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These are the thoughts that went through my head after the “Mall Massacre” in Omaha, Nebraska on December 5, 2007 when an emotionally disturbed young man walked into the Von Maur store in the Westroads Mall and killed nine people, including himself.

You now, when you read about what happened or you listen to the coverage you think ‘Oh, there was just another shooting’ and it doesn’t affect you that much. But then you see the pictures and you’re like ‘I walked down those stairs where people are crying. I’ve walked through those doors where they are bringing people out on stretchers. I’ve shopped those aisle where the bodies are laying.’ That’s when it hits home, that’s when you realize that something so horrible, so unspeakable has happened in a place that you have grown to love with time. You see it not as a building on the T.V. but as a place that is burned into your memory as a place that is yours, as a place of love and a place of joy. It is like someone has come up to you and spit right in your face, on all of those happy memories with friends and family.

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I think of the people who where in the mall. I think if they had just answered the phone before they left the house, would things be different. Or if they hadn’t, would there be one more family able to sleep tonight? I think of the terror of those who where there afraid that they might not see those people who they care most about again. Scared that the cop knocking to see if they are all right might be a man with no hope for the future.

My thoughts are drown back to Virginia Tech and Columbine. What could drive these young men with there entire lives before them to snap? What could causes a person to be so emotionally disturbed  so that he wants others to share in this pain and suffering but yet is to cowardly to face the consequences, to take the easy way out, to cause other live to feel so empty with the loss of a loved one and then just end the suffering for your self. If the suffering was too much for you to bear, why do you think that someone else can bear it?

But in the end you know that this won’t stop you from having those happy memories and from making new ones. There is a time to grieve, so grieve. But in your grief bear in mind that there is always a dawn, and there is hope, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.