Reflections on Growing Up In Highland Park: Native’s Hometown Redefined Forever

Mike Isaacs is a Highland Park native and longtime reporter who covered Skokie and surrounding towns and currently works in the same area. He contributed the following commentary in the wake of Monday's mass shooting at the Highland Park July 4 parade.

On page 66 of a book I wrote for my family about growing up in Highland Park, there is an older photo of the main drag in downtown with 1950s or 1960s-style cars parked in front of businesses.

“When I was growing up,” I wrote, “downtown Highland Park was a regular shopping venue to buy records (Grant & Grant), basketballs and baseball gloves (The Highland Park Sports Shop), books (Chestnut Court), clothes (The Fell Company or ‘Fells’) and more.”

After July 4, 2022, none of those memories will be what I (or anyone else) remember most about downtown Highland Park. Everything changed after a lone gunman climbed onto the roof of a Central Avenue business and sprayed assault rifle bullets into a crowd enjoying the Fourth of July Parade on a lovely summer morning.

Seven innocents were killed — five of them at the scene — and dozens of others were injured, many of them seriously. The carnage was unspeakably gruesome by all reports, the stories of unprecedented terror gut wrenching to even hear.

Suddenly, my hometown joined scores of others in this country dating back to and before Columbine and Aurora and, more recently, Buffalo and Uvalde — the site of mass shootings leaving communities devastated and changed forever.

Surreal really doesn’t cover it. Highland Park became the lead story in virtually all papers from the New York Times to the Washington Post and on all 24/7 television news channels from CNN to MSNBC.

The latter sent one of their hosts to Highland Park to conduct his weekday news-oriented show — as though he was reporting live from a war zone. The Pope spoke about Highland Park, offering prayers, the President the same and the Vice President stopped there to thank first responders and talk to Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering with whom I graduated from high school in 1979.

Falling on a Monday, the Fourth this year was the final day of a three-day weekend. Although Highland Park was the spotlighted story everywhere, it’s important to keep in mind that more than 50 shootings had taken place in the Chicago area over the weekend before Highland Park ever happened. By the end of Monday, more than 70 people had been shot. Take a second to wrap your mind around those numbers.

It is irrefutable that raging gun violence in the country is at epidemic proportions and with no real solution in sight. Don’t misunderstand: the magnitude of gun violence here is solvable; you only need to look at other countries that have instituted more serious gun control laws to know this is true. But the intractable politics of Washington and the far right-dominated Supreme Court make common-sense gun laws feel like an impossibility — no matter how many people are injured or lose their lives, no matter how many communities are instantly ripped apart.

Highland Park wasn’t thought likely to be one of those communities. The serious crime rate there is minuscule. The city is affluent and attracts those well off enough to afford a more insulated existence dozens of miles from Chicago. Familiar words that are repeatedly sounded during these kind of massacres rang true once again: “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.”

This, undoubtedly, is one of the reasons the Highland Park attack has become such a shattering news event across the country and around the world. The 21-year-old suspect charged with these crimes allegedly climbed onto a rooftop overseeing the most traditional summer event in the country on its birthday. He is accused of firing some 90 rounds of bullets below where families had gathered with children to take in the parade.

Like school shootings in the country, a sense of innocence immediately ruptured in an environment where such violence was once thought to be unimaginable. There is no such thing anymore.

The Highland Park mass shooting story also featured a manhunt, the gradual revelation of more crime details, the disturbing on-line presence of the alleged killer, the background of the suspect’s family who lived or lives in Highland Park and in neighboring Highwood and past incidents with the suspect that today look like they should have been serious red flags.

What we now know is that the suspect had a plethora of knives in his possession, or at least in the family home, which were confiscated after a family member told authorities that he was threatening to kill his family. That apparently came some time after authorities were called about a suicide threat that the suspect made.

Inexplicable is that even after these occurrences, the suspect’s father was still willing to sponsor his son so that he could acquire a Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) card to purchase an assault rifle-style gun. (He was under 21 at the time). It was this type of gun that was used to pick off a crowd of people lining Central Avenue simply watching a marching band perform at the start of an annual Parade.

This gun is not like just any gun. I saw one of the graphic unblemished photos from the scene with bodies lifeless on the ground and blood pouring from them. Bullets from these guns shred from the inside, which make them among the most destructive killing devices imaginable. Doctors who worked on victims in Highland Park said the kind of destruction they were seeing happens in battles of war.

