Impact of Uvalde will linger

Mass shooting survivors continue to endure the pain years later.

On a sunny Sunday morning in the fall of 2017, a Stockdale volunteer firefighter stepped inside a small country church east of San Antonio and encountered the unimaginable. As a first responder, Rusty Duncan had dealt with pain, suffering and trauma, but nothing had prepared him for the horror he saw inside the bullet-riddled sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.

Duncan walked slowly down the center aisle, he would later explain to a member of this board, taking note of blood-washed bodies, 26 in all, sprawled across and under bulletriddled pews, huddled up against one wall, lying atop one another in the aisle at his feet. Near the front of the church, he paused beside a stack of bodies. He felt a slight tug on his pant leg.

Startled, he looked down and saw the pale hand of a small child reaching out from beneath a woman’s body. Pinned beneath the stepmother who had died trying to save him, 5-year-old Ryland Ward was alive, critically injured but alive. The lifeless bodies of a stepsister and a half-sister lay near their mother. Gingerly gathering the little boy in his arms, his blood-soaked body limp like a rag doll, Duncan carried him outside into the sun.

Two months later, a big, red fire truck led a procession of police and fire vehicles, sirens wailing and horns blasting, from University Hospital in San Antonio to Sutherland Springs. Behind the wheel of the lead truck was Duncan. In the passenger seat was a blonde-haired little boy, smiling and waving through the open window at well-wishers lining the road near the church. Ryland was home.

Nearly five years have passed. This week, 10-year-old Ryland will be back in the hospital for surgery, as doctors continue working to repair massive damage done by the AR-15 bullets that burrowed into his body in five different places. It will be his 31st surgical procedure. His 31st.

“It’s crazy to me to see a child so young and so small go through something so tragic but still be strong,” Ryland’s mother, Chancie McMahan, told KSAT-TV in San Antonio.

McMahan said her son’s nightmares have gotten worse. She said the Uvalde shooting triggered his PTSD.

“It brought up memories from him being put through what he went through,” she said. “He saw everything and remembers it.”

A little boy in a tiny Texas town, seeing and remembering, represents a steadily growing number of men, women and children in towns and cities across the nation who have seen and who can’t help remembering. According to statistics compiled by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, they are witness to episodes of gun violence that kills roughly 40,000 Americans a year, including suicides by gun, a death rate from guns that’s 13 times higher than that of other highincome countries. They’re among approximately 85,000 who are shot and wounded every year. Since 2009, more than 2,000 people have been killed or wounded in mass shootings alone.

Survivors suffer. After the TV satellite trucks rumble away, after the nation’s horrified attention reverts to everyday life — until the next mass shooting — they remain to cope with physical pain and injury, with PTSD and depression, with ongoing financial burdens and steep medical costs and an inability to resume the lives they once knew. (Ryland, for example, can’t run the way he used to. A bullet shattered a growth plate in his leg, and the leg isn’t growing the way it normally would.)

Across the country, these are the “secondary injuries,” writes Elizabeth Williamson, author of a new book about the aftermath of Sandy Hook, where an 18-year-old shooter killed 20 first-graders and six educators in 2012.

“Newtown,” she writes in “Sandy Hook: American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,” “knows how the damage to bodies and lives radiates outward like fallout for years after a mass shooting, scarring a community in ways outsiders do not often see.” (An excerpt is published in the current issue of The Atlantic.)

From Newtown to Parkland, from Charleston to Thousand Oaks, from El Paso to Santa Fe , from Buffalo to Uvalde, those “secondary injuries” are part of the grim legacy burdening a nation that refuses to come to terms with a virulent national obsession with guns. It’s a grotesque obsession that disturbs and bewilders many Americans, as well as the rest of the world.

Ongoing injury also is the legacy elected officials choose for themselves when they mumble practiced pieties and suggest absurd “solutions” to the public health crisis we face — and then do nothing. Stiff-necked politicians hear the persistent pleas from constituents and the impolitic questions from reporters, and then scurry away.

In Santa Fe, where eight students and two teachers were shot to death four years ago, survivors, family members and school officials remember promises made by Gov. Greg Abbott and other elected officials. Politicians offered assurances they would take action to make sure that a mass shooting never happened again. Abbott formed an advisory committee — and pretty much ignored its recommendations.

Santa Fe resident Rhonda Hart lost her daughter Kimberly. What happened in Uvalde reignites the pain that never fully heals, she told KHOU-11 last week. “People won’t understand the pain it is until it happens to them, and I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

She’s also angry that we have allowed it to happen again. “I feel very much like a duck right now,” she said. “I’m cool and collected on the outside, and underneath I’m paddling like crazy and mad as hell.”

In February, U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez in San Antonio found in favor of 84 Sutherland Springs plaintiffs, ruling that the Air Force was primarily responsible for the worst mass shooting in Texas history when it failed to supply information about the shooter’s criminal history to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Rodriguez approved a multimillion-dollar settlement, thus providing a measure of relief to those survivors and family members who face a lifetime of steep medical costs, who can’t work for the rest of their lives, who can’t shake the mental and emotional trauma.

Just last week, the Justice Department appealed, which means that any justice for the Sutherland Springs group is months, if not years, away — if it ever comes at all.

Meanwhile, a grieving community on the western edge of the Texas Hill Country looks toward the ordeal that has afflicted a tiny community east of San Antonio for nearly five years.

In Sutherland Springs a little girl who ran like the wind will never walk normally again because of a debilitating foot injury. A retired Marine experiences what feels like torture; “I can’t turn it off,” he says. A young man paralyzed from the waist down lives with his wife and daughter in a mobile home where the hallway is too narrow for his wheelchair. An adult daughter can no longer work full time; her elderly mother, grievously wounded in the shooting, requires her constant care. A suddenly single father struggles to braid his daughter’s long, blond hair, even as he helps her cope with the loss of her mother (who was pregnant), her grandparents, three stepsiblings, an uncle and an infant cousin. And a tough little guy who came home from the hospital in a fire truck needs all the strength and toughness he can muster.

Uvalde will have its own stories. So will the next town and the next — until the American people get fed up with craven politicians and acolytes of the NRA and take it upon themselves to demand that their leaders act — or to elect new leaders who will.