Each one counted
They were more than statistics, and their loss lessens us all
None pioneered a lifestyle like Hugh Hefner, rocked like Chuck Berry or made ’em laugh like Jerry Lewis. ❚ Those who died this year in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs and a dozen other places are familiar to us only because of how they died: One of their fellow citizens wanted to kill — publicly, suddenly, often randomly — in massacres that shocked a nation seemingly inured to gun violence. ❚ But, like the more famous departed whom the news media memorialize this month, the hundreds of victims of 2017’s mass shootings deserve to be remembered at year’s end.
We know them, if at all, through posthumous tributes dominated by clichés. To judge from these platitudes, the victims all would give you the shirt off their back. All were the life of the party. All had a smile that lit up the room. All loved kids and dogs.
These generalities, well intended and understandable, make the deceased all seem the same. Which is how a tragedy becomes a statistic.
Yet these individuals had their own talents, accomplishments, hopes, plans, flaws and quirks. They left behind classrooms, delivery routes,
farms, teams and homes; the victims of the Las Vegas shooting had 87 children.
If their biographical details are less exalted than those of the year’s celebrated dead, they’re no less precious.
Precious as the laugh of Tony Cross, 33, killed with seven others at a cookout in Plano, Texas, by a man whose victims included his estranged wife.
Rachel Vinyard, 32, knew Cross for more than half her life. “The world needed a Tony Cross,” she told the Austin American-Statesman.
And the world needed a “Big Mike” Lefiti, a UPS driver gunned down at a depot in San Francisco by a co-worker who shot four others, killing two.
Lefiti was a delivery man out of Frank Capra’s fonder dreams: honking if he saw you walking down the street, trading gossip, offering to pick up lunch.
Nelson Barry, a lawyer on Lefiti’s route, recalled how he’d greet people by name and ask about their families — including pets. “No one can fill the hole he left,” Barry said.
And the world needed a Sandy Casey, a Manhattan Beach, Calif., special ed teacher who was killed with 58 others in Las Vegas when a gunman fired from a high-rise hotel into a concert crowd across the street.
She had the knack, hard to define and harder not to admire, of getting through to students, including a girl who’d spoken barely a word. Casey’s reward: a seashell her student decorated with glitter.
“Now I have a gap to fill,” Casey’s fiancé, Chris Willemse, said at her funeral. “That gap will never be filled.”
Missing people, missing places
That lament spans the generations. “Who’s going to play UNO with us now?” asked the granddaughter of Terry Andres, 62, of Virginia Beach. He was killed at Fort Lauderdale’s airport by a man with a history of mental illness who flew in from Alaska and shot 11 people, killing five.
Who will lead the way like James Dunlop, “the glue that held all the friends together … the successful one you wanted to be like,’’ his friend Jonathan Harvey told the University of Texas-Dallas Mercury. “He made you feel you need to work harder, because he would go out and buy a house, and all of the rest of us would be like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re supposed to do that as adults now.’ ’’
Dunlop was another of those killed at the Plano party. He was 29.
Who will fill Benson Louie’s position in nine-man volleyball? Louie, 50, one of the slain San Francisco UPS men, excelled in a version of the game invented in Holyoke, Mass., in 1895. Missionaries took volleyball to China, where it evolved (lower net, larger court, more players) into a version that was brought here by Chinese immigrants.
Since players don’t rotate in nineman, their skills become more specialized. As a defender on the left side of the back line, Louie was expert at digging — keeping the ball in the air — even if it meant diving on the asphalt. “He was known for his bleeding knees,” recalled his friend, Henry Lam.
A decade ago, interest in the sport was waning in the Chinese-American community. So Louie and Lam started a program with a few high school kids; now the city has seven teams, some of which play around the nation and world.
Who will ring the cowbell at Anchorage hockey games like Dorene Anderson, former treasurer of the group that calls itself the Cowbell Crew? She died in the Las Vegas shooting. She was 49.
Her many friends remembered her at a vigil outside the local hockey arena in a way she would have appreciated: They rang their cowbells.
The Rothschild, Wis., branch of Marathon Savings Bank lost its beloved manager when Diane “Dee-Dee” Look was gunned down by a man who killed one of her tellers. She was 67. She had a nice word for everyone, and she always had treats for dogs, such as Antoinette Krzensinski’s pooch, Patches.
When she learned of the shooting, Jami Miller thought of how Look had helped her children set up savings accounts and patiently counted the change from their piggy banks. Without her, she wrote on a funeral website, “something as ordinary as banking will no longer be the same.”
Nor will a visit to the public library in Clovis, N.M., where an angry high school student killed two librarians and wounded four other people.
Children’s librarian Krissie Carter, 48, was “the smiling face my daughter always looked forward to seeing,” according to a parent, John Mead.
She’d start her toddlers group with a song called “Goood Moooorning, Have a Happy Day!” Susana Mendoza, a mother whose kid was in the group, still finds herself humming it and thinking of Miss Krissie.
Some memories offer consolation: Caleb Edwards, 25, a Plano casualty, laughing at a bad joke because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings; Michelle MacFayden, 55, killed in a shooting spree in Rancho Tehoma, Calif., riding a tricycle around the office.
Sometimes the irony is too bitter. Kevin Lawson survived service with the 82nd Airborne in the Gulf War, only to be shot to death, along with four others, by a former co-worker at an RV awning manufacturer where he worked outside Orlando. He was 46.
It’s said over and over after each shooting: The victim “would do anything for you.”
Usually, it’s figuratively true. Leisa Kugler recalled the time some branches fell on her roof, and she was too scared of heights to clear them herself.
She called her older sister, Peggy Lynn Warden, who climbed up instead.
Sometimes, it’s literally true. Warden’s 18-year-old grandson said she shielded his body with hers from gunfire in the invasion of First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas. The grandson lived; the grandmother died, along with 24 others, one of whom was pregnant. Warden was 56.
In Texas, a ‘wicked scheme’
Bryan Holcombe, 60, a lay minister, was scheduled to preach that day. He was born to preach; according to family lore, his first word was “God,” and his first sentence “See the light.”
He met his wife, Karla, in high school. One day, when a student group was raising money by selling roses, he had one sent to her in each class. He grew into a burly man with a white beard. His Sunday church outfit consisted of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Bryan and Karla sat in the fifth pew from the front, on the left.
He earned his living making tarps for livestock trailers, but his passion was Scripture. He favored the Holman Christian Standard Bible and would debate its merits with another congregant, Stormy Choate, who preferred the King James translation.
On Oct. 8, before reading the day’s scriptural passage, he told the congregation how “spirit-filled” the church had felt the previous Sunday night during a performance by a women’s gospel singing group. Then, he said, he woke the next day to learn what had happened in Las Vegas. He said the problem was not God’s design but the human heart: “Man gets involved, and our wicked nature takes over.” Citing the Book of Proverbs, he said the Lord hates seven things, including “a heart that plots wicked schemes.”
He was going to preach Nov. 5 because the pastor was away. But someone entered the church behind him. Someone with a heart that plotted wicked schemes. Someone with a gun.
Seconds later, he was dead, as were seven other members of his extended family, including the one to whom he once sent roses.
These individuals had their own talents, accomplishments, hopes, plans, flaws and quirks. They left behind classrooms, delivery routes, farms, teams and homes and children.