CONFOUNDED BY HATE
Local woman was in Buffalo and would have been a victim if not for a nap
POTTSTOWN » A year or so ago, Whittina Gregory would not have lain down on the sofa, even though she was tired.
“I would have pushed through it, because that’s how I am,” she said.
But she said she is trying to listen to her body more, so she laid on the sofa for 20 minutes.
That nap likely saved her life and the life of her niece.
Gregory, a Pottstown resident, was in Buffalo, N.Y., to visit her mother, who had had a stroke, when chaos broke out at the local grocery store.
The day before the May 14 massacre took place at the Tops Friendly Market grocery store in a majority Black neighborhood in Buffalo, Gregory and her niece, a Buffalo resident, were at that same store to return bottles. (New York has a 5-cent deposit on bottles.)
“I told my niece when I get home from the hospital Saturday, ‘I will take you to the supermarket again and we will return more bottles,’ but the strangest feeling came over me when I left the hospital and I got very, very tired,” Gregory told a small gathering at Bethel Community Church of Pottstown Friday.
“I decided to listen to my body and I laid down for 20 minutes,” Gregory said. “I thank God for that tiredness because if I had not laid down, my niece and myself would be two more victims. We would have been standing right there at the entrance when he started firing.
“When I got the news, I just threw my hands up in the air and said ‘thank you, Lord,’” Gregory said. “My cousin looked at me and said ‘thank you, Lord?’ And I told her what had happened, a
single tear came out of her eye and she said ‘thank God you laid down.’”
Gregory and her niece were evidently in the store Friday at the same time the shooter was getting his bearings for the next day’s horror.
“My cousin said ‘God was not only looking out for you Saturday, but Friday too’,” Gregory recounted.
Thirteen were shot, 10 of them dead.
Of the 13 shot, 11 were Black. That is not random.
The Pottstown Ministerium Communities of Faith held a prayer service at Bethel Community Church honoring the Buffalo victims and others targeted by mass shootings at cultural gatherings. “Father, help us understand, most of all to trust you, to send us some justice,” prayed the Rev. Lori Hutchinson, associate pastor at Bethel.
“I am confounded by the prospect of how you legislate against hate,” said Gregory Scott.
It’s likely to be more than a rhetorical question for him. In February, Scott stepped down as a district judge in Norristown to run for the newly created 54th District seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He won the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
“It’s not just at Tops,” Scott said. “I’m talking about a group of Delaware State University athletes pulled off their bus because of the color of their skin; having their bags searched like a bunch of thugs instead of the educated kings and queens that they are.”
Georgia sheriff’s deputies pulled the bus over in April and searched the bags in an incident that has drawn national outrage.
“I’m talking about the people in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who gathered to worship together and were killed,” Scott said. That shooting took place on Oct. 27, 2018, when 11 people were shot to death, including a 97-yearold woman.
“I’m talking about killings at a Bible study group at Mother Emanuel. A young man walked in and opened fire,” Scott said. On
“We must resist attempts to rationalize irrational behavior. I hear people say ‘well, he was only 18.’ Well, 18 was old enough to case out the joint the day before the shooting; 18 was old enough to write a manifesto, document his actions and livestream it; 18 was old enough to know that the majority of people shot were elderly and the significance of what that means in the AfricanAmerican community.”
—Gregory Scott
the night of June 17, 2015, a 21-year-old man entered the predominantly black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., and opened fire on a Bible study group, killing nine parishioners.
“I’m talking about Geneva, California, where a man was welcomed, broke bread with the people there, then glued the doors shut, chained the doors shut and opened fire, slaughtering an innocent,” said Scott.
One day after the shootings in Buffalo, another occurred in Laguna Woods, Calif., but John Cheng, a 52-year-old doctor, tackled the shooter and others in the Geneva Presbyterian Church were able to disarm and “hog-tie” the shooter. The Taiwanese church held services in the Geneva building and the shooting occurred during a lunch reception of largely elderly congregants to celebrate a Taiwanese pastor’s return from a mission trip in Taiwan.