Assault Rifles offer little reason for existing other than to accomplish what this suspect infamously accomplished in Highland Park. They are not necessities for hunting or protecting oneself or for target practice. It’s pretty harrowingly simple: They exist to tear bodies apart.

And yet, only here — only in this country — do we find banning these weapons to be politically insurmountable. This, despite evidence that such bans are impactful in saving lives. When an Assault Rifle ban was in effect during the Clinton era, the frequency of mass killings significantly declined.

When that law expired, gun lobby groups led by the NRA were vocal and powerful, and Republicans strong enough in their intransigence to never allow such a “mistake” again.

And so here we are. Another mass killing. Another wrecked community. Another set of political hacks placing all the blame on mental health — a legitimate concern to be sure — but only so they don’t have to address the elephant in the room.

Shortly before Highland Park became known to the world this week, I received email advertising weapons including AK-47 Style Rifles sent to my inbox. I clicked and went through the beginning motions of ordering one just to see how easy it would be to obtain. Shockingly easy.

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The Democrats only a few weeks ago gathered and sang “God Bless America” after the first gun control law in 30 years was passed in a bipartisan effort. It was a tone deaf celebration. Yes, it had been decades since legislation was approved to reel in the proliferation of gun violence. Although there is some significance to the law, it is too limited and timid to make enough of a difference in fighting this epidemic.

Assault style rifles are still available for purchase with or without this law. Just click here. Red flag laws, while important, do not solve the problem alone as the Highland Park slaughter demonstrates. Illinois has Red Flag laws and it’s hard to imagine a much better case of when they should have been enforced. They weren’t.

It didn’t help that no one in the family was willing to sign complaints about this boy, although some say there was enough there for authorities to have acted on their own. This, and so many other details that led to this horrifying day in Highland Park, are certain to be explored in the days, weeks, months and maybe even years ahead.

As part of my own job, I was to participate in two nearby Fourth Of July Parades — a noon parade in Skokie and an afternoon parade in Morton Grove.

We had decorated the vehicles and were in the parade line minutes away from starting when the parades were called off. The most heartbreaking moments that I heard and saw Monday were parents trying to explain to their children why there would be no parade. I can’t even imagine what parents who brought their children to the Highland Park parade went through.

When victims’ and witnesses’ stories were told over the following day, they were more devastating than could even be imagined: A married couple in their 30s killed while the father covered his child with his body as gunfire rang out. Reunited with his grandparents, the boy reportedly said, “Mommy and Daddy are coming soon.” They weren’t.

A 22-year-old daughter was with her mother when shots rang out. She told her mother they had to run, but a bullet hit her mother in the chest as they fled. She reportedly told her mother, “I love you,” but knew she was dead and knew she had to keep running for her own survival.

Heartbreaking stories like these have been coming to us every day since the Highland Park shootings. Downtown where the horror unfolded has become a memorial site for locals to gather to mourn the dead, to be with each other in shared grief. We’ve seen similar scenes play out in so many devastated communities around the country, and now it is on view in a place I once called home.

Which community will be next?

Soon, I will head to downtown Highland Park as I do every six months for a dentist appointment. I have been going to the dentist in this office (and a previous office that was also in downtown Highland Park before moving) since I was a little boy. My dentist’s office is less than a quarter block from the crime scene.

The trip will not be the same. It will never be the same again. In downtown Highland Park, I once went to a James Bond triple feature at the Highland Park Theater. I bought bell bottom pants at Fells. I annually purchased my Chandler’s Notebook at Chandler’s. I went to eat Sunday breakfast at Leo’s Delicatessen where Leo would scream at the waitresses who were not shy about giving it right back.

I saw “Risky Business” being filmed in downtown Highland Park and always showed people where the office of the psychiatrist played by Judd Hirsch in “Ordinary People” was located. I had my 40th birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Highland Park.

I don’t really know whether these downtown Highland Park memories will fade from me over time as I grow older. I do know the ones from Monday, July 4, 2022 will not. Like so many other communities in all parts of the country, Highland Park is redefined — and probably forever.

This commentary was provided by Mike Isaacs. The views expressed here are the author's own.