If I Don’t Make It, I Love You

ON THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2018 7:57 a.m. I sent an email to Melinda Benton, one of the professors present at the time of the Umpqua Community College (UCC) shooting. Connecting with survivors at UCC was challenging. Out of the twenty individuals I reached out to (some of which were vocal on social media) most never returned my queries. But it was when I connected with Lori Shontz, a journalism instructor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and coproducer of the project Reporting Roseburg, that I was able to make contact with the first UCC survivor, Melinda Benton.

Melinda and I exchanged a few emails before we set a date and time to talk. Over the phone, Melinda told me she got her new office because her colleague was shot and killed. She talked about how Snyder Hall was torn down, and its place, a new building, similar to the original hall was built. People don’t realize that after a shooting the buildings come down. They don’t realize how hard it is to go back to those buildings even after they’ve been rebuilt. My stomach dropped. Is it like going to school on a gravesite?

The sadness is perpetual. Melinda confirms this in her essay, Then I see a mother, my word how the memory of her still makes me cry, who quietly slips under the ribbon meant to keep out everyone but staff and students, and she is dressed as if for Sunday church.

Like Melinda, Kindra, a student present at the time of the UCC shooting, echoes the ripple effect of memory. I first connected with Kindra after reading her illustrated comic about grief after a school shooting. I was moved by the images, a self-portrait of how one heals in the aftermath of such trauma. She draws a young girl, herself, next to the ticking clock. A metaphor for pain. I message her through Facebook asking if she’d be interested in talking about expanding on her comic for our book. A few days goes by. I anxiously wait for her to respond. When she does, my response is reflex.

Over the phone she tells me how gunfire broke the quietness of the campus. Later in her essay she would describe the noise like a plank of wood clattering to the ground. Her voice changes. She’s out of breath. And suddenly I’m running with her down the nature path where her friends were going to seek safety from the shooting. She says she ran with them for a minute, picking my way through the tall dried grass and sliding haphazardly down the steep incline. If we made it a solid twenty feet down, we’d be right on the natural platform where I had sat for my Illustrating Nature class the previous spring. But then she slows down. I slow down. I couldn’t do it, I realized. And she decided to head back up the incline.

I was frustrated, she told me. When she got back up the incline some students thought it was joke. They didn’t know at the time how many students had died. Suddenly everyone was ushered inside my sociology classroom. Inside, people she never saw before. Some were making jokes about how terrible the emergency plan for the school was. Then sirens sounded. She says, I was still trying to catch my breath. At that time the students in that classroom were unaware that the assistant English teacher, Lawrence Levin, was dead, as were many others. Some of which the shooter made beg for their lives. Or how six minutes after the initial 911 call, the Roseburg Police Department engaged in a short shoot-out with the shooter, who subsequently committed suicide.

In six minutes this small town of Roseburg, Oregon, became national news. She says, a friend had a major news network message him on Facebook as the shooting was unfolding and asked for a statement. The audacity. And still media was trying to access survivors during vigils held after the shooting. We’re trying to grieve here, he said.

Before we end our call, Kindra says, I wish I could say it ended there. She continued to explore this theme of memory and recovery in her graphic novel piece. She writes, sometimes I can’t get a moment of quiet, only when I can’t take it anymore. But then another minute ticks by. And I know. The nightmare is perpetual.

Today I hold their nightmare. Kindra and Melinda are with me as I travel across country to vacation with my in-laws in Washington. Their home, a few hours from Roseburg. A part of me wants to drive to the small wooded campus and meet Melinda. Or visit the spots on campus where Kindra would draw. But I’m worried that if I met them, my heartache might overflow. I wouldn’t want them to have to hold any more pain.

LOREN KLEINMAN, EDITOR

NOVEMBER 2018

The following students and staff were shot and killed at Umpqua Community College:

Lucero Alcaraz, 19, student

Treven Taylor Anspach, 20, student

Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18, student

Quinn Glen Cooper, 18, student

Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59, student

Lucas Eibel, 18, student

Jason Dale Johnson, 34, student

Lawrence Levin, 67, assistant professor

Sarena Dawn Moore, 44, student

MELINDA BENTON

Melinda Benton is an associate professor teaching in Humanities and Social Science and an adviser for student media at Umpqua Community College (UCC). She was fifty-six at the time of the UCC school shooting.

