I’d like to start this whole writing project by going back to 2009.
I know, that is terribly far back. I’ve been mulling over this blog for the past month, and I confess that I did not expect to go back this far in time or to start with such a heavy topic. But I’ve realized that this story is where this has to start for me, because it’s a little bit of a look into my first encounter with real tragedy. For me, that happens to be story about gun violence. This is by no means all about that, but as a trigger warning, some of the following might be difficult to hear. So if today is not the day or if this is not the time for you, feel free to shut this off and take some time for self care.
If you do want to keep reading or listening, let me ask you for your patience as I broach the subjects of death and gun violence. I’ve thought about how the beauty of writing is that it can render things more visible—more “there”—to us. I want things more there. I want easier in-roads to ideas and experiences that were significant and need rendering. But when it comes to this—to a part of the human experience that is dealing with horrendous, senseless suffering, I don’t always know how to bring that to the foreground, render it for what it is in my understanding of the world and how it works, think about why it happens, while keeping my heart tender and asking myself what I can do.
So this is about grieving gun violence and processing the fact that there is so much senseless suffering. This is about grief. But then it is about turning that grief into action. And by the way, I know that no one is actually expecting me to explain the absurdity of the world and its senseless violence. But I’m constantly frustrated that I don’t have the answer.1 So, again, I ask for your patience.
I first want to try to tell this story about Ashley, so let me zoom out and begin with a question:
Can anyone relate to meeting someone who is new to your hometown making you feel more at home in your own hometown?
That is the feeling I had in 2007 when I met Ashley Lauren Wilks, beginning our freshman year of high school in the Portland, Oregon area. She had just moved from Denver with her family, entering our massive public school of 2,000+ students.
And immediately, it seemed like everyone, no matter your so-called coolness or weirdness level, not only liked Ashley but knew her. When she asked you how you were, she meant it. She actually would smile at you. I met her on the first day of school because she was assigned the seat in front of me in English class. I still remember when she turned around in her seat to say, “so, your name’s my middle name,” like it was something that should bond us. And like little high school girls, it did.
Slowly, I noticed that she wore the peace sign on everything. Her backpack had a peace sign patch, her folders had peace sign stickers, she wore bright peace sign jewelry. One day at our desks, someone asked her why she liked the peace sign so much. I forget exactly what she said, but it was something fairly straightforward, that she believed in peace for everybody. Therefore, she wore the peace sign.
I remember that in English, we’d turn to small groups to discuss the books we’d read. Ashley and I and others on our side of the room would turn to each other and discuss. Do I remember which books or what we talked about? No. (Sometimes memories are just impressions). But I remember that I always found her observations insightful and funny, and she was really good at making people feel heard.
We became a part of a group of softball team/swim team/English class kids/anyone-who-wanted-to-join that would eat lunch together. (Sometimes memories carry details like the texture of a sandwich). I learned about her life in Denver and her family. She also had an older brother who she really loved. We became friends, friends without any sense of pressure on our time. It was such a massive school, but she had a way of making people feel a little bit more seen—a little more there—a rare thing for one 15-year-old peer to be able to bestow upon another.
Now, fast-forward to sophomore year.
Ashley and I had different class schedules. I was in student government, choir, and theater. She was on two sports teams. So without realizing it, we started seeing each other only at random or at lunch. But whenever we did see each other, again, our interactions were laced with this sense of kindness. There was a fierceness in her to help correct the world, which seemed to flow out in every conversation.
On one Friday afternoon in January, I was sitting with my back against some lockers in the hallway doing homework, when Ashley walked by me. She stopped to say hi. We caught up for a bit. I remember that I told her that I liked her necklace—a long chain with I think (when I see the memory) some kind of animal pendant (an octopus? an owl?) We agreed we should get lunch the next week. Maybe Friday? We didn’t make plans; we just agreed we’d figure out the best time then.
She smiles, says, alright, I’ll see you next week, and walks away.
