“We’ve helped each other respond to those things without sounding curt or unappreciative.” “How do you respond when somebody walks up to you and believes they have a right to know what happened? Or when people say, ‘How are you doing?’” Thompson said. They became therapeutic gatherings for people who had seen co-workers and friends gunned down, who narrowly escaped their own demise and then had to gird themselves for the procession of funerals. Then, in February, the meetings moved to The Rock Church, less than two miles from where the mass shooting happened. “You got together and it was ‘How are you?’ and ‘Where were you when it happened?’ and ‘Have you heard about so and so?’” “It was like an office party, but about a grim subject,” Houser said. It was the first time anyone who had been in the conference room gathered to talk as a group. A former health department director opened up her home for a week straight, said Hal Houser, one of the survivors. Just days after the San Bernardino attack, some of the survivors began to meet. “We deal with it every day, but the world has moved on.” “You feel forgotten, like our friends are forgotten,” Ballesteros, 35, said. They were living through their own trauma of a terrorist attack when another one, in Orlando, Fla., brought back fresh memories of the bloodshed they endured. Jessica Ballesteros hears the sound of her own screams inside the conference room. Sally Cardinale trembles at the sound of slamming doors and wrestles with violent dreams. Thompson sits with her back to the wall in crowded rooms and keeps a mental tally of every exit she cries every day. Thompson, 49, was among the wounded, a bullet slamming into her thigh, where it remains to this day.įor the survivors, adapting to the world after their brush with death has been a daily struggle. Six months had passed since Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, launched their terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center, killing 14 people and wounding 22. 2, 2015, again, inside a conference room, a man and a woman spraying bodies with bullets. But it sufficed to send Thompson crashing to her knees. It wasn’t a terribly unusual sound in San Bernardino, a city with one of California’s highest crime rates.
San berbardino attacks inside the office crack#
Tracie Thompson focused hard on a row of shopping carts as she approached the supermarket, her brain struggling to stave off a memory, when the crack of a gunshot echoed in the distance. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/TNS) Gina Ferazzi Houser ran out before the gun was reloaded. On the day of the San Bernardino shooting, Houser said he was standing next to a Christmas tree during an office party when the gunmen came in and killed everyone standing to his left. Houser is back to work as a Lead Environmental Health Specialist. San Bernardino terrorist shooting survivor Hal Houser said many survivors, including himself, are still adapting to the world after their brush with death and for many, the Orlando shooting brought the terror of that day back again. On the day of the shooting, Cardinale had just left the room when the gunmen came in and started shooting. She is back to work part time and still has trouble watching the news on TV. San Bernardino terrorist shooting survivor Sally Cardinale of Redlands, Calif., is still adapting to the world after her brush with death.
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