Make It Stop

 It was a check-down menu of sorts: Active shooter.

Where? Colorado.

Where in Colorado? Northwest of Denver.

Exactly? Boulder.

My hometown. Now it wasn't a "That's kind of interesting." This was a "NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo."

I tried to rest assured that my mother was nowhere near the scene. On the opposite side of town. My older brother is retired from the Boulder County Sheriff's Department. His years on patrol were long behind him. We are a north side of town family. Always have been. The King Soopers my brother shops at for his family and my mom sits at the near the center of town, across the street from what used to be called The Crossroads Shopping Center. Suddenly, all that internalized Boulder geography leaped back into my head. The King Soopers they were talking about was on the south side of town, in the always repetitively named Table Mesa Shopping Center. 

That end of town was where the video store I worked at used to be. I had driven past that King Soopers a couple of summers back on a visit. It was just down the hill from where my friends' parents live. I wondered about the probability of them stopping by to pick up some groceries on a cool Monday afternoon in March. That would be a coincidence to large to imagine.

But I did. Which stretched my imagination still further to encompass all the people I still know who live in Boulder who might have had any business in that area on that day. When I got back from work, I called my mother, and made cheerful conversation about what was still unfolding across town from her. Across the country from me. There was a collective sigh of relief when we were able to account for all those we knew who might have been in the crossfire. And the three victims described in the preliminary report? No names as yet.

Later that evening my wife, who grew up in Boulder as well, relayed the sad news that authorities had upped the total number of casualties to ten. I had yet to turn on the television to look at the scene from the twenty-four hour news network point of view. When I did, I was confronted by aerial footage of more police cars than I ever saw in Boulder surrounding the grocery store. Windows had been blasted out. Bodies were retrieved from the parking lot outside and inside the store. Witnesses told their stories of fear and heroism. Running out the back, but doubling back to help others who were fleeing for their lives.

And that's when I made the shuddering conclusion that my hometown had now joined a list of cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Dayton, El Paso, Aurora, Columbine. Once again I was confronted by the name of the elementary school I attended in Boulder: Columbine. Not the high school south of Denver where school shootings began their ugly turn into regular occurrence. 

I turned the television off. I knew the days and weeks that followed would bring still more revelations about the killer. He used an AR-15 to kill ten seemingly random victims. One of them was a Boulder Police officer. And the trickle of information will never fill a bucket or a basin or an ocean large enough to make it make sense. As we brace ourselves for another. In someone else's hometown.