IN MEMORY OF

Lawrence Levin

Lucero Alcaraz

Rebecka Carnes

Quinn Cooper

Lucas Eibel

Jason Johnson

Treven Anspach

Kim Saltmarsh Dietz

Sarena Moore

WHY NOW?

Before writing this, I had to ask myself, “Why?” and “Why, again?” After all, I’ve retold whatever little I know to FBI officers, to family, to friends, to doctors, to researchers, to journalists, to students, until I’m sick of the weight of each word. By this time, I am afraid that revisiting the events of the October 1, 2015, mass school shooting at my workplace could be counterproductive, especially since most of us in my small town seem to want to forget. To move on. Returning to those memories of October 1st can feel almost shameful, hurtful, exploitative. So, why me? and why now?

Because school shootings keep happening. Because two and a half years later, people here still hurt. Or feel numb. Or feel helpless. And those feelings matter more than you may suspect. Because erroneous, highly erroneous, public arguments are being made that school shootings, in perspective, aren’t monumental enough to justify change. Because I realized that I need to learn more.

Even though I’ve been inundated with information about school shootings, especially about my own school’s shooting, I realized that I didn’t know nearly enough about how exposure to this type of trauma affects the whole human body, and I suspected that others didn’t, either. And, I wanted to know why some of my students are still having such a hard time, why some cannot return to school while others can, and why delayed reactions to school shootings are so common. I also wanted to understand some of my own feelings from a scientific, health perspective, especially since mainstream public media in America has not yet definitely reviewed the health costs of school shootings.

OCTOBER 1, 2015

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I would teach in the Snyder Hall classroom 15 and the Snyder Hall 16 lab from 9:30 a.m. until 12:15 p.m. But October 1 is Thursday, the first Thursday of the first term of the school year, so this morning I am preparing lecture notes and packing up handouts to go to class at the other end of the campus. Just as I am going out of the door, a student on the newspaper staff that I advise calls me. He first asks me where I am—an odd question. He then asks me if I’d heard, an unnecessary bit of tease, I feel, even for a journalism student. And then he quietly, with slow heaviness, tells me the school is in lockdown. I wait for more details, confused. He tells me a shooter is on campus. Deaths have occurred. In Snyder Hall. In rooms 15 and 16.

My close-knit department has always almost exclusively taught in Snyder Hall. I have spent more time there than in my own home. I have known every person who works out of that building for decades, so I am instantly desperate to get more information. The air whooshes out of the room, out of my lungs. I remember the overwhelming buzzing in my head, in my blood, in my bones. I want off the phone immediately, but in teacher mode I tell the student to keep in contact with his friend inside and call me back with reports as soon as he knows anything. He never calls.

I call my mother in Washington State to let her know I’m okay. I answer a frantic call from my daughter in Roseburg. I wail. I try to get in touch with the student editor. I call my son in Colorado who’s been notified by a friend. I get on Facebook, start posting warnings and police radio announcements, join the desperate social media mob trying to get information on who’s hurt and who’s not, keep jamming the college website trying to see when, if, it will finally open, keep frantically messaging and texting my colleagues to see if they are okay. My mind races because I can’t find any information on our secretary, a dear friend, or several coworkers. I hear the police radio calls for ambulances. The radio codes for acute trauma. Hear the police radio directions for hospital deliveries. Hear the police radio codes repeating and repeating and repeating requests for ambulance assistance. Hear the codes, again, and again, and again, changing ambulance orders because patients are deceased. I scour websites and phone directories and messages for contact information, answering the phone so many, many times, neighbors, the New York Times, too many media outlets to count, my husband, school retirees, a telemarketer with exceptionally bad timing, my mother again, former students from all over the nation. I find the editor, give her directions. She doesn’t seem okay, but I don’t know what to do other than what we’ve always done. I answer the front door, another neighbor with my former phone number has received over one hundred calls asking for me. She wants to know if I’m okay. I get in my car and my daughter drives me to the end of College Road for a news conference to be held at the fire station. She won’t let me drive. I stand in the fire station parking lot while my friend texts me that it was Larry. It was Larry in Snyder 15. It was students in Snyder 15 and 16. Lots of blood. I’m amazed at how my friend sounds so matter of fact. I stand in the fire station garage while newscasters put their tripods on my feet, elbow me out of the way. I film. I advise and direct media students. They are afraid. They don’t want to go back to the place they’ve escaped. I understand. I answer my phone again, on my phone for about twenty-four hours straight now. A little sleep, then on the phone again with students, with reporters, with my own newspaper staff journalists, with family, friends, pastor, fellow teachers, former colleagues, with the university up the road. So much talking. So much crying.

