As you've all been made abundantly aware of by now, Lewiston, Maine recently endured one of the worst mass shootings this nation has ever witnessed. On October 25 of this year, eighteen Mainer's who set out for a night of wholesome bowling, a round of corn hole, or an evening shift of work, lost their lives. Knowing that each of you have read the countless harrowing stories that have come out and continue to flow from news outlets and Facebook posts, I'll spare any more recounting of the details or impact, I know we all see, hear, and feel that part.
I will however, share the thoughts and feelings that this devastating event has brought about since.
I found out about the shooting about an hour after the first 911 call was received from the Just-In-Time Bowling Alley on Mollison Way. I was sitting on my couch, safe in my Portland apartment after a workout at my local fitness center when my mom texted our family group chat something along the lines of "oh my god, there's an active shooter and multiple casualties in Lewiston."
My initial reaction was slight panic, but even as my other family members began to chime in with tidbits of info pulled from Facebook statuses and police updates, the magnitude of what was happening hadn't yet unfolded itself to me. It was only when I checked the first news story and saw the raw number of confirmed victims, one that would only climb higher and higher over the next 24 hours—that I grasped the reality. I sat glued to the TV for the next six hours, three devices open, constantly refreshing various news websites and social media pages for the most up-to-date information—which seemed to be little or downright incorrect as most anybody was scrambling for answers, even if they were unfounded.
Perhaps the most chilling words I heard on the news that evening came from Lee Goldberg on News Center Maine. He opened up his portion of nightly coverage referring to the shooting as happening "on an innocuous Wednesday in October at a bowling alley in Maine.” That word, innocuous immediately struck me. Because that’s exactly what this is and was. In fact, unfortunately, innocuous is what mass shootings are starting to feel like overall—commonplace, mild, unremarkable. The Lewiston tragedy has, among other things, brought about some familiar memories of my own experience surrounding an active shooter threat. While many of us now unfortunately find ourselves with intimate connections to such disturbing events, mine is one that never actually came to fruition. A shooting that never was, yet held all the same complexities of trauma and fear that an actual one yields. In Goldberg’s words, it was an in innocuous day, also in October, at Simmons University in Boston during 2018. It was a Thursday, not a particularly heavy course schedule day for my sophomore self at the time. I had walked to academic campus, just a quarter mile from the dorms for an early afternoon communications class. Simmons is a small, womens-centered private liberal arts school, so the class population itself was relatively low, maybe 20 of us. During this lecture, we were discussing biases that make up our identities, particularly focusing around polarizing opinions such as political views, civil rights, military funding, and most ironically, we discussed gun control. With about an hour left in the class, a unanimous buzz, ding, and honk erupted from each and everyone’s phones, face down on our desks. In unison, we each slowly flipped over our devices to see a message stating that there was an active threat on campus:
“Run, if you can. Avoid campus. Wait for instructions.” A stressful message to read as someone who was very much on campus. The demeanor of the classroom started as a state of confusion, not yet alarm, expressed even by our course instructor who had clearly also never been in charge during, let alone involved in such a scenario. My classmates began the all-too-familiar ritual of texting friends and roommates for more information. After a few minutes, I noticed a girl across the room turn porcelain white as she read a notification on her phone. She passed the cell to student next to her, who instantly began to sob. As the information started to make its way around the room, the realization that a very real threat was nearby, became unavoidable. The text had revealed that an active shooter, an older male, complete with a description, a weapon, and a motive, was armed and dangerous in the library. Registering suddenly that my classroom was just one floor above the library, my heart sank. As the temperature of the room shifted from lukewarm skepticism to ice cold fright, we all began to cry. Frantically texting or quietly calling loved ones to share what we knew and express untimely quasi-farewells, suddenly became the only thing left to do. With each new bit of received information, panic rose. Our instructor directed us to pile into the corner of the room, and “pancake” to the ground. But no matter where we convened, hiding was impossible. This particular classroom had a wall made of floor-to-ceiling glass, conveniently facing the elevator that one would use to get from the library to the second level. Hopeless. In those waking moments, I operated under sheer adrenalin. Pure fear and a longing for survival was fueling each thought and decision as I tried to match my actions to what I'd seen on TV. I recall positioning myself behind a classmate who was much taller than me, affixing my backpack in front of my chest for extra protection. I have never in my life felt so guilty, so entitled. In that moment, for whatever reason, I developed a one-man-for-himself mentality, and became tactical yet careless enough to place someone else’s life potentially before mine. All the while, I had been in