Six months after ‘the incident,’ a little town and country church cope
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS — On a sunny Sunday after church, I’m walking behind a young man rolling himself in his wheelchair along a newly built wooden ramp. He comes to a ridge in the boards and hesitates; I reach for the handgrips to give him a slight push.
“Whoa!” he exclaims. “I wasn’t ready for that.”
During the past six months of his life, 34-year-old Kris Workman, married and the father of a little girl, has had to get used to a lot of things he wasn’t ready for. On a Sunday morning six months ago, he was one of about 50 worshippers at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs when a gunman stormed into the little sanctuary and started spraying bullets from an AR-15. Twenty-six people died that morning, including children, including three generations of one family. Workman, shot in the back as he huddled under a pew, was left paralyzed from the waist down. Absent the miracle his mother fervently expects, this former college tennis player will use a wheelchair the rest of his life.
“I don’t have nightmares; I don’t have PTSD symptoms,” he told me the other day. “I guess the one regret I have is not being able to run and play with my daughter.”
The crush of media that overwhelmed this little town east of San Antonio has gone away. The huge satellite trucks have lumbered on to the next disaster, the next tragedy. Gaggles of intrusive print reporters juggling notebooks and tape recorders, broadcast reporters wielding microphones and cameras, are no longer accosting people after church or at the Valero station across the highway or at their front doors.
A few reporters have lingered, seeking to capture, if you will, the rest of the story. We want to know how this community copes long-term with suffering in the wake of outrage, disaster, tragedy (whatever the word should be). We want to know whether good
can emerge from such a deep well of pain. Is there anything a little town and a country church can teach the rest of us?
As one of those reporters who returns periodically to this quiet, unassuming community — and who tries not to be too intrusive with his questions — I’ve come to realize this one thing: When fickle public attention eventually gets distracted, when the White House and the National Rifle Association and good-hearted donors from around the world move on, residents and church members won’t be. When they wake up in the morning, when they go to bed at night, they live with “the incident” (the generic term they’ve come to use for the deadliest mass shooting at a place of worship in American history). Like residents of West, the little Central Texas town that experienced a deadly fertilizer-plant explosion five years ago, or like Gulf Coast Texans in the wake of Harvey, moving on, literally or figuratively, is not that simple.
Faith sees them through
I think of Workman, of course, who was able to return to his job with a San Antoniobased computing company only a couple of weeks ago. (He’s also the church worship leader.) I think of his mother, Julie Workman, who was under that pew with her son and survived. Both insist that their faith will see them through.
I think also of David Colbath, a lay minister at the church who has worked in construction for most of his life. Colbath, 46, was sitting in the pew nearest the shooter when he burst in and started firing. Bullets riddled his arm and hand, burrowed into his chest and buttocks. A bullet remains lodged in his side near his heart. He’s still undergoing physical therapy and will be for months.
He’s also undergoing therapy of a different sort as he copes with the memories of a Houston Chronicle morning “when bullets were flying all over” and for the nightmares that visit him at night. Encouraging his fellow survivors not to be reluctant to get help, he tells them about the therapist at Brooke Army Medical Center who counsels veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Warriors have sat in that same chair you’re sitting in,” the therapist told Colbath. “They’ve seen much violence. They’re the toughest men in America, and they were bawling.”
Cobath’s message is that there’s no shame in seeking help.
Garcias know everybody
I think also of Oscar and Alice Garcia, longtime Sutherland Springs residents who weren’t members of the church at the time of the shooting but who know everybody in town. Alice was born and raised in Sutherland Springs and remembers as a kid playing basketball in the quiet streets and attending Vacation Bible School at the church, even though she and her family were Catholic. “People still hung their clothes on clotheslines,” she recalls.
On that Sunday, they were leaving their church in nearby La Vernia when they began to get frantic texts about a shooting in Sutherland Springs. Arriving back home a few minutes later, they ran to the church, saw with horror what had happened and then, desperately looking for some way to help, opened the door of the local community center. The old building a couple of blocks from the church became the heart of the community every day for the next couple of weeks.
Usually a place for birthday parties, family reunions and annual festivals, the center became an impromptu meeting spot for families affected by the shooting and then a place for receiving donations, food and flowers. First responders and anyone else in the community came by for meals at all hours of the day.
The Garcias, both in their 40s, would stay until midnight and be back the next morning at 7. Oscar, who delivers septic tanks for a company in nearby Floresville, juggled his job and his duties at the center.
“We were looking for a ministry, and we became the ministers,” he told me last week. They switched their memberships to the little church nearby that needed so much in those first few weeks.
Finding life’s purpose
“I believed in God,” Alice said, “but I can say my love for God has grown significantly. I found out what my purpose in life was. To serve others.”
More than a century ago, Sutherland Springs was a place of healing. In the early 1900s, people rode trains out from San Antonio to bathe in and drink the mineral waters of nearby Cibolo Creek. Alice and Oscar Garcia would like to think that in the wake of unspeakable tragedy, their little town again will be a place of healing — for townspeople, the church and for others far beyond Sutherland Springs. From both the community’s sorrow and its strength, they pray that good can emerge.