I won’t talk about the crying.

But the faces.

I want to tell you about the faces.

It’s October 9, and the campus is open now, supposedly just for staff first and then students so that we can each in our small groups in our own ways address this new thing. But, truly, it’s just everyone everywhere. I remember and then forget that this is my husband’s birthday. Reporters stand across the street on the road’s miniscule shoulder, their toes just in the gravel, as they balance massive camera lenses. A former student, one I taught and liked, has scrunched her face into a knot as she hurries back and forth on the adjoining campus sidewalk, yelling profanities at these journalists who with their dead faces ignore her. So many journalists. So many people everywhere hating journalists. I’m a journalist. My heart can’t get any sadder; it just registers the spectacle. Everywhere spectacle.

I walk back and forth across the campus lawn’s expanse on the same path for seven hours that I honestly thought were only about seven minutes, and I register odd details: that teacher’s green remembrance ribbon is upside down; those people who are not students aren’t supposed to be here; a group of strangers are comparing new tattoos with that horrible October 1 date emblazoned over their faces, hands, arms, backs; a group of staff are holding hands in a circle with their heads down reverently and someone, without permission, photographs them; someone else is trying to give away odd, plastic cartoon figures; someone is laughing, but I don’t understand how; a veterinary teacher says she is marking her territory by revisiting all of her favorite campus places and reclaiming them; the college president and entourage stride purposely across the quad, but my supervisor trails behind woodenly, and I can tell from here that she knows she will never in any way catch up and that frightens me; a line forms around the beautiful comfort dogs. Then I see a mother, my word how the memory of her still makes me cry, who quietly slips under the ribbon meant to keep out everyone but staff and students, and she is dressed as if for Sunday church. And her son, her beautiful twentyish-year-old son, is holding her hand the way little five-year-old boys hold their mothers’ hands. And I sit down, holding on to the bench to keep from falling. And, with tears I can’t feel slipping down my face, I thank God she still has her boy; I thank God her son still has his future.

And I look, and I see how everyone looks different, in both senses of the word. They are looking differently at the world. But their faces also look, appear, so different. So different that I can’t mentally register how the bones of their faces seem to have rearranged. I’ve never seen so many faces reconfigure like this, but this is real, this is happening. A vice president’s face is an odd mask that says don’t look at me because I’m not okay and I don’t know what to do. The mouth is lower than where it was, the forehead higher. The security guard, his body forced over onto his toes, follows behind his supervisor, and his face is not his, either. It’s flatter, carved out of wood which later, he tells me, was just anger. A recently hired staff member stands tall and alone under an old campus oak tree looking like someone’s canonized saint, and his face seems painted on, unreal. A student who works for me walks by, clutched by his girlfriend, and their faces are oddly pulled back, warning me, I think, to just leave them alone. A coworker literally stumbles over something I can’t see on the sidewalk, and his whole body has gone so thin that I am shocked enough to take his hand. I genuinely think he will fall if I don’t, and his face is just lumps of muscle pulled around.

So many people look ancient. I see their future faces. Red splotches have shown up on cheeks, collarbones, arms. The skin, especially around the eyes, is wrinkled, darkened. Some faces have changed color. And, I’m surprised to see more than a few people decades out of their teens with acne again. But really, it’s the shape of the faces that scares me. The shapes are just different, wrong, and I can more easily recognize people by their familiar clothing than by any familiar expression.

This, truthfully, is the face of trauma.
Stress disfigures.

BEHIND THE STORY:
JOURNALISTIC RESPONSIBILITY WHEN REPORTING A SCHOOL SHOOTING

By Lori Shontz

Lori Shontz is a journalism instructor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Shontz is the coproducer of the project Reporting Roseburg, which covers the experiences of the journalists who covered the UCC shooting.

