By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
On the calendar, it has been a year. But for the survivors of the shooting and the people in their lives closest to them, it may have been a day, a month, or a lifetime that has passed. They still see the events of that July afternoon clearly in their minds, they have the recurring — or in some cases, constant — physical pain, they have the knowledge that their communities surrounded them with help and their prayers.
For the rest of us, though the survivors and the shooting itself linger in our thoughts, without constant reminders of what happened that day, many of us have moved on. But the women injured that day, with scars they will carry for the rest of their lives, are still recovering and will be doing so for a long time to come.
JTNews spoke with four of the women injured in the shooting on July 28, 2006 about where they are one year later, both physically and emotionally.
Pain management
As the Federation’s receptionist, Layla Bush was the front line of the organization — and the first of the six women to be shot.
Of the two bullets that hit her at close range, the one near her shoulder caused very little damage. The other hit several organs and was lodged in her spine until surgeons removed it in February, but a recent doctor’s visit has reassured her that her bones are fusing properly. She will be dealing with pain issues for the foreseeable future, however, which may include a trip to a pain management clinic. And one of her legs has likely suffered permanent damage, a disability Bush is only coming to terms with now.
“We’re getting to the point now where there’s probably not going to be a whole lot more recovery,” says Bush, now 24, who was the youngest and most seriously injured in the shooting.
“I’m not going to be able to dance. I can’t bowl, I can’t put my pants on standing up,” she says. “It’s hard to try to focus on what I can do rather than what I can’t right now.”
Bush didn’t come back to work until June. She is working about two hours a week right now, “and probably won’t increase that anytime soon,” she says. “I have a lot of trouble and pain with sitting.”
But Bush has been trying to help others. Once a month she volunteers at Seattle’s Harborview trauma center, where all the shooting victims were rushed after the shooting, to talk with people who have suffered spinal cord injuries. She is also hoping to attend Seattle University in the fall, where she would like to obtain a Master’s in Public Administration that she can use to eventually run a non-profit or hold a government position where she can “do something good for people.”
“I just feel a stronger drive, and I feel what happened has gained me direction in my life,” she says. “Now I have limits as to what I can do, and so that has really helped me think I can do this, rather than keep working as a receptionist.”
Through the recurring pain, the medication, and weekly caregivers, and the uncertainty, Bush is trying to see things in a positive light.
“There’s always these little challenges that life throws at you,” she says. “Part of life is just learning how to deal with it and overcome, and I feel like that’s kind of where I’m at right now.”
Working the system
If there’s anything that Carol Goldman has gotten out of the past year, it’s how to advocate for herself.
“I think the biggest thing for me throughout the whole thing is it’s been a learning process,” Goldman, a coordinator for the Federation’s community campaign, said. “A lot of the things [I] didn’t know before because [I] didn’t have experience with, and probably didn’t want to know, whether it’s navigating [Labor and Industries] paperwork, pain meds, attending doctors, physical therapy — any of these things.”
Goldman, 36, sustained a bullet wound to the knee. She regained almost a full range of motion, but not without having to fight to get there.
“Getting up to 90 degrees range of motion was a really big deal for me, because it was really very hard,” she says. “I had to switch to two different physical therapists.”
The first physical therapist told Goldman: “‘We can’t do any more for you….’ She wasn’t getting anywhere, and L&I wants progress reports,” she says. “After a while, if you’re not making progress, they say ‘we can’t see you anymore,’ but I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not recovered yet!’ I was at 55 degrees.”
Initially, Goldman had settled for whatever caregivers Labor and Industries accepted and were qualified. When the first physical therapist gave up, Goldman approached it from a different angle: “I [said] ‘All right, I’m going to ask specifically what you do,’” she says.
“I asked her some of the questions I’d asked the previous doctors and previous PTs: There’s this certain spot on my knee that always hurts. Why does it do that? I don’t expect an answer, but an educated guess.”
The one she chose was the one who told answered her beyond her knee “was really messed up.” She also found that by switching her primary care physician from the doctor assigned to her at Harborview to her regular doctor she was able to get better response and more help with the loads of paperwork.
One thing Goldman never expected out of the entire ordeal was a close-up view of the judicial system.
“I’ve been in a jury, but I’ve never been on the other side,” she says. “It’s been kind of interesting seeing that side of it, too — meeting all the people at the police department and the prosecutor’s office. All of them have been very nice and wonderful.”
