The Mass-Shooting Survivor Network

As Patrick Korellis remembers it, he arrived at the college support group in 2008 and introduced himself to the person standing closest to him, a young woman named Emily Haas. She was a junior at Virginia Tech, majoring in business. Korellis was a senior at Northern Illinois University, studying meteorology and geography.

They would later swap stories of the stereotypical college variety — about cafeteria food, campus life and their post-graduation plans — but first, Korellis and Haas connected over a horrific shared experience.

“So, you were shot too?” she said.

Two months earlier, Korellis had been in the front row of his oceanography class when a gunman burst into the lecture hall with a shotgun. Korellis ducked under his desk, waited for a pause between blasts and bolted for the door. He was hit in the back of the head and arm with shotgun pellets but managed to stagger out into the safety of the cold Midwestern winter. When he got to the hospital, he was bleeding and missing a shoe.

Haas could relate. One year before, she had been in French class when a gunman had walked in and killed the teacher. Haas huddled under her desk as her classmates were shot, and two bullets grazed her head. The gunman left to terrorize other classrooms but returned several times to kill more students, and then himself. Eleven students died in that small room.

The conversation between Korellis and Haas, which took place a decade ago, was the result of a specific kind of outreach: survivors reaching out to other survivors. More and more, those who have lived through mass shootings — which were defined by the Obama administration in 2013 as a shooting with three or more deaths — are connecting with new survivors to create support groups between communities.

In this case, Virginia Tech students heard about the shooting at Northern Illinois University, waited a few days and then reached out with cards and phone calls. Their message was simple: We’ve been through it, too. And we’re here to talk.

“We didn’t know who else to talk to,” said Korellis, 32, now a geographic information systems project manager for Walgreens. “But hearing about a different shooting from their perspective helped. It was like, ‘Tell me how the next year is going to be, what am I going to be dealing with?'”

Within the next few weeks, Korellis and nine other injured classmates traveled to Blacksburg, Virginia, for a memorial service that marked a year since the Virginia Tech shooting. On the morning of the service, students from both schools met, paired up and traded tips for dealing with the frustrations and worries they had in the aftermath of their separate traumas.

The network of gun-violence support groups across the country is loose and sprawling, with ad hoc outfits that form and disband based on need. After a mass shooting there is an initial media blitz in which survivors are overwhelmed with attention. But after the TV camera crews pack up and leave, the affected communities are left to pick up the pieces. That’s when the emotional support groups reach out.

One of the largest is the Rebels Project, a nonprofit founded by survivors of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. It was created in 2012 after the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which took place about 20 miles from Columbine. Today, the group has more than 770 members from roughly 40 different communities of people who have been affected by mass shootings.

New mass shootings “can be really traumatizing,” said Heather Martin, the group’s founder, who was a senior at Columbine High School in 1999. “But you really want to help.”

The Rebels Project began its outreach to the Aurora survivors through local TV news interviews, holding monthly meetings in a local church that offered its space for free. They had few attendees at first, but that wasn’t unexpected.

“In the immediate aftermath, you just want to be left alone,” Martin said. “The media is everywhere, bothering everyone they can for a story.” But the Rebels Project kept holding meetings and attendance grew as word-of-mouth knowledge of the group spread.

Today, members meet face to face, over Skype or through Google Hangouts, and once a year the group hosts a retreat for survivors from around the country where everyone has a chance to do restorative yoga, share stories and participate in what Martin calls a “family-friendly ‘let’s get drunk and decompress’ night.” Whenever new survivors join the Rebels Project, Martin asks them about the specifics of the shooting they experienced — where were they, if they were injured, and what else was going on in their lives.

She uses this information to coordinate between disparate members who have had similar experiences. “We have three members that were injured in shootings while they were pregnant, and all three of their babies survived,” Martin said. “Knowing that, I was able to connect them with each other.”

She also emphasized the importance of having survivors with different types of experiences talk with each other: for example, having someone who was injured connect with a family member of someone who died.

That is because part of the process is accepting that there is no good way to define a survivor of a mass shooting. The label can encompass those who were physically injured in attacks; those in the rooms or spaces where the shootings took place; those who were roiled by the intense confusion of police responses; and the families and loved ones of all those involved. The only people who can’t be counted as survivors are the dead.

“One of our core beliefs is that, while experiences are different, no one is worse than the other,” Martin said. “A big part of survivors’ guilt is thinking you don’t have the right to feel bad or traumatized because you weren’t right there.”

The Rebels Project eschews political activism, but other support groups, like Everytown Survivor Network, which is the trauma support wing of the Everytown for Gun Safety grass-roots advocacy group, mobilize members to push for legislative change.

Survivors Empowered, a network started after the Aurora shooting, has developed a “rapid response team” to assist new survivor cohorts with media interactions. Find My LV Hero, a Facebook group, exists to connect survivors of the Las Vegas shooting with people who helped rescue them.

For Kristina Anderson, a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting and founder of the Koshka Foundation — which focuses on school safety — survivor networks of every kind are important because they fill a gap for people that the rest of society doesn’t quite know what to do with. “It’s not about making friends,” Anderson said. The purpose is much more practical. Members of support groups bounce specific questions off each other, and not just expected ones about handling the media, dealing with medical bills and insurance, or talking with employers about post-traumatic stress disorder. One common query among survivors: How should one stay calm during the country’s most triggering holiday?

“We see an uptick in the group on the Fourth of July, with people talking about fireworks going off,” Martin said. “The general consensus is that fireworks are great if you can see them, but not if you can’t.”

Stressors can be unexpected, and it helps to have sounding boards. “I’m not dissing IKEA, but it drives me nuts because I have no idea how to get out of there,” said Zach Cartaya, a Columbine survivor and chief financial officer of the Rebels Project. “Talking to others has helped me realize that I’m not a crazy person for going into a small conference room and feeling anxious and uptight. Knowing I’m not alone, and not insane, and it’s OK to seek help and talk about this, it makes a really big difference.”

In a recent Facebook post, one member of a survivor support group simply asked if anyone else was having trouble sleeping. There were dozens of responses.

“We know we don’t have to be polite or overly protective of each other’s feelings,” Anderson said. Everyone has “been through the same things we have.”

In February, she and Martin went to DeKalb, Illinois, to meet Korellis and other survivors of the 2008 Northern Illinois University shooting. It was the 10th anniversary, which meant that this memorial would be particularly stressful, with a heavy media footprint. To get a calming breath before the cameras rolled, the survivors and their supporters hunkered down in a conference room.

They ate brownies and cookies shaped like dog bones (a reference to the Huskie, the college mascot) and spent a few quiet moments catching up on each other’s lives. On display were five wreaths, one for each of those who had died 10 years before.

Before long, Korellis began getting alerts on his phone, and he noticed other survivors checking notifications. Whatever they were reading was shocking; some reacted with tears. Finally, one member announced to the group that there were reports of another shooting, this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

The NIU survivors put their phones away and went outside. In front of a fleet of news cameras, they placed wreaths outside of Cole Hall and spoke words of remembrance. At 3:06 p.m., the minute when the shooting on their campus began a decade before, they observed a moment of silence.

Then the ceremony ended, and everyone began to talk about how best to reach out to the new survivors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.