“I Accept…”

With only a few hours between my interview with Kirk Bast (see previous blog) and my interview with Aurora Theater survivor, Lasamoa Cross, I freshened up and left Arapahoe for Aurora – a mere 20 minute drive. I wanted to get there early to poke around, get a feel for the community, drive by the infamous Century Aurora 16, and grab a bite to eat to refuel before my next sure-to-be powerful meeting.

Ten miles east of Denver, Aurora is similar to every other suburb nestled on the outskirts of the mile-high city, drenched in sprawling suburban neighborhoods, countless shopping centers, Starbucks on every corner, and beautifully manicured lawns, though not quite as lush or green as its Littleton and Arapahoe neighbors, being as Aurora is a gateway to the eastern Colorado desert, the Kansas flatlands some 500 miles beyond.

I drove straight to the theater, tucked away in the chaos of a large shopping mall. (It reopened six months after the shooting.) The sky overhead was dark and gloomy. Rumbles of thunder growled in the distance. West of the theater, on the distant horizon, the sun was beginning to make its descent towards the rockies, casting a luminous twilight glow like a spotlight on the front entrance of the theater. It was radiant, and haunting. I was covered in goosebumps.

Century Aurora 16

Other than a lurking memory and the bizarre skyline, there was nothing special about the theater. It looked like every other multiplex in the country, so I kept driving. With two hours to spare before meeting Lasamoa, I meandered down Alameda Parkway, congested with rush hour traffic and endless stoplights, then wound back around towards the mall and theater. I spotted a Chili’s on a nearby corner, and my stomach growled. (Some of you may know this about me, but most of you may not – I’m a huge fan of Chili’s. I can’t say I like any other restaurant chain, but I worked at a Chili’s in college and I guess the place has always stuck with me in a nostalgic sense, regardless of the amount of TUMS I must consume in order to eat and drink there.)

Anyways, I strolled in and found a spot at the bar, which was crowded with World Cup fans. I don’t really consider myself the type of person who enjoys dining out solo, but I was excited to order a beer and a salad, and enjoy the alone time in a sea of strangers. While digesting, I pulled out my phone (I don’t like to look at it while I’m eating, mostly because I don’t like doing two things at once if I don’t have to) and reminded myself the details of the shooting.

On June 20, 2012, a (pardon my French, but you may as well get used to it) fucking lunatic, whose name need not be repeated, crept into the shadows of theater 9 where The Dark Knight Rises had been playing for about 30 minutes. His face was shielded by a gas mask and he was outfitted in black military-ish gear. He lingered in the front corner near the emergency exit, then tossed a few tear gas grenades and began shooting at the audience using 3 legally purchased (in spite of a documented history of mental illness – just sayin’) firearms. Most onlookers thought it was all part of the movie drama, until they quickly realized it was anything but. In under 2 minutes, he killed 12 people and injured 70 others. Lasamoa was one of the fortunate survivors to escape unharmed, but her fiance wasn’t so lucky.

I tried to absorb as much information as I could about the shooting so that I wouldn’t have to hash out details with Lasamoa. The more I read, the more frustrated I became. After being arrested outside the theater, the shooter was charged with 24 counts of first degree murder and 116 counts of attempted murder. He has plead not guilty to all of the charges by reason of insanity, and his trial date has been pushed back (a 4th time) to December 8, 2014, while a court-ordered psychiatrist continues to examine, evaluate and compile a report on his mental capacity.