Life is mostly back to normal for Goldman. She says she’s had to think about the anniversary of the shooting because people keep bringing it up.
“People asked, ‘Were you angry?’ I said, ‘No, I had enough on my plate just trying to get better.’ That’s where I expend all my energy,” Goldman said.
In training
Cheryl Stumbo was training for the Danskin Women’s Triathlon at the time of the shooting. Two bullet wounds changed that — but only for a year.
“I am still training for a triathlon. It actually makes me feel better,” says Stumbo, the Federation’s director of marketing. “I used to have a lot of stress relief from exercise, but the difference in mood before exercise and after exercise is really different.”
She is still dealing with pain issues, however. “I was in surgery five times but I had 10 different incisions between the lung surgery and the bullet removal,” Stumbo says. “I had a lot of nerve damage in the trunk of my body.”
The pain that would wake her when she rolled onto her side in her sleep has largely gone away, but her doctors have told her that it could be years before the nerve damage fully heals itself.
Stumbo was in the hospital during the triathlon last year, but the team of women with whom she had planned to compete printed up temporary tattoos in her honor, and an extended segment of a story by KING-5 News about the team has helped to inspire participants in this year’s triathlon.
Stumbo has also joined the board of local gun control organization Washington Ceasefire.
“I come from a family where the men actually own guns and shoot guns, so this is kind of a sore topic in my family,” she says. “The whole idea is ‘don’t let dangerous people get a hold of dangerous weapons legally and easily.’
“That just seems like common sense to me, something I can really get behind, and actually, my father, who’s a card-carrying NRA member, can get behind as well.”
Stumbo says her father, who has been an NRA member for over 40 years, actually wrote a letter to the organization to remind its leaders they were in a good position to attempt to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
“It took the Virginia Tech massacre before they did something,” Stumbo says, “but they did step forward.
Like many of the survivors, Stumbo was not looking forward to the anniversary of the shooting.
“The gravity of the 28th is just pulling at me,” she said earlier in the week. “I’ll be happy to see it be next week and have that behind us.”
Controlled anger
When JTNews spoke with several of the survivors who sustained gunshot wounds, a few said they wouldn’t be running any marathons. But they weren’t planning on doing so. That’s not the case for Tammy Kaiser, now the director of adult education for the Jewish Education Council, who was injured when she jumped out a second-floor window to escape the gunman as he made his way through the Federation building.
Kaiser, who does run marathons, was told by doctors this week that her running career is over.
“Because of injury to my back and to my knees, I’m not to run anymore,” Kaiser says. “At all.”
Kaiser had spent the past year throwing herself into violence prevention: she heads up the Federation’s safety committee, she has spoken about violence in local schools, and had even done extensive research into the history of Naveed Haq, the man charged in the shooting. It was a way of helping her to better understand the mindset of someone who could perform such horrific acts. Doing so gave her a semblance of control — something she did not have on the afternoon of the shooting. But now the anger is emerging.
“I’m angry. I’m okay with saying that now. I’m okay with owning the fact that I have anger. I’ve been able to channel the anger into positive activities,” she says. But “one of the reasons I’m revved up now is it’s catching up with me.”
She says she respects her fellow survivors that can write off people like Haq, but she feels that educating herself is key to understanding what happened.
“If I just sit on the problem, just constantly sit in the anger without learning about from where it starts, then all I’m doing is perpetuating the violence that came in here on the 28th,” she says.
Like the shooting victims, Kaiser was taken to Harborview — she was the first to be released. When she had jumped into the Dumpster, her then-waist length hair caught on the window latch, causing her to need reconstructive surgery. She had bruises that took up nearly her entire calf muscles, and her doctors now tell her that years from now she will need hip replacement surgery.
Kaiser ran some half marathons and 5K’s over the past year, and that running precipitated her doctor’s declaration now, which is partly what is causing her anger.
“I feel like I’m in another out-of-control place,” she says. “Even though I wasn’t shot, had I recognized the fact that I was able to take care of myself without feeling guilty, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
The day after Pam Waechter’s funeral, against the advice of nearly everyone she spoke with, Kaiser entered the building with a fellow Federation employee. She says she went to each desk and switched off her co-workers’ computers. She also took the nearly full cup of coffee at Waechter’s desk, dumped it out, then washed it before placing it back where she found it.
“It’s not always the healthy way to heal,” she says. “But it gets things done.”