The following Sunday afternoon, sitting on my bed, I logged into Myspace.
I immediately saw a bulletin that was titled, “RIP Ashley Wilks.” I clicked on it, confused. I don’t remember it word for word, but I remember the gist. It said that if we’d been hearing rumors about the shooting downtown, it was confirmed that it was true. That Ashley was shot and was one of the people killed the night before in downtown Portland. The next thing I remember is weeping uncontrollably, going downstairs to find my mom, her saying, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” and all I could get out was, “Ashley Wilks has been murdered.”
The next morning, school happened to be off for a teacher’s workday. So on Myspace, everyone was trying to figure out what had actually happened. We only knew the basics, so what follows includes slightly more than what I knew back then.
Saturday evening, January 24th, 2009, Ashley and a few other students from various high schools in the area were all meeting downtown at a teenage nightclub called The Zone, located just a few minutes away from the waterfront, for a birthday party. The group was a mix of international exchange students from France, Ecuador, Guatemala, Taiwan, Peru, and Italy, and future exchange students from Oregon, who knew each other through the Rotary. Ashley had been selected to go abroad the following year. So this group of kids, mostly international students, who became friends because they had convened around ideas such as global peace and cultural exchange, were all standing on the sidewalk in line for The Zone in Portland, Oregon, the United States.
The perpetrator, a 24-year-old man, walked up to a pub across the street. He pointed a semi-automatic handgun toward the group standing in line, and opened fire, shot nine people, and then he shot himself.
The manager of The Zone was hit. Six students, including a girl from France, and another from Italy, who was in my speech and debate class, were critically injured and in the ICU for weeks, undergoing multiple surgeries. They survived.
Marta Pas De Novoa, 17, an exchange student from Arequipa, Peru, who was studying in Washington state, was shot and killed.
Ashley was shot twice in the chest. A DJ had raced outside at the sound of gunfire and saw Ashley on the sidewalk. The reports state that he came up to her and started pumping her chest to try to help her breathe. He held her, and told her to hang on, that help was coming. She died a few minutes later, in his arms, as the ambulance was arriving.2
It was the worst mass shooting in Portland’s history.
On Monday, my friends and I started posting last words to Ashley on Myspace, posting pictures, collages, remembering her, saying goodbye. Amongst the grief, appreciation and reflection on the smart and beautiful person that she was, the posts contained things like: I can’t believe I was just talking to you on Friday. This is unreal, unpredictable. It’s one thing to die naturally; it’s another thing to be murdered. If someone as amazing as Ashley can get taken away from life without warning, then what are all of us doing here?
I went back to my journal entry that Monday morning. My words were simply: “How can somebody be alive and then dead? How can someone have breath and then none? What happened to this world?”
The next day, back at school, we cried together. I went to see a grief counselor. Then I went to a piano practice room. (I must have felt safer there).
There was this sense of grieving Ashley’s death, wanting to remember and memorialize her life immediately. Underneath our grief, though, there was confusion. There was the sense of asking, “What happened to this world?”
As we grow older, the reality of death never stops confounding us—as if death was not supposed to happen to us. And obviously, if one is of the Judeo-Christian faith, then based on Genesis 3, this is something one truly believes, that death being a part of our human experience was God’s Plan B. At this time of my life when Ashley was murdered, this was something I believed. But I also could recognize that this shooting was something altogether different than just “death happens.” This was about senselessness. There’s death, but then there’s murder, human cruelty.
I remember only snapshots of the memorial service that was held for her the following Wednesday. The massive church was completely packed. Her closest friends spoke of their sweetest memories, and honored Ashley’s beautiful soul. Some friends came out from Denver to speak, too. I remember a family member calling her phone and putting the microphone up to it so we could listen to her voicemail together. That was really hard. It was an open-casket funeral. I didn’t go to say goodbye at first, I didn’t want to look, then a friend asked me if I would. I returned to my seat in shock. I remember going back to school, while her family went to bury her at the highest point of a cemetery near my house. I remember the picture of her casket getting carried to her burial site being blown up on the front page of the paper the next morning.
