2009 Ft. Hood victim on latest shooting: ‘I kind of lost it’
Amber Gadlin, 24, was driving home from the grocery store when she got the text Wednesday afternoon.
“Turn on the news,” her neighbor wrote. “My mom said there was another shooting at Ft. Hood.”
Gadlin’s heart stopped.
The memories from the 2009 Ft. Hood shooting came rushing back:
The four gunshot wounds in her back.
The three days she spent in the hospital.
“I started shaking and crying. I kind of lost it. I’m pretty sure I had a panic attack,” she told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday night from her home in Albuquerque, where she now lives. “It was kind of looking at the same situation in two completely different ways.”
Gadlin, who is a stay-at-home mom to her 18-month-old son, immediately called her mom.
“My mom said, ‘Oh, my God’ - and from what she told me, she lost it too,” Gadlin said.
Later, she updated her Facebook page.
“I can’t breath,” she wrote. “I am shaking so bad right now.”
About 30 people posted replies; many friends wrote that they were praying for her.
“You’ve been through hell and back, just glad you’re home and not going through it again,” one friend said.
Another wrote, “We’re out of the area physically but this pulls us right back emotionally, as I’m sure it does for so many.”
As far as safety at Ft. Hood goes, Gadlin, who has arthritis in her back because of bullet fragments, said she didn’t think much could be done.
“The only way that you’re going to stop something like that from happening again is literally patting every single person down,” she said. “The last time I checked it was something like 70, 80,000 people that go on base every single day, so doing something like that is virtually impossible.”
But Gadlin thinks there could be more training to prepare for such events.
A couple of Gadlin’s friends who are still at Ft. Hood posted on their Facebook pages that they were safe.
By 7 p.m., Gadlin was finally able to relax.
“I’m still thinking about it and everything,” she said. “But I’m not really panicking anymore.”
The shooting also brought back memories for Kimberly Cooke of Oneonta, N.Y., whose brother, Matthew, was shot five times at Ft. Hood in 2009, and survived.
“I’m totally fine until I hear my family panicking and I know they are having flashbacks,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “I hear them tearing up on the other end of the phone line ... thinking of the Fort Hood families.”
When the 2009 shooting occurred, Cooke said her family had trouble getting information about the incident.
“Nobody contacted us to tell us he was one of the victims,” she said. “The Army is not really forthcoming in with what’s going on.”
Cooke said her family still hadn’t told her brother about Wednesday’s shooting.
“He actually doesn’t know about the shooting today,” she told The Times. “My family hasn’t told him because he suffers a lot of PTSD issues. He has a lot of heavy depression. He’s still on anxiety medications, four and a half years later.”
Twitter: @saba_h
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.