The whole story made me feel sick to my core, kind of like the way it feels when my stomach churns with acid after a regretful night of binge drinking. Sure, he’s insane, there’s no argument there, but to what degree? An alarming one, although medically, the verdict is still out. But this whole I’m-not-guilty-because-I’m-crazy thing is a disturbing plea and a lame excuse, that is, if you ask me. And since you have by way of continuing to read this, let me say for the record: yes, I do believe people can go nuts, off the rocker, mad as a hatter, completely fucking lose it in the blink of an eye, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here as this wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment act, and it certainly doesn’t excuse murder the way I see it. There are undoubtedly a lot of (um, I don’t know the exact number) severely mentally ill people who function in society without shooting people. Like many of the school shooters I’ve been researching, this nut-job planned his attack well in advance, and allegedly documented his frightening intentions online, to friends, to his psychiatrist, and in a journal. Why does he get to say he’s “not guilty” just because he’s clinically nuts? Why not just say, “I’m guilty because I’m batshit crazy”? I have a hard time wrapping my head around these premeditated acts of rampage violence, and with the phrase “not guilty” in general, but I guess that’s one of the million reasons I didn’t go into law…or politics for that matter. IF YOU DID IT, OWN UP TO IT. End of story.

Once I had digested dinner and a giant dose of crappy news, I drove around the block to Starbucks, then around another block to the right Starbucks. Lasamoa texted saying she was running a few minutes late. I texted back asking if she wanted me to order her a coffee of some sort. She declined, but I bought us both Chai Tea Latte’s anyways, plus 2 cookies – 1 chocolate chip and the other gluten-free, just in case (you never know these days.) Right as the barista placed the frothy beverages on the countertop, Lasamoa whisked in the side door, her keys jingling from a cloth lanyard dangling at her side. I recognized her from pictures I had seen online by her pearly white smile, her youthful, natural beauty, and her quizzical expression that told me she was looking for someone. I smiled, introduced myself and handed her the Chai, explaining my love for the beverage and my need to spread said love to others, hence buying it despite her refusal. She cocked her head back and laughed, saying “okay, that’s fair, that’s fair.” I motioned to a table outside where Ted was already tied up, and then revealed the cookie. Her reaction was the same, “that’s fair too, that’s fair. I’ll take the chocolate chip,” she said, bursting out in that contagiously loud laugh again.

I liked her right off the bat.

We sat outside on a makeshift patio, which was actually just a sidewalk cluttered with metal green Starbucks tables and chairs, shaded by dark green umbrellas. The sun was still dancing above the peaks of the Rockies, emitting a horizontal glow. Dark clouds drifted further into the eastern sky. Ted curled up under the table between our chairs, occasionally propping his head on my knee for a scratch, then shifting to hers, then back to mine, then settling down again and drifting off into a light slumber until a passerby made his ears perk.

Lasamoa, or La as she prefers to be called by her friends, got right down to business. “Ask me anything,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air as if to say the sky’s the limit. Feeling slightly rusty with my interview skills, her confidence and directness stunned me into near silence for a split second until I remembered I needed to say something. Then we dove right in.

La told me about that night just under two years ago when, at the young age of 19, she faced death inside theater 9, her fiance, AJ, 18, right beside her. La and AJ met in high school, dated for a couple of years, and got engaged roughly a year prior to the shooting, during a portion of which La was away at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Movies were their thing, and Century Aurora 16 was their place. They couldn’t wait for the highly-anticipated release of  The Dark Knight Rises. On opening night, they took their seats a few rows from the front.

She described in detail her initial confusion, the reddish-orange haired shooter, the spraying bullets, and the way AJ grabbed her hand and told her, “babe, we’ve got to get out of here.” They made a run for it down the aisle, screams and gunshots piercing through clouds of smoke around them, The Dark Knight Rises still rolling on the big scream. Within feet, she felt AJ’s hand go limp and let go of hers. She fell to the ground with him, ducking behind the backs of chairs to cradle his head. She felt his warm blood seep over her like melting honey. She heard more gunshots as herds of shoes trampled by, flickering past in the dim floor lights. She was in complete shock, yet her mind was racing. She laid her fiance’s head gently on the floor and made a run for it. When she got outside, she beelined it for AJ’s car, certain that is where he would find her whenever he made it out.

Sometime later, once the theater was cleared and the shooter in handcuffs, law enforcement summoned the survivors to the nearby Gateway High School, where La and AJ had went. She said she felt a sense of relief taking refuge in her old stomping grounds. I guess that’s how she/we should feel, but that’s not always the case, and I found it ironic – this juxtaposition of what we all personally consider safe anymore, and why.

