SURVIVORS’ ADVICE
Victims of prior incidents say steps should be taken
On the subject of terror, their voices echo the loudest. They have seen what terror looks like up close. It’s almost unimaginable to comprehend, but for them it’s all too real.
After three mass shootings in less than 30 days where 34 men, women and children have lost their lives, these survivors are speaking up and offering their thoughts on this epidemic that has poisoned our collective souls.
Debby Allen sees the faces of the victims, especially the young ones, and thinks about her own son, Christopher Roybal, who was shot and killed in the Las Vegas massacre during a country music concert in 2017.
Roybal was a Navy combat veteran who survived multiple tours in Afghanistan, only to be cut down by a seemingly never-ending rain of bullets fired by a madman from the window of a nearby hotel.
Before the eruption of gunfire, Allen and her son were enjoying the music when Christopher decided to get some drinks. Minutes later, he was gone, murdered along with 57 others.
“It’s hard for me to come up with thoughts on how to prevent these horrific events,” Allen tells me. “There was a day when parents were allowed to parent and God was allowed to be named. Most children did not start their lives on antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs. I’ve been sick with worry about the future of our country and what that means for the children I have left.”
Julie Dove got shot that night in Las Vegas. The bullet struck her left shoulder and then traveled across her back and wound up embedded in her neck. Through some miracle, she wasn’t killed or paralyzed.
She tells me that although she’s in favor of commonsense gun laws, like the 10round magazine limit for rifles, the issue for her goes deeper than firearms.
“We need more mental health facilities and they should be subsidized,” Dove says. “These are well thought out methodical murders from people who seem to show no emotion. They look like they’re playing a video game. But to the rest of us whose lives have been shattered or forever changed, it’s not a game.”
Erin Stordeur DeRusha was also at the Route 91 concert and barely escaped with her life.
“We live in such a selfserving disconnected society,” DeRusha tells me. “One can interact with other humans on the internet, but not in a face to face way that brings any sort of humanness to their words and actions … we all have to be vigilant and aware of the people around us and pull our collective selves out from behind our phones and computers if this is ever going to change.”
Here in Boston, survivors of the Boston Marathon bombings are also weighing in on America’s terror crisis. Melida Arredondo was at the finish line with her husband, Carlos Arredondo, when two pressure cooker bombs tore through the crowd killing 8-year-old Martin Richard, 29-year-old Krystle Campbell and 23-year-old Lingzi Lu and injuring hundreds more in April 2013.
Watching the television coverage of the most recent tragedies has rocked Arredondo to her core.
“The shootings, especially the one clearly targeting Latino people in El Paso, has upset me greatly,” she says. “After having experienced the Boston bombing firsthand, which was designed to be a mass casualty event, this ongoing violence undermines a sense of safety, especially among minority groups.”
Marathon bombing survivor Anton Spaans lost some of his hearing as the result of those deafening explosions at the finish line. He’s sick of all the political rhetoric and demands a solution.
“(Our politicians) need to truly discuss what can be done, put all options on the table,” he tells me. “Including topics that may be hard for folks on either side of the aisle, from looking for better ways to prevent people from pulling the trigger to a re-examination of the Second Amendment. I’m not hopeful that will happen soon.”
That makes two of us.