Wilkinsburg moving on after shooting

trained.”

Wilkinsburg police Chief Ophelia “Cookie” Coleman said she perceived that professionalism as soon as she got to the scene that night.

“As bad as that situation was, I knew — the moment I arrived — that we were in good hands,” she said. “Everyone that came — and we had six or seven, maybe nine agencies that night — and we performed as if we had worked with each other all the time. Everything was in sync, very respectful for the victims, the families and the residents. For as bad as it was, there was no chaos at all.

“But nobody prepares for this. Every officer that was there, you could see on his or her face, the meaning of what had just happened, that this was surreal.”

The department made counseling available to any officer who might have been haunted by the scene, but she couldn’t say whether any had sought it.

“It affected me,” she said. “How an innocent thing like a barbecue can end up as a massacre. But it doesn’t stop us. We can say, ‘Yes this happened,’ but we have to keep moving.

“When that happened, that horrific night, we were all devastated, simply because we had always worked as a community. We felt that we were the victims as well, because that could have happened in Squirrel Hill, that could have happened in Fox Chapel, that could have happened in Mt. Lebanon, that could have happened anywhere. No one that was involved lived in Wilkinsburg.”

The chief is proud of her community and her department. She points to the state-of-the-art tools — acquired through grants — available to every officer, and the extensive training they go through. There are outreach programs that are cultivating relations in the schools and the streets. Wilkinsburg, she said, is strong. “This wasn’t something for the community to come together for, because we already were coming together,” she said of the shootings’ aftermath. “And that’s why we didn’t crumble.”

“I knew how it would reflect on Wilkinsburg,” said Mr. Morris, who can recall the gangs that ravaged the borough in the 1990s. “I knew everybody would say, ‘There goes Wilkinsburg again.’ But this wasn’t Wilkinsburg. This was brought into Wilkinsburg.

“We have to show people that we are more than what that shooting was. The shooting did not bring us together. We were together before that.”

Coming together

“Our neighbors have been family here and they have been for a very long time,” she said. “This has always been my home. And this place — not this house, necessarily — I couldn’t leave. I understand the rap that Wilkinsburg has. But at the same time, I can’t fathom it.”

“The worst thing that could have happened is if Julie would have left that house and it would have sat vacant and abandoned,” Mr. Morris said. “It would have become like a haunted house.

“But Bill and Linda Knapp, two of the most beautiful people you could meet, they did a lot of fellowship on the street. That’s why it’s so strange that something so hideous could happen at such a beautiful place. [Maybe] it’s the only house that could absorb such a horrible thing. That’s Bill and Linda’s house. That’s not the house where there was a massacre. That’s Bill and Linda Knapp’s house.”