Fort Worth Leans on Others Scarred by Mass Killings

Days after the church shooting that killed eight people and left Fort Worth in a daze, seminary professor Wesley Black found some world-class experts to train counselors for the rampage’s aftermath.

His authorities included three students and a youth minister in Littleton, Colo.; a minister and police chaplain in Pearl, Miss.; and a youth church leader in West Paducah, Ky. All seven belong to the grim, expanding fraternity of residents of American cities stricken by public massacres. Now, however joylessly, members of this national fellowship are sharing their expertise with the communities that suffer after them.

“I asked them if they had advice for youth advisors,” said Black, a youth ministry professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary here. “I wanted to find out what their immediate feelings were after the situation. . . . Were you there at the time? Did you have a friend there? What kind of lingering thoughts or emotions did you have five months down the road?”

Last week, after quizzing his informal panel by telephone and two-way video, Black shared their answers with about 150 volunteer counselors. All planned to help survivors of Larry Gene Ashbrook’s Sept. 15 shooting rampage at Wedgwood Baptist Church.

Once a terrifying anomaly, the mass killings that one sociologist calls “public massacres” now are simply terrifying. Similar enough to show clear patterns, each massacre also adds its own grisly details to the growing body of knowledge.

As a result, governors and other officials now confer with each other after the unthinkable happens. Law enforcers study each other’s crisis plans, and victim advocates share tips on death notices and group dynamics gleaned from places such as Oklahoma City and Littleton.

As in many of these communities, Fort Worth culture is deeply tinged with Bible Belt Protestantism. Several distinguished seminaries dot the Dallas-Forth Worth area; not far away lies Burleson, the town that launched a grass-roots student worship movement.

Since the killings, Fort Worth clergy have taken leadership roles in counseling, crisis management and even a planned review of mental health services. Ten thousand people attended a city memorial service; the Wedgwood church reported more than 30,000 visits to its Web site within 48 hours of the tragedy.

Black knew where to call. It was in Pearl that a teenager killed his mother and two fellow students in a 1997 rampage that wounded seven more. In West Paducah, the same year, a 14-year-old boy fatally shot three students and left five others wounded in a hallway at his high school.

And Littleton--where last April two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher, wounded 23 others and then killed themselves--has perforce developed a whole network of informal consultants.

In their videotaped chat, the Littleton students advised counselors that survivors are eager to talk about their experience and after a point also want to get on with their lives, Black said.

Pastor Tommy Mitchell, of Pearl, told Black that youth leaders must “remain calm and exhibit confidence” to reassure teenagers life can be normal again.

State and local officials were also busily consulting their counterparts. The day after the shootings, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens called Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr, offering sympathy and advice.

“I think what Mayor Barr heard from the governor was, ‘Give your community the opportunity to mourn as it wants to,’ ” Fort Worth spokesman Pat Svacina said. “He [also] said, ‘This is going to affect your community for some time afterward, even after the mourning. Look at it in the long range. Look at what things work in your community’ ” and what can be changed.

Barr evidently took that advice. The Sunday after the shootings, the city helped plan a huge memorial service in a local stadium but left the format up to clergy and community leaders.

And a few days later, Barr called for a citywide panel to examine Fort Worth’s mental health system, appointing the mayor pro tem to develop a plan. According to friends and family, Ashbrook had shown signs of paranoia and schizophrenia but apparently never caught the attention of mental health experts.

Barr’s proposed mental health initiative is a shrewd response to the shootings, said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center for the Study of Conflict and Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. Too often, Levin said, officials instead tell each other to beef up security measures such as video cameras and metal detectors.

The district attorney of Jefferson County, who is investigating the Littleton massacre, Levin said, was one of the first public officials to stress the importance of community analysis. Since then, he said, cities are slowly beginning to analyze systemic issues such as mental health and school bullying.

Involving religious leaders in crisis management is another lesson learned through hard experience--despite some officials’ discomfort mixing government and religion, said Robin Finegan, a prominent Denver victim advocate.

Part of a growing community of public tragedy experts, Finegan and colleague Krista Flannigan first helped survivors during the 1997 Oklahoma City bombing trials in Colorado. Later, the consultants worked in Springfield, Ore., where a teenage boy last year killed three people and wounded 20. This spring, they helped coordinate community response to the Littleton shootings.

“We weren’t afraid of” including clergy, Finegan said. “We learned from the Oklahoma City experience . . . how successful you can be with mental health, clergy and victim advocates as a team.”

Such partnerships are an important trend, said sociologist Levin. “The clergy are about the only leaders who don’t have the stature of used car salesmen in this country” and have proved effective when mass killings rock a community from its base.

In Fort Worth, partly because the shootings took place in a church, religion has played an unusually large role in binding communal wounds. Most of the 150 counselors that Black trained last week were religious folk, deployed to public schools and sometimes receiving leave from school officials to include theology in their talks.

At public Brewer Senior High School, seminarians trained in counseling told students of “the hope we have as Christians,” said Jenny Wells, one of Black’s students.

“The kids wanted to know, ‘Why would God let something like this happen?’ If they’re not a Christian, we try to do some evangelism,” Wells said. “We had five kids accept Christ at Brewer high school on Thursday, right there in the library.”

But Jessica Bunnt, a former seminarian now completing training as a counselor, voiced reservations about overtly religious counseling--and religious conversion--in a school setting.

“Especially with this tragedy happening in a church, it’s going to bring up a lot of soul-searching and questions about religion anyway,” said Bunnt, noting that her orientation as a counselor is Christian-influenced. But “I think it may be taking advantage of vulnerability in this situation, unless these children have been struggling with [religious issues] already.”

For-profit institutions are also learning new rules from the decade’s parade of massacres. For Dublin & Associates, a San Antonio public relations firm, the turning point was George Hennard’s 1991 shooting orgy in a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, which left 23 dead before Hennard killed himself.

The firm, which represented Luby’s before the shooting, had always created crisis management plans for its clients, said Chief Executive Officer Jim Dublin. But after Killeen, he said, “you realize that whatever your worst case scenario is, there can be something worse. . . . You can’t stop it, predict it. You can’t test for it.”

So Dublin also now provides post-disaster assistance, including community agency coordination, frank and accessible spokesmen, and help with the now routine post-massacre victim relief funds.

“You have to be a human being, and not a corporation, first,” Dublin said.

Fort Worth spokesman Svacina agreed, saying that others in his field have realized the need to impart abundant, fast information in a disaster, not only about the event itself but the context in which it occurs.

To that end, Svacina pointedly noted in early interviews that Fort Worth had a plummeting crime rate and that the neighborhood where the shooting occurred actually had a volunteer crime watch program.

Cities and school districts have also learned to craft elaborate crisis management programs once more typical of big corporations.

Fort Worth, which has had such a plan for years, is constantly refining it. The city’s preparation garnered national praise after Ashbrook’s rampage. Authorities had all of the victims in hospitals within 29 minutes and gave speedy notifications first to families, then to the media.

“With the shooting in [Littleton’s] Columbine [High School], the [crime] scene wasn’t cleared for the medical examiners for a few days,” Fort Worth chief medical examiner Nizam Peerwani told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It’s very, very tough on the next of kin.”

Still, in front of Wedgwood Baptist Church, where seminarians in black vests quietly waited to counsel visitors, a pile of flowers and two huge, handwritten cards made plain that no lessons learned could keep tragedy out of Fort Worth.

While workers unrolled fresh carpets to bring into the bloodied sanctuary, seminarian Traci Stovall said she fully expected another massacre somewhere else. When it does happen, she said, she will offer all that she has--prayer, and the fresh viewpoint of yet one more expert.