'Justice Delayed': Cooper Roberts' Mother Reflects On 2 Years Since Highland Park Shooting

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — Two years after the "total annihilation" of her family's lives, Kelly Roberts, the mother of the boy paralyzed from the waist down in the Highland Park shooting, said she may never attend another parade.

Roberts recently reflected on the 730 days since the devastating events of July 4, 2022, when seven people were killed and at least 48 others were injured when a gunman opened fire at paradegoers from a rooftop.

It felt like a knife to her heart, she said, to see the man charged with her son's shooting brought into court in a wheelchair for a court hearing last week.

"We were told that the shooter requested a wheelchair because he was 'nervous.' Do you know how 'nervous' Cooper is every day of his life? Can you imagine the emotions Cooper continues to feel as a little 8-year-old who was shot and almost killed and was left paralyzed? Can you imagine the feelings he deals with every day as he deals with constant pain, physically and emotionally, as he is forced to live his life as a paraplegic?" Roberts said.

"Cooper never gets to decide if he wants to use a wheelchair or not. No, Cooper’s choices were stolen – violently – from him," she said.

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Families of victims and survivors had showed up in Waukegan expecting to watch the accused shooter plead guilty to the first-degree murder of Katie Goldstein, Irina McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, Stephen Straus, Jacki Sundheim, Nicolás Toledo and Eduardo Uvaldo and the attempted murder of 48 others.

Some, including Roberts, had come prepared to deliver victim impact statements before the defendant was to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

After first refusing to answer the judge, the accused gunman told her that he did not accept the plea, keeping the case on track for a February jury trial.

"I sat in the courtroom for the rest of that hearing, fighting back tears of pain, with my fellow victims, all watching in horror as it quickly became apparent that there would be no guilty plea entered," Roberts said. "Once again, the shooter calls the shots, literally."

Roberts said the pending criminal court case makes it feel like she is stuck in purgatory. Roberts is also among the shooting survivors suing gunmaker Smith & Wesson, the alleged shooter, his father and several firearm retailers in Lake County court. She said she has come to believe that there will never be closure with a wound so deep.

"But what there is going to be is justice, and justice delayed is nothing. There's just nothing healing or restorative or comforting about justice delayed, especially the justice delayed in a way that feels cruel," she told reporters. "I don't know that I have better word for it than that —that that hearing felt cruel."

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Cooper Roberts, who turned 10 last week, initially spent three weeks in a pediatric intensive care unit, followed by eight weeks in inpatient rehabilitation.

Previously a passionate soccer player, he has become increasingly involved in various adaptive sports such as sled hockey and wheelchair basketball.

"He is really taking to adaptive sports, just like he took to playing sports before this happened," his mother said.

For the 4th of July this year, the family planned to head to a lake in Wisconsin, Roberts said, explaining she was unsure if they would ever go to a parade again. Highland Park held a July 4 parade Thursday with a modified route after having replaced it with a community walk last year.

Roberts said the family is continuing to raise money for a renovation to make her family's home able to meet all of Cooper's emotional, medical and therapeutic needs.

"It is 110 percent true that for as damaging and hurtful that this dark evil did to our lives, it is balanced, even overweighed by the goodness and the light and the love," Roberts expressed. "And that is something that, I if I was not sitting in this in this spot right now, if this had not happened to me in my family, I would not believe it's possible to have some family as devastated as ours has been be able to honestly sit and say that moral of the story for us is going to be that love wins, that good is stronger than evil."

Every day, Roberts said, she is blessed by the love and generosity of neighbors, strangers, community members and people from around the world.

"I just cannot stress to you enough how important that is for us, that we live our life every day feeling blessed — not feeling like this is a family of victims," she said. "We are victims. What's happened to us is unacceptable, but that is not the place we're going to stay in and that's not what we focus on."

Anyone wishing to make an tax-deductible charitable donation to support medical care and ADA adaptations to the Roberts home can do so through the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Help Hope Live.