John Cheng died from gunshot wounds and five others were injured. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office has indicated the victims in that shooting are a 66-year-old male, a 92-yearold male, an 82-year-old male, a 75-year-old male and an 82-year-old male, all of Asian descent.
Cheng was in the prayers of those at the Pottstown service Friday as well.
“John Cheng rushed at the shooter and lost his life, but as a result, he saved the lives of many,” said the Rev. Vernon Ross, Bethel’s pastor.
And so we return to the question.
“How do you legislate against hate when it’s so deep?” Scott wondered. “We’re confounded.”
Ross knows a thing or two about deep-rooted hatred. He grew up in central Mississippi where he said hatred was the norm.
“It was one of the things we had to endure,” Ross explained. “As kids, it was hard to understand why we were such hated people.”
The teams at his high school were interracial and none of the hotels or restaurants would allow them to have season banquets there.
But where there is hate, there is also, sometimes, hope.
It was a Jewish summer camp that allowed the interracial teams to gather for a meal and celebrate their successes. Ross said many years later he sees and embraces the irony of sharing the church space with Temple Heshed Shel Emet.
“I feel so blessed to be able to share this space with you and our Jewish brothers and sisters,” he said.
Nevertheless, more than blessings must be considered.
“We must resist attempts to rationalize irrational behavior,” said Scott. “I hear people say ‘well, he was only 18.’ Well, 18 was old enough to case out the joint the day before the shooting; 18 was old enough to write a manifesto, document his actions and livestream it; 18 was old enough to know that the majority of people shot were elderly and the significance of what that means in the African-American community,” he said.
“It is OK to not be OK. “This is unthinkable. Give yourself space to breathe,” Scott said. “This is trauma.”
Many of those who spoke at the Friday afternoon service in Bethel still seemed to be in shock.
Karen Strother said her fiancé grew up in Buffalo “and he still is having trouble processing it. I think he’s still traumatized.”
That trauma can still be found in Bethel’s sanctuary as well, said Ross.
In 2021, the Pottstown Ministerium had a meeting with Pottstown Police Chief Michael Markovich about gun violence “and he told us things weren’t too bad. Then, in the immediate aftermath of that conversation, there were three or four shootings in Pottstown,” Ross said.
One of them, in October of that year, was a murder/ suicide. Carla Thornton was beaten and shot by her husband, Edward Thornton, who then shot himself.
“She was a member of our church,” Ross said. “That Sunday, she had been in church like always and the next day she was dead, killed by her husband. That death shook our congregation. It is still shaking our congregation.”
The entire world has been shaken by Russia’s brazen invasion of Ukraine and prayers were offered for those victims of war as well.
Cathy Skitko offered that her son was engaged to a woman from Ukraine and shortly after their engagement in January, they decided to marry quickly as the violence escalated.
“He told me, ‘I love her mom, and I want to spend the rest of my life with her, why wait?’” Skitko recounted.
After several attempts, his wife and mother-inlaw were able to escape the fighting and a woman in Poland took them in. Now Skitko’s son is working to get his wife her visa so he can bring her to the U.S., but they do not yet know what will happen to her mother.
Larry Cohen visited Ukraine when he worked for the U.S. State Department and his grandfather left the country as a 5-yearold boy.
“I think of all who have died, all the people who have no home to return to and have become permanent refugees,” said Cohen. “They have lost loved ones, they are hurt and wounded and they will probably never recover. All these tears have been spilled for no good reason.”
Citing the Bible verse Micah, 6:8, Ross urged all to “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”
And that means at the polls as well.
“This is an important time in the life of Pennsylvania and the country,” said Ross. “We need voters to speak loudly about the kind of leaders they would like to have. We must remind those leaders they are elected to serve all the people, not just one class, not just one color.”
Then, perhaps, Strother’s dark foreshadowing will not come true.
“It’s hard, I know it’s hard,” she said after the service. “But what we’re talking about, it’s happened before. And I know we’re going to be talking about this again.”