootings.
“What I’ve heard from survivors is that once this happens, your life is different than it was before. It’s never the same,” she said.
Kingston said she’s seeing people already coming together, and that kind of connection is a cornerstone for communities healing from traumatic events like a mass shooting.
“It can almost crack us open to have that kind of pain, to open up to the love we can have for each other,” she said. “I think it’s going to be really important that we have ways as a community to come together, acknowledge what’s happened and use all the tools that are positive to bring us together, not apart, from this violent act. That community wins, not violence.”
Aftermath of violence
There have been enough mass shootings in the United States that researchers can study what happens to the people and communities who survive, what helps them move forward.
In the immediate aftermath, much of the focus is on people who are directly impacted by the shooting, said Monica Fitzgerald, senior research associate at CU Boulder’s Institute for Behavioral Science and faculty member at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. That can look like making sure people who worked at King Soopers and are now out of work still have a way to pay bills or psychological first aid for survivors who witnessed the shooting.
It’s important to establish human connection and validate how people are feeling, Fitzgerald said. Reactions can include fear, anger, sadness, numbness and callousness. People might notice themselves feeling extra-anxious in public places or looking for places to hide in a grocery store.
“People in the community are going to have reactions that are very normal but can feel very overwhelming,” Fitzgerald said. “These kinds of events sometimes shake our sense of security and safety, these everyday experiences, these places you normally feel safe in.”
Even experts find themselves having those reactions. Fitzgerald said she noticed it Tuesday, when her daughter needed eggs for a recipe. The King Soopers on Table Mesa Drive was one of Fitzgerald’s main grocery stores, and walking into another store Tuesday she noticed herself having a stress reaction — elevated heart rate, faster breathing.
“You have to know this is normal but also cope and find ways to feel calm and grounded,” she said. Look at how to connect with people, how to feel safe, address your immediate needs, calm and orient yourself.
Some people might have bigger reactions and feel more unsafe because of other scary situations they’ve been in, Fitzgerald said.
“If it’s getting in the way of how you engage with your life, that’s when you want to reach out for additional support and maybe a more formal intervention and treatment,” she said. “If it gets in the way of functioning, you might need another layer of mental health support.”
Ongoing support needed
In the days and weeks to come, the international spotlight shining on Boulder will move on, and the onslaught of attention will slow.
But grief does not have any such timeline, and healing does not stick to a schedule.
“In the mental health world we have to have services and support ongoing, letting people know in their time that we’re here for them,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re not going anywhere, this isn’t just going to be here until the next hard thing comes. We’re here for you in an ongoing way.”
Some people’s reactions may be different or delayed because they’re already dealing with trauma, said Sona Dimidjian, director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at CU Boulder.
“What I’ve heard from people is it’s almost an inability to even process the information because there’s so many traumas layered on top of each other,” she said. “Traumas of loss and injustice related to the COVID public health crisis, the level of economic stress people are experiencing, repeated racial injustices including multiple racially motivated murders — and now we have this.”
Continue to check in with yourself and acknowledge your feelings, even before you reach out to help others, Fitzgerald said.
“It’s not about getting back to business as usual on Monday,” Dimidjian said. “It’s continuing to validate, affirm, support, acknowledge, feel, honor and mourn.” Reach out to loved ones, faith communities, support groups, she said. Participate in meaningful ways, whether that’s visiting a memorial or attending a funeral.
“We know there’s no timeline of the reaction, of the processing, the coping. There’s great resilience in this community and many communities to adapt and withstand hardship and adversity,” Fitzgerald said. “Resilience is universal but it can also be cultivated and taught.”
Calls for change
In the days after the shooting, local, state and federal lawmakers began pledging support for a ban on assault weapons, universal background checks and other gun control measures.
“I really hope meaningful gun legislation can come out of this,” Shearer said, standing in front of the memorial at King Soopers. “I know we say that every single time, and it never does.”
L ongtime Boulder residents and partners Patty Zishka and Cara Stiles said they’ve felt numbness, anger and heartache over the past week.
“It needs to change, and I’m just so sad for everyone in the families and all the children,” Zishka said, her voice breaking. “They shouldn’t have to worry that they’re going to have to have someone shoot them. None of us should, but they’re kids, for God’s sake.”
“It will serve to make the community tighter, at least for a while, but it’s one more indication of the blindness and audacity of our government that we are not able to do what so many other countries do in terms of gun control,” Stiles said.
“You would think that Jan. 6 would have scared enough people there that they would have reacted,” she said, referring to the date armed people breached the United States Capitol. “I don’t know what it’s going to take. I guess their constituents voting them out.”
Kingston hears from people who wonder why gun violence has gone on for so long or feel like it’s a hopeless situation. But according to research, this is a solvable problem.
“I not only hold a great hope, I know what the research says,” Kingston said. “We know so much about what works to prevent violence, we just haven’t had the political will, the funding. The efforts haven’t come together for that.”
The answer is a comprehensive public health approach, Kingston said. New laws are part of that, but so is active bystander training, because research shows that in the majority of cases, shooters have told someone their plans. It’s intervention systems for young people, which Kingston defines as up to 24 years old as the human brain continues to develop. It’s having adequate mental health resources and support.
“We’ve invested a lot in the law enforcement response since Columbine, and that’s really important and should not end, but we haven’t put that same investment in violence prevention,” Kingston said.
Many of the survivors that Kingston works with turn to activism and prevention.
“I think that’s one of the things we can do to help serve the survivors, is to do everything we can so that nobody has to go through this again.”
