On Sunday, my cousin got married at a lovely venue south of Indianapolis. After the afternoon reception, or at least as much as we could get our 3-year-old to tolerate, we headed to Greenwood Square Mall to charge my car, which is an older EV with a not-great range. We should have taken my husband’s car, but gas is expensive, so I thought, why not take mine?
We plugged in and killed some time at the bookstore, looking at the stuffed animals and books with characters my kids were familiar with. My son ran around with a Pete the Cat stuffed animal and my 9-year-old daughter suggested, not as subtly as she hoped, that she would like a large stuffed avocado. We braved the persistent drizzle to look at the fountain on the other side of the mall (“It’s soooo beautiful!” says the 9-year-old) and go inside, where we found a small kids’ play area. We let the kids run around, our toddler tried to throw himself under the child-sized train an employee drives around, and it was all insignificantly stressful because our kids wanted to do all of the things that cost money, which we were trying not to spend.
Our son threw a little bit of a fit because we wouldn’t pay for him to ride the train around, and we distracted him with a ride on one of the $1 rides, this one shaped like a double decker bus. After that, we walked around the mall, looking at the stores, the people, smelling the Starbucks, and checking our phones for the time. Small crowds of people congregated at the exits, hoping for the rain to slow enough for them to get to their cars without getting drenched.
After about an hour, right around 5 p.m., we decided the car had probably charged long enough for us to get home.
We stopped by a nearby McDonalds for sodas and Happy Meals for the kids and headed home. Some time around 7:30 or 8, I awoke from a short nap to a notification from the New York Times: there had been a mostly-thwarted mass shooting at the mall we’d just visited.
As more news about the shooting was released, I learned that my family was in the building at the same time as the 20-year-old shooter. As we were preparing to leave, he was walking into the food court bathroom, where he would re-assemble his AR-style rifles, and after about an hour, exit the bathroom and begin shooting. He killed three people and injured several more before he was shot and killed by another young man, who was legally carrying a firearm.
So, we missed being in a mass shooter situation by about an hour. Realistically, we were on the other side of the mall and didn’t even realize there was a food court. But it’s the what-ifs that haunt me. What if we’d had more spending money and spent more time at the mall? What if I’d decided I couldn’t wait for a McDonalds Coke and made us go down to the Sbarro? What if the shooter had decided to start at the other end of the mall?
We were lucky, or perhaps blessed, depending on who you ask, to have avoided being embroiled in that tragedy. And many more people could have died if it weren’t for the “good guy with a gun” who stopped the first shooter.
The NRA and their ilk will point to this as a perfect illustration of why they think more people should have guns and why access to guns shouldn’t be restricted: a disaster, prevented. I think for at least three people, this was still a tragedy. I feel for the young man who stopped the shooter. Now he has to deal with the aftermath of being in a mass shooting and having to end someone’s life. While I believe everyone who chooses to carry a firearm should consider the consequences of using said firearm, I’m sure he had no intentions of having to kill someone at the mall on a Sunday evening.
Frankly, I’ve had a couple sleepless nights trying not to imagine what we would have done if we had been caught in the escaping crowds. I’m thankful that we’re all still here today to go about our little activities. Our daughter went school shopping with her grandparents, in preparation for fourth grade. Our son, who has been rather uninterested in potty training, peed in a toilet twice today. Just little things that mark lives that continue to be lived.
Four lives ended on Sunday in the mall, including that of the shooter. Two of those killed were a married couple, sitting down to eat in the food court. One was a 30-year-old man, headed to, or perhaps returning from, the bathroom. Just like all the other people killed by gun violence in the United States, including the young school children in Uvalde, Texas, they were real people, living their lives, having hopes and dreams. There were no “crisis actors” here. I think, as a matter of necessity, we as a society have become desensitized by the rising levels of gun violence, because if we mourned every person killed by a gun, we’d never stop mourning. But I can’t be distantly sad about these people.
For a lot of my friends and family, it’s hitting close to home, because this is a mall they live near to, or one they have walked through quite often. For me, it’s uncomfortably close. They were people I could have walked by, distractedly smiled at as we tried to keep our slightly bored children in line. It could have been us.
I’m just so tired of Americans not being able to go anywhere without the threat of a mass shooting. We can’t go to school, the grocery store, the park, concerts, the hospital, work, 4th of July parades. I’m tired of not feeling safe. I’m tired of not even being able to grieve the people lost in one shooting before another one happens.
I don’t know how to end this post, so I asked my husband, who unsurprisingly is handling this much better than I am. He said, “Well, we lived.”
We lived this time.
Rorye Hatcher 