She had gone to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, with one of her friends at a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado. This was back in 2012, and their daughter Jessi was in college at the time. They got the news in the middle of the night when they were asleep at their home in Texas. The answer, of course, starts with their daughter's shooting. They tell families to brace themselves.Īfter watching Lonnie and Sandy in Santa Fe, I wondered why in the world they were throwing themselves back into this setting, reliving their worst moment over and over again. So hoaxers are one of the things the Phillips warn parents about. The man who was threatening him ended up in jail. After the Phillips' son gave interviews in Aurora, he got death threats and had to get the FBI involved. The conspiracy theorists, known as truthers or hoaxers, troll families of victims on social media immediately after any mass shooting. I reached out to Jones through one of his lawyers, who declined to comment. It looked like a shoving match was about to start, until Sandy stepped in and broke it up. Lonnie got into it with Jones, stood right in front of him. One of our producers, Miki Meek, put this together and spent time with Phillipses. I was re-listening to this story this week, and one thing that really hit me is how deeply it takes you into the place that- I don't know, speaking for myself, I find myself thinking about all the time right now, which is what the parents and families in Uvalde, Texas are going through. But really, nothing has changed since we first heard this. We did this story back in 2018, right after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. And since then, they've organized their lives to be able to reach out to other parents like themselves. Their daughter, Jessi, died back in 2012 when a gunman opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. They headed there straight from Buffalo, where, of course, 10 people were killed earlier this month in a grocery store. In the second half hour of our show, we have a dad from Sandy Hook, who jumped into action after his son was killed, just took extraordinary measures, and got results.īut we're going to begin with this story about that couple, Sandy and Lonnie Phillips. Today, on our show, we have two stories for you about parents like these. In the wake of that, that nothingness, that non-response, parents of children who've died have stepped in in various ways. I don't need to tell you that our government has utterly failed at any kind of response to stop school shootings and mass shootings. And they come, and what they do seems to be very effective. And there's this couple who shows up, this couple whose daughter died in a mass shooting. There's the police and SWAT teams, of course, and the Red Cross, the Billy Graham prayer truck, therapy dogs. So there's a whole infrastructure that springs into action when a mass shooting happens. It's This American Life from WBEZ Chicago.
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