DALLAS — Kat Vargas’ husband won’t wear flip-flops in public anymore. He can’t run in them. One of their three kids wondered if students missing from class were hurt. Vargas won’t attend large events with her children while her husband works.
“Like my 9-year-old said, I can’t carry them all. I can’t cover them all,” she said.
This is their life after the May 6 mass shooting at Allen Premium Outlets. Vargas’ husband, an Allen firefighter, was one of the first responders when a gunman killed eight people, injured at least seven and traumatized hundreds more.
The damage that day wasn’t just inflicted on those who shopped and worked there. Trauma from the mall shooting has impacted many other families and friends and reverberated into the city and North Texas.
Roughly two months after the Allen shooting, gun violence around the Fourth of July holiday left more trauma in Texas and across the nation.
In Fort Worth, police say several men fired at random into a crowd that gathered after a festival and 11 people were shot. Three have died. In Baltimore, 28 people were wounded and two were killed in a shooting at a block party. In the nation’s capitol, nine people were wounded, among other shootings across the country.
“Communities are affected by this globally because these shootings tend to happen in community places that feel objectively safe, right?” said Dr. Ann Marie Warren, a clinical psychologist at Baylor University Medical Center who studies trauma. “A mall, a church, a school, those are objectively safe places that a community identifies with. … Understandably, you could experience some psychological effects of that as well.”
Research suggests the proximity people have to traumatic events, and the personal nature of the events, increases their chances of psychological challenges, Warren said, but it doesn’t mean people who had more distance from the shooting aren’t affected.
At the Allen mall, Ismarie López, an employee at Fragrance Outlet, said the store used to be her “safe place,” a chance to get out of the house after finishing her work-from-home job.
Now she constantly thinks about what is happening outside the store’s two front doors. López said she feels guilt for not being there when the shooting started. She’s also grateful she wasn’t. She went home a few hours before the rampage.
Some colleagues are coping with trauma better than others, she said.
“We try to just stay away from that topic,” López said. “We have customers who come in and ask you, and it’s like, ‘I don’t want to go through that again.’”
Some bring it up sensitively. Others ask for details, like how many shots they heard or where they were when the shooting began, she said.
“It still impacted me because I was not here when I could have been,” López said. “I guess you have that guilt that you should have been there, been here with them and to go through that with them.”
Making sense of ‘a senseless situation’
Warren, who works with people who experienced trauma, said sometimes people blame themselves for traumatic events out of their control.
They may question what they could have done differently. People often question their safety in new situations after an event like the Allen shooting, she said.
“One of the hallmarks of trauma is that you’re trying to make sense of a senseless situation,” she said.
Symptoms like increased anxiety, sadness, an inability to sleep and being hypervigilant in the weeks following traumatic events are normal, she said.
Warren said first responders get direct and repeated exposure to trauma as a part of their work, even though the traumatic event is not happening to them.
Vargas recalled the fear she felt as she waited to hear from her husband after he responded to the outlet mall.
“It was this just paralyzing feeling,” she said. “My stomach dropped.”
Vargas is a volunteer with Moms Demand Action, a movement calling for public safety measures to prevent gun violence. She said she joined after finding out the 2019 mass shooter in El Paso was from Allen. In that mass shooting, 23 were killed and at least 22 were wounded.
About two weeks before the outlet mall shooting, Vargas testified at the state Capitol that her husband was “training not to prevent shootings, but to arrive to dead bodies.” The Dallas Morning News is not naming her husband because he is not authorized to speak publicly about his job.
Their 9-year-old son had questions the day of the shooting about what was wrong, if his dad was hurt and what happened, she said. A few days later, he came home sick from school and asked if it was caused by stress.
The boy didn’t know if classmates were absent because they were harmed in the shooting or stayed home after threats to area schools. Now he worries about his dad going into active-shooter situations and where they could happen next, she said.
“That was incredibly hard,” Vargas said. “It was constantly asking for updates to see if it was any of his friends. Since then, he does ask at different places, like, ‘Could it happen here?’”
Resilience and helplessness
The majority of people, who are “even exposed to the most difficult traumas,” are resilient, Warren said, and they can bounce back.
After the shooting, Vargas said she sprung into action, helping to organize a rally in Allen of hundreds of people to demand political action against gun violence. She said it gave her hope to see them come together in the hot sun and raise their voices.
“Having that work is definitely helpful,” Vargas said. “But then once it all quiets down, you do think about it more and have that time.”
Vargas is considering therapy. Warren said while most people get better on their own with support from family, friends and the community, evidence-based treatment could help people work through their feelings.
People could find something meaningful in their life that wasn’t there before, a concept called post-traumatic growth, Warren said. A tragic event could cause people to become closer to their family, choose a different career, return to their faith, as well as other changes.
“It’s sort of the flip side of PTSD,” Warren said.
People also may want to avoid situations that make them feel they’re not safe. Warren said this can cause post-traumatic symptoms to persist and is “the opposite of what we want them to do from a treatment standpoint.”
Warren said online resources with The National Center For PTSD could offer answers to questions about whether their reaction is normal and when it’s important to seek help.
Vargas said it seems like the world is moving on. But she said her family thinks about those killed or wounded and their families.
Her noisy household, with kids out of school for the summer, now serves as a reminder to be grateful knowing “some houses are very quiet right now,” Vargas said.