contact with my family, mostly my parents and sister, Olivia, most of whom were home in Maine. They were just as frantic, if not more, than myself as they tried to make sense of the limited information that was being disputed and mutated via every Boston news outlet and emergency communication source. My dad, who was working just outside Boston at the time and had plans to go to a post-work Red Sox game, was speeding as fast as he could on Route 1 from Quincy to campus. After another maybe fifteen minutes (to be completely honest I’m not sure how long it was, it felt like years, but could've been a matter of seconds), we received a perplexing message from Simmons Public Safety, riddled with grammatical errors and question marks, but confidently stating the "all-clear." Leaving that classroom was a blur, suddenly the 20-or-so of us had gone from being future witnesses to one another's violent deaths, to standard peers who should be lucky it was all a hoax. In a way, I think we were trauma bonded in that room, though I don’t recall discussing the matter with any of those classmates again. I do remember what it felt like leaving the academic campus building. I noticed there were two or three police helicopters flying overhead. Nothing felt real, as if was walking onto a movie set at Universal Studios. As I left through the main University doors to Fenway Avenue, I noticed an endless amount of police cruisers, ambulances, and officers, all pacing around and speaking what sounded like slowed gibberish to me at the time. I found my dad parked a little ways down the street, waiting for me with the warmest and most necessary hug I’ve ever received. From there, we went to a local cafe for coffee and a slice of cake. Nothing like caffeine and sugar to quell your nerves. We stopped into my dorm so I could collect some things for the weekend and check on my roommate. There was no way I was staying on that campus for the next three days, whether there was class on Friday or not. And then we went home. Life moved on around me. The next day, students were informed that the active shooter threat had been reported by a fellow Simmons student, who made the emergency call after hearing what sounded like gunshots which were in fact popped balloons. What struck me as so painful at that point, was the immediate dismissal of sensitivity from the general public. Empathy transformed into humiliation.
There suddenly became level of hilarity to the concept of something as comical and childish as balloons being mistaken for gun shots. And boy what a statement that is on the United States. Gun shots might as well be balloons at this point, they're equally as accessible and heard. But as other college students and even friends began to diminish the experience of sitting through a false alarm active shooter threat, my ability to process the ordeal was taken away. To be anything but okay became overly dramatic. Because I wasn’t shot, because there were no bodies to bag, or wounds to suture, or wrists to handcuff—the incident became like that of a silly dream, and one that I needed to get over and move on from, quickly. What myself and so many other students went through that day was everything but the bullets. The emotional trauma, the fear, the panic, the thought of dying, of never seeing your family again, was just as debilitating as that of the real thing. Only in this country, in this generation, there needs to be dozens murdered in order to validate that trauma. With hundreds of mass shootings every year, how could what happened at Simmons possibly stand out? I say this not looking for sympathy or consoling, I took my time to process and cope with the strange and devastating event that happened on that day five years ago and I am grateful it turned out to be a faulty threat. But I do urge us all to extend our sympathies beyond direct victims of the Lewiston tragedy. It is a disgrace that so many lost their lives at the hands of a gun, and I cannot even begin to imagine how those family members are dealing with the loss of their beloved, not to mention the loss of their sense of safety in this state.
But I urge you to extend sympathy, empathy, and support far and wide too. To the folks who were there and survived injuries, minor and major. To the folks who came out unscathed, or the ones who heard the gun shots from the sidewalk and ran to safety. How about the nine-year-old who stayed up watching the local news report harrowing details of a killer on the loose, or the mom who had to explain why school was cancelled for them in the morning. Gun violence impacts every single U.S. American in a dramatically negative way, and one doesn’t need to be shot at in order to feel the pain of that fallout.
We aren't lucky that we weren't in that bowling alley last Wednesday night, and this is not a matter of wrong time/wrong place. Survival in this generation shouldn't be a coin toss, and it is mortifying to think that in this state even, we have to think twice about going out to dinner, or catching a movie at the theater. We will never again attend a concert or parade or nightclub or bowling alley, without wagering the concept of death or severe injury as we walk through the doors. And there is no harsher reality, or greater cost than that. I love Maine, I love Mainers, and I can't imagine not calling this place my home. To echo the redundant, but never truer words of everyone around me, hold your loved ones close, check in on each and every person you care about, and do anything you need to do to process this. There is no wrong way to deal with grief, even if you don’t feel deserving of experiencing it.
Gun violence will not end here, and we can’t revive those lost, but Maine itself will recover, we always do.❤️
Comments