Every time I teach reporting at the University of Oregon, I pick a day to walk into my classes and ask this question: “If there were a shooting right now, on campus, what would you do to report it? Right now.”

I hate that I have to do this. But I must.

Because when a mass shooting happened at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Roseburg, Oregon, on October 1, 2015, this is what some of the state’s journalists were doing when they got called to cover it:

A sports reporter from the Oregonian, the largest newspaper in the state, was at the University of Oregon interviewing the football coach. He was two hours closer to the scene than anyone else on the staff, so he cut the interview short.

A news reporter from Portland was walking out of a marijuana dispensary, where he’d been covering the first day that recreational pot was legal in Oregon. The New York Times called him because they happened to have his number. He’d previously written some freelance pieces.

A journalism student at the University of Oregon was lying in bed, scrolling through Twitter, when he got a call from The Washington Post. He’d signed up for the newspaper’s student talent network six months earlier and hadn’t heard a thing until the news broke. Before he left, he scrambled to find his only clean button-down shirt. And then, because he was nervous, he called his mom.

The police reporter for The News Review, the local newspaper in Roseburg, was half listening to the scanner as he was putting together briefs for the afternoon edition, which was being published in a couple of hours. He’d been on the job—his first journalism job—for six months. He wasn’t even sure exactly what it meant when he heard a police dispatcher say there was an “active shooter.”

None of them were prepared.

This isn’t unusual. News happens, as we say, and part of being a journalist is dropping whatever you’re doing and heading to the scene as soon as you can. Most of us thrive on the adrenaline rush, and we get the job done because muscle memory kicks in. Journalism isn’t really learned in a classroom. We learn it by doing it.

But what I’ve learned, after spending three years researching how the UCC shooting was reported and how the community responded to the news media’s efforts, is that covering a mass shooting isn’t like covering anything else. Particularly, journalists need a sophisticated understanding of trauma—both how it affects the survivors whom journalists are interviewing and how it affects the journalists themselves.

I want my students to be prepared to cover a mass shooting in the same way that I want them to be able to request public records and craft a compelling news hook and put commas in the right places. These are skills that my industry, my craft, demand.

But journalists are not routinely trained in the specific requirements of covering a mass shooting.

The Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism has rich resources, including how to approach and interview children, characteristics of mass killers and how to refer to them, and explainers about trauma. But its website and training programs are mostly sought out by journalists after they have reported on a traumatic situation. My colleagues at a number of journalism schools are teaching classes dedicated to trauma journalism. But not all schools have them, and even at those schools, not all students take them. Plus majoring in journalism is not a requirement to be a journalist. (I didn’t.)

The UCC shooting felt close to me. I’m one degree of separation from so many people who were affected, from a student who was hiding in the library to a reporter who had to sit outside the home of a victim, mustering the courage to ask the dead student’s family for an interview. I had to do something.

My colleague Nicole Dahmen and I began our exploration of the UCC shooting coverage because so many of our students and our program’s young alumni had covered it, and because President Barack Obama had lamented aloud that mass shootings were happening often enough that everyone, from himself to journalists, knew how to respond. “Somehow this has become routine,” he said, punctuating each word by pounding his hand on the podium.

We then tracked down nineteen of the Oregon-area reporters who covered the shooting, and we interviewed them for a project called Reporting Roseburg. In nearly forty hours of interviews, we learned a lot. But what struck me most—and what spurred me to add “mass shooting coverage prep” to my basic reporting classes—are these three things:

FIRST AND FOREMOST: Sixteen of the nineteen journalists had never covered a mass tragedy before. They learned on the job, and they wish they’d known more. That’s why I cover the basics of trauma—fragmented memories, the danger of recounting and therefore reliving a story over and over, how no two people react the same—and give students some time to decide, before they are in the thick of things, how they’d like to conduct themselves.

SECOND: More than half of the journalists were uncomfortable asking questions they knew they were required to ask.

Joseph Hoyt, the University of Oregon student who was working for The Washington Post, was assigned to interview students getting off buses at the country fairground, where they could meet their families. And some of those students got mad at him, asking or yelling, “What are you doing here?” or “Get out of here!” or “Can’t you see we’re grieving?”