Sitting across from La as she replayed her experience, I was overcome with so many emotions for this young girl, now 21. I thought about where I was in life when I was her age. Yes, I had witnessed death, including a murder in a seemingly random act of gun violence. (I say “seemingly” because I don’t believe this kind of gun violence is random – at least not for the perpetrator. But it sure as hell is for the victims.) And sure, at age 21, my mother was two years deep in chemotherapy, and things weren’t looking so good for her. But I had never been engaged, let alone lost a fiance, let alone survived that kind of trauma. To this day, I have no idea what that must feel like and no one will ever know exactly how that feels for La, but I will say, she helped me understand what it feels like to heal from such devastating pain.

La wholeheartedly believes in the power of counseling (on the grounds you find a therapist you can honestly and openly connect with.) She found someone she could talk to, and they’ve been talking ever since, one day at a time, one foot in front of the other, sometimes moving backwards, sometimes leaping forwards, sometimes going nowhere, but always looking ahead.

“So many people want to ask why, you know, why did this happen to me? Why that theater? Why my fiance? But I just wanted to know how. How do I put one foot in front of the other? How do I go on with my life without AJ? You know what I mean?”

Well, shit La, I do know what you mean, but I had never thought about it that way before.

When my mom lost her fight with her cancer in 2007, I was 23 years old, and I did a lot of asking the why’s of the world. Those were some of the darkest days of my life, and I wasn’t sure I would make it through them. One year later, when my stepfather kicked my brother and I out of his life and subsequently offed with my mother’s Will, some of her jewelry, and a laundry list of her possessions, I asked why a few thousand more times.

I, too, saw a counselor in Truckee, and in our time together, he helped me enormously. But I couldn’t afford to pay someone to listen to me for more than 6 months at that point in my life, so I jumped ship a little too soon.

Through ongoing counseling sessions, La also came to understand the value of acceptance. “It was about accepting something new everyday,” she said, like day 1 – accepting her hair was black and her eyes were dark brown and she had a mediocre relationship with her parents; day 2 – accepting she’s however tall, however size (I’d say she’s thin, toned, about 5’6″) and she doesn’t want to major in film anymore; and so forth. Until finally, day-however-many-later, she had to accept that AJ was gone, that she had survived the shooting at Century Aurora 16, and that her life may never be the same.

I asked her if she thought that was the same as forgiveness, but we both came to the conclusion that forgiveness is tough when the person you’re trying to forgive hasn’t asked for it. It got me thinking, maybe acceptance is a form of forgiveness, the kind where the person doing the forgiving does so by healing him/herself within, not asking for anything from the outside, but simply finding it deep inside his/her own heart, mind and soul to accept and let go so he/she may be at peace.

Then it got me thinking about my stepfather, and my own struggles with forgiveness. Some time ago, I accepted that my mother died, and that it’s important for me to keep her memory alive. But I haven’t reached a peace of mind when it comes to her other (lesser) half, aka the stepfatherkenstein. (Get it? Stepmonster = stepfatherkenstein = Frankenstein. I just came up with that one. Don’t believe me? Google it. You won’t find it anywhere. I think we can work with it.) Anyways, since this revelation, I have taken La’s advice to heart, accepting certain circumstances as they may be. I hereby accept I may never again see that floating diamond bracelet my mother bought during our girls-only trip to the Virgin Islands. I accept that I am in six figures worth of debt from grad school despite her Will stating she left funds to provide for me otherwise. I accept what my stepfather did, no matter how unfair or cruel it felt. It happened, and I can’t change it. I can only move forward, and be a better me because of it. In one meeting and one conversation with one extraordinary person, I stopped scratching this irritating itch that is buried deep inside, refusing to subside, that is until I met La. So, La, thanks for that. You don’t even know what it means to me.

