Community feels loss and discovers hope
Those who knew victims of mass shooting seek to regain normalcy at Floresville game
FLORESVILLE — She carried the ribbons in a large plastic freezer bag. When the evening began it contained hundreds of them, all neatly clipped and folded and affixed to safety pins by booster club mothers the night before.
Someone in town had decided the ribbons should be white, because it symbolizes hope. Mendy Kiolbassa liked that idea.
Still, as she pinned those ribbons onto one member of the Mighty Tiger Band after another, she could not help looking up into the bleachers at Eschenburg Field and feeling a sense of loss.
“The Holcombes would have been up there,” Kiolbassa said. “Tara and Hailey would have been up there. That little boy would have been in the band. It’s emotional.”
Twelve miles of road stretch between Floresville High School and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where a gunman killed 26 people and wounded 20 others during a worship service last Sunday.
Tight-knit community
But in a place like this, it is futile to try to determine where one community ends and the next one begins, because that is not how it works. The eight members of the beloved Holcombe family who died in the rampage did not belong to just a single church or a single town. Neither did Tara McNulty, the spunky freckle-faced woman who lost her life in the attack that sent her children, Hailey and James, to the hospital.
Those victims left holes all over Wilson County, and one huge one was felt at a football game. More than 5,000 mourners and celebrants congregated to watch Floresville play Southside on Friday night, and the rite served as both an attempt to return to normalcy and an acknowledgment they probably never will.
Joseph and Stephanie Flores realized that right away. Like dozens of other proud parents, they were on the field as part of senior night festivities Friday, standing with their son Joshua Herrera, a Floresville linebacker.
Five days earlier, Herrera had called them from his job at Whataburger. His girlfriend, Dakota Ramsey, was in a panic. Word about the shooting had begun to spread, and Ramsey knew her grandparents, Ricardo and Therese Rodriguez, had attended church in Sutherland Springs that morning.
Both of them died in the attack.
“We cried, we prayed, we cried some more, and we still cry,” Stephanie Flores said.
As she spoke near the steps leading up to the grandstands, a dad and a toddler walked by, trying to get to their seats.
“Look at him,” Flores said, nodding at the 3-year-old boy. “You think about how adorable he is. And you know there’s another one who’s not able to come today. It’s sad.”
Even so, they all cheered when their Tigers took a threetouchdown lead, and they kept cheering even when the visiting Southside Cardinals came back to win 36-28. As the band played Floresville’s alma mater, weary Tigers coach Andrew Rohrs acknowledged he was not quite sure how his team had made it through the week.
“You don’t really have any training for something like this,” Rohrs said. “All we tried to do was give them something normal.”
That, of course, was impossible. But everyone tried Friday, from the women at the folding table selling JROTC raffle tickets, to the parents working in the concession stand, to the band members playing “Amazing Grace” at halftime, to the flag-waving girls in the color guard.
In charge of the color guard is Kim Cathey. Almost two decades ago, one of her favorite girls in the group was McNulty, who Cathey said “had perfect little cheeks and was a hard worker and a good student. She was just lovely.”
Words to live by
Before the color guard’s halftime performance, Cathey thought of McNulty and her two kids, and she gave her squad an impromptu pep talk.
“I told them to make sure you live every day, appreciate every moment and don’t have any regrets,” Cathey said. “I told them to tell the people you love that you love them.”
Cathey did not know this, but in the grandstands, there was a woman who appreciated that message more than most.
Becky Braune raised her two sons in Floresville, and like many Wilson County boys, they grew to see Bryan Holcombe as a mentor.
Holcombe, an associate pastor at First Baptist Church, took kids to camps to the Frio River, taught them how to hunt and fish and, in the words of one mother, “how to be a man.” Braune remains thankful to Holcombe for that.
But seven years ago, she said, one of her sons “walked down the aisle and out of our lives.” He settled in Austin with his new wife, and refused to see his mother. Since the wedding, he called her only twice. She had never met her grandchildren.
Last Sunday, though, Braune’s son called. He had heard about the rampage in Sutherland Springs, and knew his mother used to attend church there, and worried she was one of the victims.
She was not. But that call led to a long overdue conversation, and a son told his mother he loved her, and she told her son she loved him, too.
Friday, they spent the day together in Floresville for the first time in seven years. They grieved for the Holcombes, including Bryan, one of the victims. They lamented that it had taken this long to reconnect, and that, as Braune said, “it was all because of that horrible tragedy.”
Emotional reconciliation
Then her son drove back to Austin, and Braune went to the football game. When she walked up to the bleachers, she was greeted by an old friend who, as usual, asked if she had heard from her long-estranged son.
And there, on a cold aluminum step, under bright Friday night lights, surrounded by people wearing white ribbons symbolizing hope, Braune hugged her friend and cried.
“A miracle has happened,” she said.