Some friends and I helped plan a more intimate memorial for her in our high school, which was held in the cafeteria a few days later. I said a little something about how Ashley would want us to have hope. Then I sang this song called Hear You Me by Jimmy Eats World on my guitar. The lyrics go: “There's no one in town I know, you gave us some place to go, I never said thank you for that, I thought I might get one more chance. May angels lead you in, hear you me my friends, on sleepless roads, the sleepless go, my angels lead you in.”
My friends, my high school—we didn’t move on, but we kept going. Junior year, on the one-year anniversary of her death, I expected the school to do something to honor Ashley. When nothing happened, I asked a teacher, why aren’t we having a moment of silence? Their response was essentially, we can’t have a moment of silence this year because we can’t have a moment of silence forever.
That was eleven years ago now.
And since then, I’ve had days, weeks, months, where I’ve really thought about Ashley. I’ve made it a ritual to visit her grave when I go home. I’ll quietly say hello and put my hand on the peace sign engraved on her tombstone. I count the years.
I’ve had other moments of reflection, like how in my last semester of college, I took this class where we had a weekly writing practice, and I decided to work on mastering the almighty sonnet. One day I found myself in the corner of the caf trying to put my memories of Ashley into iambic pentameter (I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, now that I talk about it). The final line went, “her heart resounding louder than the shot.” I have always felt strange about the fact that I ended the poem on the word “shot,” knowing her memory and impact does resound beyond the shots that stole her life.
In grad school, after the Parkland shooting, I went to March for Our Lives in Washington, DC. I began to read and research gun control policies in my spare time. Then I realized that I didn’t understand what factors caused The Zone shooting. I’d known the perpetrator’s “motivation”—that he wanted to target the so-called “preps” who he disliked when he was in high school. I knew that he had a history of mental health problems, and had tried to commit suicide when he was in high school. But in my research, I found out that he had acquired a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun with the appropriate paperwork. I found that there was no background check and he never got a permit to conceal carry.3 This led me to find an article published in 2015 which called The Zone shooting the “prime example of both the promise of threat assessment and its limitations,” because, despite a team of psychologists working with him in high school, they had lost touch, and without the background check, no one was monitoring whether a guy like him should have been able to buy and possess a gun.
And now, here I am, trying to put this all together.
I think a large part of me wonders, have I been angry enough about Ashley’s death? But then I think, angry enough with who or at what? There are so many things to unpack here. Where do I even begin?
Should I start with the fact that not much has changed since her murder? That in the past decade, we’re being terrorized by gun violence more than ever before, ranging from suicides, to mass shootings, to almost daily use of deadly force by police officers on black and brown people?
Or should I start by simply stating that guns occupy a terrifying amount of space in our lives?4 In 2018, it was estimated that there are 393 million guns in civilian possession in the US alone, which makes up 46% of all global civilian-held firearms and means that there are 65 million more guns in the U.S. than there are people.5 Stats like this are mind-boggling to me.
Should I research how only eleven states have some form of a requirement for guns to remain locked6 and only thirteen states require universal background checks?7
Should I say we need more politicians who are willing to say what Beto O’Rourke said after the domestic terrorist shooting in El Paso: “Hell Yes, we’re going to take away your AR-15?”8
Should I sound potentially divisive and say that gun ownership and gun usage is something that people feel so easily entitled to—it is in the Second Amendment, after all?
Not to say that every gun owner or gun user is an “entitled person,” unaware of the power in their hands. But that the lack of preventative action to the deadly misuse and abuse of guns in our country continues to make the gun an object of “individual right” and “individual ownership.”
It makes the gun seem like a subjective issue, as subjective as what one chooses to do with their own hands, when in fact, the gun, perhaps more than any object, is one that exists between the person behind it and the society in front of it. It might sound funny to call it a “relational” object, but that’s what it is.