(Fine Print: In terms of my own experience surviving a school shooting, I’m still trying to figure out where I stand with acceptance and forgiveness, but I promise I’m working on it diligently.)

That’s not to say La doesn’t fight her own internal battles. It’s still a process, and it may always be. That type of survival is not easy to overcome, or forget. Especially when the killer’s verdict is still out.

But La is on the right path, and from what I gathered, she’s plowing forward. She’s seen a number of movies, and she’s even returned to the remodeled Century Aurora 16, though not to theater 9 just yet. Maybe someday. She also sat through the rest of The Dark Knight Rises on DVD with her newfound besty, a local police officer who she was familiar with from his guard duty days at Gateway High, and who was there the night of the shooting. (She puked at the 30 minute mark of the movie with him, but she rinsed her mouth out and watched it all the way to the end, his strength helping get her to the final credits.)

“I always thank him [new cop besty] for taking me there, to my high school, because it was the safest place I could have gone and he brought me there,” she said.

Not only did she thank him, she also sent personal thank you’s to each and every police officer who responded that night and ran into the chaos as others were running out. She doesn’t like that people call them “pigs” or talk down to them. Overall, I think she’s got a damn good point. I mean, there can be asshole cops, but then again, there are bad eggs everywhere. And I think it was incredibly humble and selfless that she took the time to thank them in the way she did.

There is so much we can learn from someone like La. She’s still in the throes of young-adulthood, but she’s wiser than most adults I know that are twice her age. Her spirit is contagious, uplifting and powerful. She has survived something more horrific than any of us will ever know, and she’s coming out on top, standing tall and proud, ready to take on whatever comes next, with her love and memory of AJ shining through in the most honorable of ways. She opened my eyes and my heart to the possibility – and reality- of acceptance and what it means to really move forward.

La, I’ll always move with you, standing right beside you, shifting in whatever direction you need to go, whenever you need me.  Knowing you has made me a better person, and I’m excited for this new, lifelong friendship. Thank you for sharing your story with me, and for trusting me to write it. I will care for it as though it were my own.

(Regrettably, I was so immersed in my conversation with La that I forgot to take a STAND UP photo of her. But do not fear, she’s in the process of sending one, which she promises will be “cool”.)

 

 

There’s Hope in Arapahoe

After my interview with Crystal (see previous blog post), she connected me with two other gun violence survivors based in the outlying suburbs of Denver. The first was Kirk Bast, head counselor at Arapahoe High School for nearly 20 years. Kirk was just around the corner at the school when, on December 13, 2013, senior Karl Pierson shot 17-year-old Claire Peterson (who was hospitalized, but succumbed to her injuries 8 days later), and then shot himself.

I left Littleton and drove the short distance (roughly 12 miles) to Arapahoe, still on a high from my magnetic conversation with Crystal. A friend of mine from Tahoe had suggested I stay with his folks while in town, and being the gracious family that they are, they let Ted and I in with open arms. Over a dinner of pulled pork sandwiches and coleslaw, I told them I was interviewing Kirk during my visit to Arapahoe, and it just so happened they knew him on a personal level – he was their son/my friend’s high school soccer coach. It is a small world after all. My interview with Kirk remained unconfirmed until I casually dropped their name and offered their backyard as the interview location. He agreed to meet me the next day.

Fresh off a vacation in the Rockies with his family, Kirk arrived looking sun-kissed and relaxed. We sat across from each other on the back patio as a lawn mower purred nearby and a fountain trickled methodically in the garden a few feet away. The sounds of my friend’s childhood backyard hummed in peaceful drones all around us, calming us as we began to dissect the most unpeaceful of topics.

While chatting over apple slices and cheese with crackers, I quickly came to value Kirk’s wisdom as a long-time school counselor, a Doctoral candidate in counseling psychology and a native of St. Louis – commonly ranked as one of the most violent cities in the US. His thoughts and ideas provided a unique perspective on school violence, bullying, mental health, and healing in the aftermath of a rampage shooting. Our views were often aligned, but when they weren’t, we challenged each other to consider other angles, which I believe benefitted us both. He got me thinking about the importance of a loving home environment and positive upbringing in ways I hadn’t considered, and he had a profound take on the need to build more therapeutic-based counseling services in our schools, which will be imperative in formulating the overall book.

