In the painful aftermath of the church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex., that left 26 people dead on Sunday, we asked readers affected by similar attacks to share their experiences and tell us how they have coped, in the hopes that any advice they offer might help others facing such a tragedy. We heard from more than 150 people in less than a day.
Their responses suggest that such mass killings touch myriad lives — bystanders, first responders, close-knit communities, the families and friends of those lost, among others — and that the effects are powerful, lingering and often hard to talk about.
David Silberman of Brooklyn, N.Y., survived a deadly 1985 grenade attack at the Vienna airport when he was 16 and found it cathartic simply to put his experience into words: “Thank you for giving me a place to tell my story,” he wrote. “I don’t get to tell it often. I don’t know how I got through it. It is haunting, and no one ever wanted to talk about it with me. It was scary, foreign and not part of anyone else’s reality.”
[For more on this story by NANCY WARTIK and MARIE TAE McDERMOTT, go to https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...urvivor-stories.html]
Photo: A vigil on Sunday night in Sutherland Springs, Tex., after the killings at First Baptist Church.
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