“You know,” he said, “the thing is, I completely understand that. I couldn’t imagine talking to some person I’d never met before after my son, daughter, brother, sister was involved in a mass shooting.”

Hilary Lake, a reporter for KATU, the ABC affiliate in Portland, covered a community vigil the night of the shooting. “And part of me didn’t want to go up to people to talk to them, to interview them,” she said. “Because I put myself in their position. Would I want somebody coming up to me? And I don’t know if I could answer that question.

“But the only thing that helped me get through that as a reporter was, what if there was one person who wanted their story told? Who wanted the world to know what they thought about what happened or to remember somebody who had died? To give them that opportunity, that’s what we do in these situations.”

That’s something I’d like journalism to grapple better with. Can we make a process that empowers survivors to speak on their own terms and still meet the information needs of the community? I hope so.

THIRD: None of the journalists had been formally debriefed after their reporting, which stands in direct contrast to other first responders. Nicole and I hadn’t realized until we finished that simply by listening to the journalists, we were giving them a chance to come to grips with their secondhand trauma.

“I was pretty conflicted driving down and going to this press conference, everything,” said Scott Greenstone, a student journalist. He had interned in Roseburg over the summer and returned to help with the biggest story that had hit the town in fifty years. “It’s weird because there was like this adrenaline shooting into my veins, and then at the same time this deep disgust with what had happened. So my body is telling me that I should be excited and my brain is telling me, ‘Whoa, this is horrible.’”

Rachael MacDonald of KLCC, a public radio station in Eugene, hasn’t been able to forget being part of a scrum of reporters who surrounded a student who was willing to recount her experiences in the next classroom. Or the stories she heard not only from that woman, but from the other students and family members who agreed to talk.

“I had just felt really sad,” she said. “I felt like it was such a horrible event and, you know, people had come to class that morning thinking they were going to their writing class. And to have that day end up being tragic and an end of life for so many people, and for other people, you know, still coping with the physical and emotional fallout. It just was very sad, it was very, you know . . . heartbreaking.

“And to be a reporter, I felt the privilege of being able to be a witness of it. But at the same time, it was emotionally exhausting.”

This is important, too: Every one of the journalists we interviewed went to Roseburg for the right reasons. They wanted to tell the stories of the victims, to make sure they weren’t forgotten. They wanted to celebrate the heroes—and there are always heroes. They wanted to hold public officials accountable, if necessary. And they wanted—we heard this phrase repeatedly—to “help the community heal.”

By most accounts, however, the mass of media assembled in Roseburg didn’t achieve any of those aims. There’s a reason one of the UCC students said during a town hall meeting a month after the shooting, “There was honestly a lot of harassment from media to tell our stories. . . . It was rude, honestly—it wasn’t polite. Honestly, the media was probably the second trauma, almost, for us.”

After interviewing the journalists, I realized I had only half of the story. I went in search of other people to listen to—community members, pastors, government officials, victim advocates. I spent three days at a conference called Leave No Victim Behind, which was devoted to the victims and survivors of mass trauma.

I got an education in the specifics of trauma-informed care, which I’m incorporating into my lessons. I heard heart-wrenching stories of people who still live every day with the horror they experienced seven months ago, a couple of years ago, even a couple of decades ago. And I got to meet people who weren’t ready to speak to the news media right after the tragedy, but who would have eventually appreciated the chance to tell their stories.

The idea I’m holding on to is how the American Red Cross has learned that the needs of families and survivors change as time passes. There’s an immediate response. Then there’s a Family Assistance Center, which serves a specific purpose. And 10 to 14 days after the incident, after most of the TV cameras and news vans and reporters have left the area, there’s another deliberate and important change. The FAC becomes a Family Resilience Center.

Resilience. That’s something the news media can cover better, by backing off the breaking news and taking the long view. Acknowledging what went wrong. Respecting what so many people have endured. Working toward something better. Combine those things, and it’s practically a definition of journalism’s highest calling. We’re working to live up to it.

PERPETUAL

By Kindra Neely

Kindra Neely was a student at Umpqua Community College (UCC) at the time of the shooting. The following comic, Perpetual, on pages 101–105, explores the grief process in the aftermath of her school shooting at UCC.