Robin Wolfenden was doing yoga on her balcony when she heard the emergency sirens called on Monday to intervene in a Christian elementary school in Nashville where yet another school shooting was taking place in the United States.
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On Tuesday, she came to lay six stones — a tradition of Judaism — at the entrance to the Covenant School to honor the victims, three adults and three children.
With a heartfelt thought for her own grandchildren, aged 5 and 8, just younger than those killed the day before, she regrets that “these innocent children” are confronted with such violence.
The capital of Tennessee, in the southern United States, has joined the sadly long list of American cities hit by school shootings. And many of its inhabitants suffer the shock of a tragedy so close to home, and not only on television.
“Broken Souls”
“Today, it touches our hearts,” Stacie Wilford, a nurse and mother of an 8-year-old child who goes to school nearby, told AFP.
“I live 2 km from here, it happened almost in front of my house, it’s scary,” she adds. “When you drop off your kids in the morning, you don’t think you’re going to get such a phone call. It breaks my heart, it’s… I can’t believe it.”
This nurse says that such a tragedy particularly affects health professionals. “We perform care,” she says. “When you work in health, you want to treat. But when something like that happens, there’s nothing you can do.”
“I feel like our souls have been shattered,” says Carolyn Lucas. His children are educated in a school 10 minutes walk from the scene of the killing. When she heard of a shooting, she feared it was happening at her children’s facility.
“It is unimaginable and at the same time we could quite expect it. To tell the truth, why would we be spared?” she asks.
Even in a country hit by so many killings, it is easy to think that this will not affect his relatives, assures the mother of the family.
“Of course it will happen. Gun violence makes fun of origins or religions, it makes no distinction,” she continues. “We need to do more” to put an end to it.
“To shiver”
A feeling shared by Gabriella Massey and Kaylee Franzen, 21 and 22, who came to meditate in front of the bereaved school.
“We hear about it all the time,” but “it had never happened so close, and that alone is heartbreaking,” says Kaylee Franzen, a student at a Christian university in Nashville.
She insisted on laying flowers in front of the entrance guarded by a police car.
“Maybe it doesn’t change anything, but it sends a message, things have to move on, just sending thoughts and prayers won’t help,” she said.
The same message dominated a rally for better gun control that took place Tuesday afternoon in Nashville. It had been programmed before the killing took place.
“It’s horrible to live in a world where we have to be afraid to send our children to school,” said Lisa Coffman, a mother whose brother teaches in the area, to the fifty people gathered.
“You don’t think this is going to happen in your town,” she told AFP. “And when that happens, you can’t stop shaking.”