Colorado's senior U.S. senator Michael Bennet (L) speaks with Sandy Phillips, a national gun control advocate whose 24-year-old daughter Jessica Ghawi, an aspiring television sports reporter, was shot to death at the Batman movie massacre, during a gathering in Aurora, Colorado, the United States, July 23, 2022.
A gathering of several hundred, including two prominent politicians, was held in Colorado on July 23 to honor the fallen and first responders at the Batman movie massacre one decade ago. (Photo by Peter Mertz/Xinhua)
AURORA, the United States, July 24 (Xinhua) -- A gathering of several hundred, including two prominent politicians, was held in Colorado on Saturday to honor the fallen and first responders at the Batman movie massacre one decade ago.
"The people that shared that experience have been violated in an unbearably savage way," said U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper, who was Colorado governor on July 20, 2012, when 12 people were killed and 70 wounded inside a nearby theater at the midnight premiere of a Batman movie, the first of a wave of mass shootings that hit the country after then.
Saturday's day-long memorial events began with a morning 5K run led by Zack Golditch, a firefighter and former NFL player who survived the theater massacre after being shot in the neck, and featured speeches, food, beverages, and music by two local bands.
"Those images still haunt me," Hickenlooper told the crowd, referring to his day-long visits to local hospitals to offer condolences to the wounded on the day of the shooting in 2012.
The two-time Denver mayor and Colorado governor was joined on a stage of speakers and local officials by Colorado's senior U.S. senator, Michael Bennet, serving the Centennial State on Capitol Hill since 2009, at the all-day event sponsored by the 7/20 Memorial Foundation.
"When tragedies like this happen it turns out the community is more resilient than the perpetrator, and that's what you saw today," Benet told Xinhua, referring to the outpouring of community support that followed the mass shooting.
"There was a lot of damage done that night, but there's a lot of resilience in this community, and they're getting stronger and stronger," he added.
Last month, Bennett joined a bevy of Democrats and a few Republicans to pass the first gun control measures in America since 1995, signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden last month, that included tightening background checks for 18-21-year-olds, closing a loophole that endangered women from their violent boyfriends, and securing funding for intervention and mental health programs.
In 2012, not long after Aurora, 20 young children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Thousands of mass shootings, where four or more people were killed, have followed, with death and casualty totals more gruesome than Aurora's.
In just the past month, the deaths of 10 Blacks in Buffalo, New York, the July 4 killing of seven and wounding of dozens in Illinois, and the recent killing of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, have shocked the nation and triggered lawmakers to act.
"It has never stopped; in fact, it has gotten worse," said Sandy Phillips, a national gun control advocate whose 24-year-old daughter Jessica Ghawi, an aspiring television sports reporter, was shot to death in the theater.
Phillips' pain was shared by Teresa Hoover, the mother of A.J. Boik, who was 18 at the theater and became "one of the lost lives." Hoover described her ongoing recovery from the trauma of losing a child as a "work in progress, and always will be."
"I still have some very bad days," she told the crowd.
The Aurora theater shooting changed forever the way law enforcement handles today's all-too-frequent shootings, according to former Aurora Chief of Police Dan Oates, who said all 127 of his officers on duty that night were at the theater within minutes.
"You saw at the Pulse shooting, cops were putting wounded people into pick-up trucks and taking them to hospitals," he said, referring to the 2016 mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed and 53 wounded at a nightclub.
"Eight minutes after our officers arrived at the Aurora theater, they started using their patrol cars to take critically wounded to local hospitals. They didn't have time to wait for ambulances," he told Xinhua. "There were too many casualties."
Oates said that the Aurora shooting improved coordination between fire and rescue personnel and police.
"But what's most remarkable is this community," he added. "They held together and supported each other like no other in the face of this terrible tragedy." ■
