I had just finished ordering at a local coffee shop when I hear my best friend quietly ask, “Did you know there was a shooting at UNC Charlotte?” Honestly, assuming I heard her wrong, I finished paying before asking her to repeat what she said. “Did you know there was a shooting at UNC Charlotte?” she repeated. My stomach dropped; I asked, “where did you hear that?” and she pointed to the T.V. screen in the upper left corner. Standing there, I watched thinking, “this can’t be true. If this were real I would have already received a notification from one of the larger news stations”, but I stood there and watched anyway. I read the screen, there were three confirmed victims. I still didn’t believe it. A few minutes later my phone went off, it was a larger news station confirming it; there was shooting. I immediately texted one of my college friends who happens to be from my hometown and told her what was going on—between the two of us we know at least 50 people who go to UNCC, and these are just the people we know by name AND can recall being there.
At this time, I’m sitting in the coffee shop trying to do my homework, trying to write papers, attempting to prepare for finals week, but I can only think of those who are at UNCC. I had moved away from the T.V., but my eyes were glued to my phone and computer screen. I was constantly refreshing my social media pages and multiple news articles. The numbers were going up, now there were two confirmed deaths, four more victims, and at least one suspect. No names had been released. Throughout the night my friend and I were updating each other on what we heard, who we’ve heard back from, and wondering who the two confirmed deaths were. All I could think was, “do I know them?” Is it one of the guys I went to my junior prom with? Was it the girl who sat next to me and made my anatomy class a bit more bearable with her under the breath comments? Was it the girl I worked with for two years and barely had a real conversation with? Was it someone that I haven’t even thought about since they graduated high school? I so desperately did not want it to be anyone I knew—thank God, however, that everyone I knew was safe—but the sad reality is that someone, somewhere knew the victims and the odds that I knew them were the same as everyone else.
This shooting hit closer to home than any other previous shooting. Not only did I know people involved, but I was also less than twenty miles away. My mind raced with hypotheticals. What if this person had decided to go to Belmont Abbey instead of UNCC? What is stopping this from happening here? Three of the closest people in my life considered going to UNCC, what if they had been there? The hardest part was knowing that many of my friends had been near the building where it happened sometime earlier on Tuesday. What if they had been there at that moment? What if Riley Howell hadn’t sacrificed himself and stopped the shooter, how many more would have died? I don’t know what we can do to fix this issue. I do however know that we can band together, show each other that we love each other, and treat human beings with the respect and dignity that they deserve, and maybe, just maybe, we can prevent more senseless violence from occurring in the future. As I drove into Charlotte on Thursday, it really hit me hard that every other billboard said “Charlotte Strong”; this is not something that should have happened, this is not a billboard that anyone should have to see.
~Sammy
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