And as an object, it begs the question of utility. The function of the gun is to shoot, so the gun always begs the question of violence. So, whether it’s a gun in the hand of a civilian, or the gun in the hand of a police officer, a gun by nature always begs the question of its potential: shoot?
The gun shoots. There is no “shoot” without a subject.
So perhaps I should start with the fact that it shouldn’t take the tragedy of subject after subject after subject, hashtag after hashtag after hashtag, for many of us to actually stop and ask what we can do to stop so people from getting shot by guns that shouldn’t even be on the street, that shouldn’t ever be unholstered, that shouldn’t even be there.
I mean, I know that’s why I’m here, writing about Ashley in the wee hours of the morning, wondering what I can for her. I want to do more for her than go home to Portland in the summertime and get struck by the beauty of the Pacific ocean, and then, a millisecond later, by the grief that my life has moved on, and hers has not, and I am experiencing the sensation of the Pacific ocean here eleven years later, and she is not.
I want to do more than imagine if my life had stopped when I was 16, and think about what hers could have been. I want to do more than have a record of the crime. I want to do more than think about how helpless she was in that moment of her death. I want to do more than remember. I want to make sense of senselessness, even if that means walking into the senselessness that is the partisan politics surrounding this issue.
I want to keep believing that Ashley would want me to have hope.
And in that spirit, I am holding to the words of a song that comes from the Hebrew tradition:
It is not your duty to complete the work;
It is not up to you to finish it.
But neither are you free to desist from it.
Thanks for sharing Ashley’s memory with me.
And now, even if this is only for my own edification, onward.
At the end of each blog post, I’ll shout-out to a black-, minority-, or woman-owned/led organization that I have researched, bought something from during the week or that I think is doing something good in the world and that needs more attention. This week, I’m highlighting two:
First, The TraRon Center, located in Washington, DC and founded by President Ryane B. Nickens. According to Everytown Research, from 1993 to 2009, only 9 percent of victims of serious violent crime received assistance from a victim services agency.9 It’s places like The TraRon Center, which provides therapeutic programs for children and adults impacted by gun violence, that help a community grieve and then develop solutions together. Really important work. I hope you check them out.
Second, Mapping Police Violence is a database founded and run by Sam Sinyangwe that shows how many people are dying from police violence every day. It’s databases like this that keep the public informed and keep police accountable. The necessity of such a database is in it of itself a tragedy, but please visit it and consider donating so that they can keep providing this knowledge and so that we can keep using it to demand justice.
More resources I’ve been tracking:
The Truth About Gun Violence: Three Facts You Need to Know | The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence | February 27, 2020
After Passing Sweeping Gun Law Reform, Virginia Senators Look Toward National Change | WAMU | July 22, 2020
Follow Guns & America on Twitter.
Fatal Encounters Database | Created by D. Brian Burghart
A really excellent Ted Talk by Samuel Sinyangwe on Mapping Police Violence, TEDxBrookings, which I can’t believe only has 10.5K views.
Unsettling News About Second Amendment Law | Michigan Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence
The Trace is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to shining a light on America’s gun violence crisis.
Watch How we turned the tide of domestic violence, a Ted Talk by Esta Soler, who was a driving force behind passing the Violence Against Women Act in 1994
Engaging Communities in Reducing Gun Violence, A Road Map for Safer Communities | The Urban Institute, April
Finally, thanks to some friends for helping me process this piece before publishing. You are all the best.
And a bit frustrated that for quite a lot of my life I was taught to think that the answer was in reading a bunch of philosophy or praying a lot, both of which I’m bad at anyway.
“The Zone shooting one year later: A hero by circumstance,” Oregon Live. January 3, 2010.
Which I’m still unclear about whether it was required in Oregon at the time.
Governor Northrop declaring an emergency when right-wing Gun Rights Activists showed up with the VA Capitol.
Safe Storage. https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/child-consumer-safety/safe-storage
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