Fans of the Philadelphia Eagles are celebrating their team’s Super Bowl victory with a parade today. They beat the Kansas City Chiefs, which is great for the City of Brotherly Love and obviously a bummer to us here in Missouri.
But there’s actually some ambivalence about the parade’s absence in Kansas City. The celebration of the Chiefs’ win last year ended with a mass shooting that killed one person and injured at least 24 more.
I’ve been talking to the survivors since then with my colleague Peggy Lowe at KCUR for a series we call “The Injured.” They’ve told us all about their lives since the shooting: about being left off the official list of victims, about doctors leaving bullets in their bodies, about the financial hardship of surviving, about the mental toll on the children who were shot, and about their efforts to restore a sense of safety in a society where gun violence is rampant.
This week we published one last story about what therapists call the “thawing” of survivors. Many people who experience trauma emotionally freeze as a coping mechanism. But with time, that freeze melts, and the intensity of what happened to them can be suddenly overpowering.
“Trauma pulls us into the past,” Gary Behrman told me. He’s a therapist who worked with witnesses of the 9/11 attacks in New York.
Sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches can all trigger flashbacks that shut down the brain like an overloaded circuit breaker. The survivors in Kansas City told us about being triggered by loud noises, large crowds, and seeing police officers who remind them of the first responders at the shooting.
And the shooting happened at a cultural institution, Union Station, so many survivors found themselves back there unexpectedly. Kids had field trips to a science center inside. Follow-up doctor visits were often on nearby Hospital Hill. An October dinner organized for survivors was less than a mile away, prompting one young survivor to decline the invitation.
One survivor told me about a date she went on in December in downtown Kansas City. She doesn’t know the city well — she lives in Leavenworth, Kansas — so she was shocked to look up and see the intersection where a bullet ripped through her leg.
“Oh f—,” she told her date, fighting tears and a panic attack until the station was out of view.