Towards the end of our nearly 3 hour discussion, Kirk thanked me for giving him the opportunity to digest the shooting at Arapahoe, and vent, if you will, about his experience in a way that helped him take a few more steps forward. In the aftermath of such a horrific tragedy, we, as human beings, often compartmentalize the event and its detriments. For me personally, after the shooting I witnessed, I put that memory in a box and stashed it in the back of my brain’s filing cabinet, never to be reopened again. It wasn’t until I began writing about it in graduate school that I started to reflect and reexamine my feelings. Kirk doesn’t have the luxury of filing it away because 1. it hasn’t even been a year and 2. his position as head counselor at Arapahoe forces him to face the aftereffects of the shooting not just head on, but solid as a rock so his students (and staff) can lean on him – all 2,229 of them. During our talk, he named a few people he considered heroes in the school that day, but he was far too humble to take ownership of his own heroism, although I get the sense that’s just the kind of guy that he is. Therefore, I’ll own it for him. Kirk is a hero. Given the chance, there is no doubt he would have taken a bullet for each and every one of his student’s that day. He wanted nothing more than to protect them, to run into the line of fire, and to save Claire’s life.

I will never forget Kirk’s bravery, his selflessness, his knowledge and his sincerity. I hope to be able to put into words Kirk’s story in a way that will shape our understanding of the school shooting epidemic.

Kirk Bast, head counselor at Arapahoe High School, strikes a stand up pose in a friend’s backyard.

“We Are Columbine – Part 2”

I have a lot to catch up on since my time in Denver! I’m 32 days into my trip and I’ve covered nearly 5,000 miles since it all began. There have been a lot of ups and downs so far, but I figured that would be the case, and with every wrong turn, something else goes incredibly right too. Besides, life would be boring without any surprises or unexpected twists!

While in Denver, I met with 3 remarkable gun violence survivors who shared their courageous and inspiring stories with me, and for that, I feel truly blessed. The first interview with Columbine survivor, Crystal Woodman Miller, set the bar high to say the least. Crystal was in the library during the attack, where most of the killings took place. She was studying for a test with friends when Eric and Dylan entered the room, shooting and killing 10 people, and injuring 12 others. Crystal was hiding beneath one of the only tables in the library that was not targeted during the attack. The shooters did approach the table, but were out of ammunition and left to reload. As soon as they exited the library, Crystal ran for her life to safety.

Crystal Woodman Miller striking the Stand Up pose in Littleton, Colorado.

Shortly after Columbine, in December 1999, Samaritan’s Purse – a nondenominational evangelist organization offering aid to those in need worldwide – sent Crystal to Kosovo to hand out Christmas gifts to children who survived the devastating Kosovo War. Fresh off surviving her own tragedy, the experience jump-started Crystal’s courageous road to recovery, and enriched her global perspective of suffering and what it means to be a survivor. Since then, she has traveled the world as a motivational speaker, helping schools and communities heal in the wake of rampage gun violence. She also has a documentary in the works, titled Columbine Everywhere, and she continues to be a driving force behind school safety and violence prevention.

Not only is Crystal a remarkable human being, but she’s also a beautiful wife and mother of 1 with another on the way. Her positive energy was palpable, and as we sat under the shade of an umbrella outside a Starbucks in Littleton, I quickly came to regard her as a wonderful friend whose integrity, honesty and passion will continue to guide and nurture me throughout this journey. She reminded me what it means to be a survivor, as well as the potential impact we can make by turning our tragic past into something positive and enlightening.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on the Denver interviews that followed Crystal, as well as other highlights from the trip so far, including my conversation with a Virginia Tech survivor based in Washington DC!